I had signed peace with Napoleon for five of his cities; here was the treaty that we agreed upon:
This picture came a half-dozen turns later, when several of the cities had already razed down. (Rather silly that I have to spend those turns doing nothing with my civ under extreme unhappiness penalties. The gameplay mechanic whereby cities take ages to burn serves little purpose other than frustration.) At least I'm almost out of the red on unhappiness now. I took this screenshot to demonstrate the confusing and contradictory information presented on this screen. Notice that in one place, it claims that our peace agreement will last for 10 turns. Yet at another location on the same screen, it says that the deal will last for 30 turns. Uh, which one is it? Do I get a reputation hit with other AIs for declaring war again after 10 turns but before 30 turns are up? Seriously, what's the actual terms of the deal I signed?
Here's another example of the silliness of the current movement rules regarding non-combat units:
I have a settler in Paris, which I want to move onto the tile highlighted in red. However, I cannot move my settler there because the worker farming the plains tile blocks the path. In order to move the settler along the road, I must move my own worker off the road, move the settler, and then move the worker back, wasting a turn of labor. This sort of thing is pointless and microintensive; there is no good reason why non-combat units can't share the same tile together. In fact, it would open up richer tactics for worker use, adding back in the potential to team up workers in order to get tile improvements done faster, and allowing combat workers to throw down roads for military usage on the front lines. This is exactly the sort of game where that would be fun and interesting gameplay - and it's not allowed by rule. The rule should be one combat unit per tile, which achieves exactly what Firaxis is trying to do without introducing this sort of micromanagement foolishness. I'd love to see a change along these lines, although it's probably unlikely to happen.
Here's what things looked like after I placed that settler:
I spent much of my treasury purchasing four tiles along the French border, so that I will have control of this area in my inevitable future war against Napoleon. This is one area where the tile purchasing gameplay works well, although it's pretty similar to the standard practice of rushing cultural buildings for quick border pops in past games. I'll be able to place my ranged units on top of those hills to the east of Tianjin and slaughter the French units on the plains below them. With time to prepare the battlefield ahead of time, I could even place roads on all of those tiles, allowing for more tactical flexibility, especially with the Cho-ko-Nus.
I didn't rush back to war with France again. I knew that I needed some more units, so that I could cover that southern region as well as the hills near Tianjin. You can see in the above screenshot that I had only a single Cho-ko-Nu over there, which was clearly not sufficient. I built some more of my ranged units, and also got a couple of knights, since the extra mobility seemed like it would be useful in that open desert region. It was about 25 turns before I returned to war with France, once again declaring on Napoleon and waiting for him to send his armies charging out after me. Same story as before:
It's been said a gazillion times already, but the combat AI is really stupid in this game. Notice that Napoleon has musketeers, cannons, and rifleman at his disposal (holy cow!) and yet he still can't manage to do anything against me, because he keeps having them walk into a killing field of fire. The rifles were the only units that were genuinely tough, and with good reason, since Napoleon was basically a full era ahead of me in technology. Nevertheless, I think I lost all of one unit and destroyed more than twenty of Napoleon's technologically superior ones. Even with Immortal production bonuses, the AI will run low on units with time. Now I could counterattack:
Starting with these two cities isolated down here in the south, Tours and Lyons. I had another unit killed here by the cannon bombarding out of Tours, although numbers were more than sufficient to carry the day. As for the cannon in Lyons, the AI moved it out of the city and stupidly walked it right up next to my own units, getting it killed to achieve precisely nothing. My oh my. 
I also captured about seven workers/settlers down here, which the AI builds in enormous numbers and leaves sitting around helplessly. Since all units cost exactly the same in Civ5 for supply purposes, I disbanded them all. You get 20g for doing so if it's within your borders, which is all they're good for. There's simply not that much need for workers in this game, because your cities grow so slowly. After the first 100 turns, you only need a handful of workers. It's... different from other Civilization games, I'll leave it at that.
Once I took the city of Hastings, I could finally ally myself with the one remaining city state on my continent, the Maritime city state of Singapore. Technically I could have done so earlier, but Singapore was completely surrounded by French cities, and thus allying with me would have been a death sentence. I waited until now so that I could maintain the food benefit permanently, in completely safety. 1000 gold bought me 155 influence, and with the Patronage slow decay benefit, that bought me 125 turns of alliance status. Yeah, that should last until the end of the game. As I've said before, it's trivial to maintain allied status with city states once you have some practice with this game. The only issue involves them being captured by warlike AI civs, and the AIs need to be on very high difficulty (Immortal or above) to pose a serious threat of that.
