Granary is pointless. 2 gold per turn is huge, particularly early on.

Monument might be OK. Everything else is wrong. It's OK to have a military buying city, whereupon Barracks ETC is OK, but that's really it. One city only.

Techs should never be 10+ turns. I just did a one city challenge on deity and I only had double figure techs right at the end when I'd already won.

MP is fun provided you're ready to restart every 20 turns

Basically, other than your wonder city, build nothing to increase production except maybe workshops, but that's mostly so you can build markets and banks faster.

Military buildings are bigger jokes because you use, for the most part, the same units the whole game.

Don't worry about culture buildings. They really just aren't that worthwhile. You're better off getting magical culture from city states. You still need a monument to expand a new city's borders but that's pretty much all you need.

No food and pop growth buildings. Just don't do it. You want magical city state food paid for by the gold you save.


It's not so much you research the tech in 10 turns. It's people save great scientists to do the research to "slingshot" techs that would take 20 or 30 turns. You need research buildings after you build a monument and gold buildings. What makes the Chinese great is the paper maker is both research and gold. Well, that and great general golden age spam is a joke. You don't really have to go out of your way to get scientist specialists. The bulk of your research will always be from population and building bonuses.

Wonders are not particularly powerful in Civ5 except Forbidden Palace and Taj Mahal. The Great Library is also great for an early scientific jump if you could beat the AI to it (not likely at the highest diffs). The statue of liberty can be extremely powerful in very late game but by then the game is usually already decided.

Big Ben is also good. I really like Oracle in multiplayer to get to meritocracy. One of the mistakes I often make in MP is never getting policies, but you really need to get three and have to plan accordingly. I find that people really over rate monuments as you generally don't need the border expansion because you'll be making more cities there soon anyway. Obviously this two remarks are in conflict and you need to come up with a balance.

I also find in MP that I have to make great scientist cities - it's easy to just spam horsemen/whatever rather than pause for a bit and make two libraries. You don't really need more than that for quite a while - turn 120 or whatever, and most games are over by then.

Yeah, Big Ben is also really nice but that doesn't come into play until the game is pretty much over.

I played MP earlier on medieval start, that was pretty fun. I had artillery before the game was over - normally as soon as you research them in close MP games, that's the point you win - I even had destroyers before I'd definitely won. You also start with culture for 3 policies (instant meritocracy), which meant I'd got two science policies before the game was over. +1 science per trading post is strong.

Due to having 2 cities & a worker at the start, you have to make more workers early on than feels right, otherwise you're just connecting new luxuries as you're expanding twice as fast. It's also really hard to have sufficient income. And Rome are great (25% production bonus is amazing when you have a rapidly expanding network of size 1-2-3 cities), even though their unique units are essentially obsolete by the time you start.

Also, frigates are really really strong.
Also, forbidden palace needs to be a national wonder.
Also, I am coming to like Stone Henge in ancient starts. If you can get that with your ~4th city (some people like it a lot more than me and get it literally from their starter, which I think has to be wrong), Meritocracy is not a problem any more and you can often get a 4th or even 5th policy without trying too hard.

Anyone know where I might find better opponents in MP? Public games are a joke. The only relatively close games I get are with a couple of colleagues and I've played enough online games to know that that means there're much better players out there somewhere...

Is MP fixed? I tried a couple times and it was unplayable.

No. 1v1 works. You still have to rehost every 50 turns or so. Anything above that and it's rehosting every 25 turns at best.

has anyone bought the Babylonian expansion pack yet? is it worth buying?

I thought it was free?

I thought it was just a deluxe edition thing. I imagine it breaks mp even more though.

Nah it's only like £3.00 though, the fact that i'm asking should show you how broke I am :P

Lol, well I have only played 1 game of Civ 5 and have no intention of playing another until it's fixed.

Steam definitely said something about "free DLC" the other day though.

Mongols were added a couple of weeks ago, only as opposition though