Let's Discuss Nations (and other civ games)

I bet, then you can get workers over and over. And military and pump wars and battles with no mind for stability.

Also: Player Aid is right

boardgamegeek.com/thread/1088563/production-order

Played an excellent 2 player game of Clash of Cultures tonight. Only one city exchanged hands, but we threatened each other so both ended up with steel weapons. Final score was 21 to 22 1/2, I came very close to winning even though he grabbed one of my cities. Even a single additional cultural influence would have tipped the scales.

Personal opinion is that even in a two player game, confrontation is not the only legit strategy.

i played a 3 player game a couple of days ago. The way the map came out there were to large seas in the middle, so getting at each other was difficult with armies. I could have launched a sea invasion but decided not too. I lost one city at the beginning to barbarians and spent most of the game trying to recover the difference. I finished 2nd in the end thanks to a wonder.



To move to clash discussion on a bit. What is a good opening strategy? I bought a 2nd settler on the first turn this time. this was clearly a mistake. It put me behind on research and gave me 3 cities and i couldn't defend them. This is definitely a game where you build up in the first half and put your plans into action in the 2nd. What are the best routes to building up?

I'm of the opinion that the first turn advance irrigation/civic improve/gather 2 food is a no brainer except in extraordinary circumstances. After that, I can't decide. I can't figure out if pumping settlers is the best or instead wait until enough barbarians hit the board and then you can wipe them and take their city (and gold!)... I'm leaning toward building that second city almost immediately so you can increase city size but then relying on barbarian finds for your other cities.

Agree with Gary Sax. I like to get my second city started early if I can. My mid-game strategy is usually to try get trade ships out there. Trade ships are fantastic. I also like to build a decent sea presence if the map allows for it to threaten any would-be aggressors who leave a shore side vulnerable. Lingering threats can be really fun. One of the things I love about CoC is that you can't just pick a strategy and ignore the other players, and the flip-side is that you can't just leave other players alone to their own strategy. My wife has gone the economic route (Democracy path if I recall correctly) which is a behemoth if left alone.

We've had a couple games where Barbarians really beat up on one player early, and in both games both players claimed they were now "out of the game." Both times they came back and were very competitive at the end due to other players not viewing them as much of a threat in their early weakened state.

To move to clash discussion on a bit. What is a good opening strategy? I bought a 2nd settler on the first turn this time. this was clearly a mistake. It put me behind on research and gave me 3 cities and i couldn't defend them. This is definitely a game where you build up in the first half and put your plans into action in the 2nd. What are the best routes to building up?

You should totally post this as its own thread. That's a game that totally deserves its own strategy discussion.

I posted a thread which was a strategy discussion, I think it got collapsed back into the Clash VASSAL thread. I'd be up for it.

Played another solo game of Nations.

I won't pretend to give any comments on the full game and interaction, but I think there is a notable thing that Nations does well---something which could have gone disastrously wrong and landed it on my trade away list.

At the end of the game, there is a VP salad count for the winner. But my sense from the 3 times I soloed it is that the amount of VP you get and the things that you get them from are not just something that drop out of the sky at the end, but tangible, real, progress you have built up over the whole game. That is to say that the VP score you get from the count em' up ending felt very consistent with how I organically felt I was performing during the game. In fact, a significant number of the points are awarded *during* the game itself for outperforming others *during* the game. There's a sense of urgency, you'll probably lose if your plan only comes together in the last turn. If there is one thing that drives me nuts about (bad) worker placement games it's when you count at the end and it produces a result that is not consistent with your own relative assessment of how each player is playing. I think Nations doesn't have this problem, which is excellent design.

The other bit is an issue many have commented on. The game is super tactical due to the tableau options. I'm fine with it. The hardest thing about this tactical nature is that you'll never have it all. Your empire is always going to be good at one or two things, but you're never going to feel very safe in a couple of other areas. The way buildings work (only producing two types of resource) and how expensive they are to staff and buy from the tableau means you'll never really have more than 1 or 2 cutting edge buildings. If you staff those, which you should, you're going to be pretty inefficient at whatever those buildings don't produce. It's pretty tense. So this last solo game I managed to grab two good buildings for production of money and ore. But I was always, always right on the edge of famine every turn and it meant I couldn't get a very large population, which really hindered me.

Finally, printing out the production tracks is a must. I did it at Kinkos or whatever today. It's criminal they aren't in the box, to be honest. I was an idiot and printed them on A4, so they were tiny, but they're a godsend.

Since i dragged this game out (Nations) and posted in the What are you playing? thread, I thought I'd hit this thread as well. I still think this game does what it does very well, though I admittedly haven't played a lot of it. That said, it is a euro-ass euro, definitely a counting and calculating exercise. It has a very carefully weighted and considered war mechanism which accomplishes exactly the level of interaction it is attempting to implement.

Whatever FUCKING moron didn't put a +/- resources track in the original box is a complete dolt. I've never had as significant a swing from "man, this is fucking cumbersome to play" to "This works great" with the addition of a single component. Really? You don't see how having between 12-22 "+/-X" values for 4 different resources might require a consistent tracker to make plans with? Do not play this game without a tracker.

I think the only part of this game that I don't like is the VPs you earn from staffing buildings---and they are substantial. Riffing off my last post, it is the only part of the VP salad ending that *doesn't* work because it sets up a bullshit "end of the world" situation where you stare at the board very carefully and maximize which buildings your dudes are on. Everything else about the scoring works great, though, so I'll forgive it.