The next city in line was Copenhagen, which I forgot was a captured Maritime city state. I didn't want to become an ally of Copenhagen, because another Maritime city state would actually provide too much food for what I was planning economically. What I actually wanted to do was raze the city... but the game won't let you do that. You cannot raze any of the capitals or any of the city states due to the diplomatic victory condition. Sigh. Thus I had to keep this one (not going to trust that idiot puppet state AI!) and take the unhappiness penalty until it was able to build a courthouse. That was irritating.
Here's one place where the new embarkment rules for units actually worked pretty well. I was advancing from Nottinham to York, and since only a few units could pass through that little chokepoint, I sent the rest across this little inner sea. That worked much better than trying to use galleys or whatever. On the other hand, in past games I wouldn't have been choked by my own army on that narrow little two-tile isthmus, and wouldn't have needed to do this in the first place. I give the designers a pass on this - there's pretty much nothing else they could do once they decided that only one unit could appear in each tile. I do think it's rather silly when moving across entire oceans though; seeing knights or crossbows or whatever moving across the Atlantic doesn't quite feel right.
I now had caravels out exploring the oceans, and I found Arabia and Egypt on another fair-sized continent to the west. They were about on par with me technologically, but much smaller in size, each having about 8-10 cities. That was good news, since they were both much weaker than Napoleon had been. Neither was any threat to win the game.
I captured the last two cities, and it was game over for Napoleon:
Very well played, mon empereur. Napoleon really did give me a good game, and the campaign against him definitely challenged me as a player. This was the most fun that I had had so far with Civ5. 
I'm a bit worried, however, by the fact that the militaristic AIs always seem to come out on top in this game, and by how difficult it appears to win the game through peaceful means. I don't exactly want every single game on high difficulty to turn into one based around endless fighting, which is the general sense I'm getting at the moment. Well, this game is still relatively new, so let's give it some more time.
These were my Demographics in 1500AD, a little bit after eliminating France. I was comfortably ahead in most of the categories, with the sole exception of military, and that wasn't terribly worrying. All of that warring had thrown me off of my actual goal for the game, exploring the economic side of the game and planting lots of little filler cities all over the map. I had also been diverted far down the bottom, military part of the tech tree in order to fight those advanced French units. Finally, I could go back and pick up some of the economic stuff that I had missed, and correct my slow performance in terms of gold and research. I had rifles before I had banks and universities in this game! Well, that was going to change, and my civ was about to become dramatically stronger on the development front.
Let's go back and look at how those filler cities were developing once more:
Nanjing remains capped at size 4, exactly as I planned. My two maritime allies provide all of the food for this city, 8 food directly from the center tile. (Once you hit the Renaissance, the maritime benefit increases to 6 food/turn in the capital and 3 food/turn in all other cities.) That frees up all four of Tianjin's citizens to work trading post hill tiles, along with that silver resource. I have the basic four buildings in here (monument, library, market, colosseum) along with some optional extras: mint for the silver and bank because it costs nothing and adds another 25% gold boost. The net result is that Tianjin stays happy-neutral with its colosseum and produces 23.5 gold/turn after subtracting out its building maintenance. Note that this doesn't include the benefit for a trading route to this city either; the formula for that is 1.25 times population, and thus I receive another 5gpt from the city's four population. I also have very respectable production at 11 shields/turn, which I used at times for more military. Right now, Tianjin is building and disbanding scouts for even more gold. 10 gold per scout, or effectively about an extra 5 gold/turn. This is an enormously profitable city to have!
Here's an alternate take on a filler city, this one emphasizing science instead of gold. Xian is running two Scientist specialists from the Paper Maker, and that along with the Rationalism/Secularism social policy (+2 science per specialist) gets this city up to 16 beakers. 4 beakers from the four population, plus 2 beakers from having a library, then 5 beakers from each scientist for a total of 16. This is one place where it's worth it to build a university; that would increase science by 50%, plus open up another specialist slot, for a grand total of 31 beakers/turn. In a size 4 city which effectively pays for its own building maintenance and happiness. Starting to see the possibilities here? A combination of filler cities emphasizing gold and research looks like an extremely effective strategy to me.
Here are the ex-French lands developing peacefully under the Chinese dragon. The only cities that survived the inferno were Berlin, Paris, London, and Copenhagen - and I honestly would have razed most of those if the game allowed me to do so. Everything else has been razed and replaced. Those four cities that survived capture are also the only "real" cities on this map. Everything else is a filler city, growth capped at size 4. (Macau accidentally grew despite me clicking "Avoid Growth", another one of the many bugs in the game currently.) Notice how I'm having no trouble managing happiness at this point - I'm well in the green zone despite still needing a courthouse at London. My income is up over 150 gpt, and it continues to climb upwards. I can cash-rush a colosseum about every four turns at that rate, making expansion extremely easy. I could get another 10-15 cities on this continent easily, and each one will only make me stronger and stronger. This is one of those things that makes Civ5 so crazy: the designers set out to create a game that favors small empires, and most people think they've succeeded. But the conventional wisdom is wrong, wrong, wrong! 
