My takes on the game thus far:
Balance updates
- I am loving them.
- overall, game feels slower because they nerfed a lot of things that were completely imba early game
- stonehenge nerfed. It was basically an "I get whatever social policies I want, and all the early ones are borked now" button
- NC rush nerfed. Philo requires calendar as well, significantly slowing you down. You can still do the NC rush, you just can't also go for a bunch of infra techs while you build the great library to bulb philo.
- on a related note, the great Great Person nerf
-- GS no longer autobulbs. It's 6 turns off. Probably a bit extreme of a nerf. This makes academy much stronger early game, and the bulb is still somewhat strong late. Guess I can kiss goodbye to my sick gunpowder + metallurgy -> fertilizer bulb w/ the Ottomans, though.
-- only GAs can pop for golden ages. Notably, GGs can't pop for golden ages.
-- oddly enough, the GG can now culture bomb.
- liberty settler pushed back. Extremely necessary imo. Liberty was very, very powerful before. You could easily get up a super infrastructure and then just boom your way into the modern age.
- rationalism got rearranged, but it's kinda hard to gauge what the end result of that is. It's still a viable one-of (RA increase got swapped w/ happy science), but I'd have to play w/ it a lot ot understand the true rammifications.
- tradition got... nerfed? Buffed? Regardless, the finisher makes more sense now that it doesn't have an odd ICS use.
- RAs nerfed hard. Moving back to education eliminates all the super-efficient gold dumping you did early game into RAs. Requiring declaration of friendship means you have to get into the gongshow of entangling alliances (I love how people are always SO confused as to why they get into denounce spirals. It's because you've signed declarations of friendships. If you never sign a declaration of friendship, you will notice basically no one ever denounces you until you are very much in the lead. You the know the one country no one ever complains about? Switzerland.)
- SIEGE WEAPONS NO LONGER REQUIRE IRON HALLEUJAH. I mean, GOD. If you got no iron before it was basically "lol SOL, you aren't doing any aggression for 100 turns". Given how late a discovery iron was, this was easily devastating.
Religion
- overall, it's pretty cool
- the pantheon belief is CRITICAL. It can decide where your entire early game goes. The desert belief, for instance, can very quickly get out of control (floodplains and oasises? count as desert), but a lot of the other ones are very strong as well, like the healing one (makes you very hard to break on defence) or the growth one.
-- Boudica is VERY strong religiously because of this. She is assured the first pantheon pick, period. It's not even up for discussion. She is assured it.
- founder belief seems less critical. There are some decent ones, but none seem overly powerful given the rate of religion spread.
- follower belief can give some very nice, very unique perks
- enhancer beliefs can very rapidly increase the rate of spread of religion.
- Byzantium has interesting options with regards to its beliefs as well. I'd recommend a second follower belief or a pantheon belief.
City States
- made much more interesting
- new duration quests are pretty cool, and sort of help you gauge how well you are doing against your opponents outside from score
- I definitely like more than one quest at a time.
- all the quests can give you a bunch of little perks that add up
- haven't tried a lot of bullying yet
Espionage
- seems kind of half baked to me, but I haven't played with it a lot yet, mainly been trying different openings
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