There's no city maintenance in this game (Civ4) and no corruption (Civ3). Every city only makes you stronger. You just have to manage happiness, and once you figure out how to do that, you can expand endlessly without bound. The community is slowly starting to grasp this too. Unless the game design changes, this will become the dominant strategy going forward for everything other than cultural victories. The only tradeoff is losing out on the social policies, and that's well worth it.
Speaking of the social policies, I had very few of them in this game, just five overall. Two points in Patronage for the influence boost, which turned out to be a waste because this map was so lacking in city states. (Only three on my whole giant continent, and two of the three impossible to access until after France was destroyed.) The other three points went into Rationalism, for the aforementioned specialist boost and the +1 science on trading post addition. That goes very well with trading post spam, to say the least! I wanted to get the Order policies, however they just came too late, when I had too many cities. I'll have to try another game to get them. Overall, the social policies are Civ5's biggest winner at present. The different trees provide some very interesting and unique benefits, and they actually do change up the gameplay. Experimenting with the policies is the most interesting part of the game to me right now. I just wish that the rest of the game were in the same kind of shape.
Anyway, it's pretty obvious that I'm going to win this game, so let's cash out with the fastest possible victory and go for Conquest. I burned one of my Great Scientists to unlock artillery, and upgraded a bunch of longswords/Cho-ko-Nus to riflemen. By the way, the former crossbows keep the "two attacks" promotion even after they became riflemen, which made for some pretty incredible units. I built and cash-rushed several frigates to serve as protection for my army, then floated it across the ocean. Egypt was closer, and the beaches around Memphis were completely deserted, so that would be the spot of my D-Day landing.
I asked Harun to declare war on Egypt, which he agreed to do for the paltry sum of 200 gold. It feels extremely easy to get these AIs to attack one another, which is again reminiscent of Civ3. The diplomacy in this game is a lot more reminiscent of that game than Civ4, no question about it. Well, I started landing my units, and the Egyptian AI did nothing to challenge me. Here was the situation two turns later:
Egypt was technologically behind me, and if I could defeat a runaway AI Napoleon a full era ahead of me, I certainly wasn't about to lose here. Once I had Heliopolis and Thebes, I could then wheel to the north and go for Harun's own capital by stabbing him in the back. Yeah, it was a really dirty thing to do, but I didn't care. This game was already finished and I had won. Let's just get it over with as soon as possible, OK?
By the way, here's where all the missing city states were located. Haha, look at this island! Literally as far away as possible from my starting position, and even further than it looks because polar ice blocked any passage around my continent to the east. I could have afforded more city state allies very easily, and a Cultured one or two would have significantly increased the number of policies that my civ opened up. Oh well. Too late for that now. There are actually still city ruins on this island, which have never been explored by anyone. Wonder if I could pop an Industrial tech from one of them, heh.
I had heard this on the forums, and finally saw it for myself: the artillery unit is ridiculously powerful in this game. It can hit targets three tiles away, and also fires over terrain obstacles. This unit can fire on Heliopolis without the city being able to fire back itself. Nor does the AI have any idea how to use them, as I saw Egypt's city state ally moving around its artillery piece in circles, as my own artillery blasted the living daylights out of it. Not the finest moment for AI coding. This also introduced another weird issue: after taking Heliopolis I signed peace with Egypt, but I did not get peace with Egypt's city state ally. We remained at war, and because you can't negotiate peace deals with city states, there didn't appaer to be any way to solve our conflict. Ummm, is that supposed to happen? Shouldn't we have gone back to peace when I signed peace with Ramesses? Looks like there's still some wonky stuff going on with the city states and their diplomacy. (There's one game on CivFanatics where a city state ended up at war with itself, the city bombarding its own military units. I kid you not!)
Here I have peace with Egypt; I didn't get any cities, but at this point it didn't matter. Now I can reposition my units to attack Arabia:
That should do just fine. After discovering Scientific Method tech, I slingshotted forward with two Great Scientists to take Replaceable Parts and upgrade my rifles to infantry. Great Scientists are absurdly powerful in Civ5, since they can research any technology you want. You can line up several of them to leap entire eras ahead, which is indeed quite fun, but hardly balanced. (The bonus Babylonian civ is completely ridiculous, and shame on Firaxis for creating a broken civ as the "extra" content.) Scientists are also the best specialists in this game - by far - so you'll be getting lots of Great Scientists. I had four in this game, and I wasn't especially trying for them. It's too bad that the Artists, Engineers, and Merchants are almost completely useless in this game. Engineer specialists are just sad: 1 shield/turn, no better than an unemployed citizen, and worse than an unimproved hill tile! Someone buff those poor Engineers, please.
I actually had some pretty slick unit positioning in the above screenshot. My artillery piece could fire across the water on Damascus, and I could also move forward my cavalry unit one tile, then move a second artillery into firing range along a road (which my captured Egyptian workers had just laid down). Damascus falls on the first turn of the war, then the rest of the army moved into the occupied territory:
Two artillery in range, plus three combat units, all boosted by a Great General. I don't even need the artillery to be honest, as those strength 32 infantry (strength 46 with the Great General!) can just mow through the Arabian city defenses. I move into Mecca on the next turn, and...
Civ5 immediately cuts to this screen. Uh... that's it? Seriously?! 
A static popup screen, three sentences of text, and the game was simply over. With all due respect, this is completely pathetic. Every other Civilization game provided more of a reward for winning than this, and I'm not talking about Civ4, I mean Civ1, the original game. There's no victory cinematic, no replay feature at all, no bar graphs or other statistical data, just a printout of the exact same Demographics screen you can access at any point in time with F9. Not acceptable Firaxis, not acceptable. The ending to the game was actually better on the 1991 DOS version of Civilization, and I'm not exaggerating. Talk about a letdown after a long game to see... this. Patch up the ending screen, Firaxis. Your customers deserve better.
The only thing to look at here is the Demographics screen, so let's check that out:
The rankings don't matter at this point, since I've already won the game. More interesting would be comparing to the Demographics at almost the same turn from my American Empire game, which you can see by clicking here. I was slightly ahead in this game in Crop Yield (326 to 264), and very far ahead in Production (314 to 169) and especially GNP (652 to 329). My income was vastly ahead despite having a much larger military to support, and research was almost double the total from my first game. Part of this is simply due to my own increasing skill at Civ5, but I also think it's a compelling argument in favor of the filler city strategy. By the end of the game, I had a dozen of those cities, and they were producing enormous amounts of beakers + gold. Much better than leaving most of the map gripped by empty wilderness!
This is the only other screen after winning, providing a score that means... something? I confess I have no idea how this is calculated. Hopefully it will become clear with time. This screen also looks like it was thrown together in about 30 minutes, and the historian in me has to nitpick some of the selections. How exactly were these historical leaders chosen? Why are Joan of Arc and Charles de Gaulle stuck next to one another? What's more bizarre is that the first 12 leaders are all ones with positive connotations, then #13 is Henry VIII, and all of the following ones are variously terrible leaders, with nothing in between: Hebert Hoover at #14 up to Dan Quayle in the traditional bottom spot. EXCEPT that Andrew Jackson is listed at #17, which makes no sense being paired between Neville Chamberlain and Nero. Was that a mistake or something? Jackson is generally considered to have been one of the best presidents in American history. Very weird. I can't escape the feeling that this was thrown together at the last possible minute, as this whole ending sequence reeks of a rush job. There are a few games where everything feels carefully crafted and polished, where you can just see how much loving attention the designers gave their baby. Without piling on too much, I'll say that I don't get that impression from Civ5 at all.
The good news is that this was by far the most fun game of Civ5 that I played to date. I think there is some fun to be had here, playing on high difficulty, at least for a little while. And for the record, I don't believe that this game has been "dumbed down", as some readers incorrectly seemed to take away from my other Civ5 reports. This game doesn't suffer from a lack of complexity, and you can see that Civ5 is intended to present lots of interesting strategic choices. Notice the phrasing I use there, however: the game is "intended" to present strategic choices. The problem is that this game has terribly poor balancing, and the developers literally don't understand their own game. You are supposed to use granaries/watermills to increase growth - but they are made obsolete and ineffecient through maritime food. You are supposed to specialize your cities with things like barracks and stables and windmills - but the maintenance costs make them too expensive, and you're better off never building any of these. You are supposed to plan your tile improvements carefully - but trade post spam, especially on hills, is by far the strongest option. You are supposed to build a small empire - but as we saw in this game, gigantic empires of filler cities look to be much stronger. Different aspects of the game design break other aspects, and the sum total of the whole turns into a giant mess. Throw in the atrociously bad combat AI, and you have a game that's not working anything like it's intended..
I mean, this isn't a terrible game. It's no Master of Orion 3, thank god. But look at the incredibly weird results of Civ5's design:
* It's better to not grow most of your cities.
* It's better not building 80% of the city improvements in this game.
* The AI does best by never building any infrastructure and attacking/conquering nonstop.
And so on. Well, it's a very weird game, to say the least. Let's see if anything improves in the patches.
