Civlization V: How to be evil

There are plenty of guides for Civilization V.  They'll tell you how to win or what policies to take.  That's nice.  But what if I want to be evil?  We can't all be Washington.  Someone has to be Stalin, or else how would we have the Cold War?  Not sure why he's not an option anymore; that man was amazing at evil and he even got away with it.  So that's what this is for, learning how to be a horrible person in Civ V.

'Pacifism'
The first thing is to remember that war isn't the only way to be evil.  Oh sure, burning down cities and pillaging the countryside is good.  It's a classic.  But it's overdone.  Even if I'm not trying not be evil I have to burn down a city here and there.  Hashtag yolo (I only know about Twitter from listening to the radio, so I'm not sure whether that's one word or two)

Did you know that great generals, while no longer a source of free golden ages, are able to capture tiles?  That's right!  Drop a citadel and you'll gain control of all the tiles around it.  Against other civilizations this will make them very angry and they may even attack you.  Against city states it will cause a huge drop in standing: 50-60 points, possibly depending on tiles taken.  Anyone can conquer a city state, but to be truly evil you leave it just barely alive, with no land, furious but unable to do anything about it.

Sharing intrigue sounds like a nice thing to do.  But remember, these are spies we're talking about.  Maybe your 'friend' is planning to attack an enemy.  Warn them!  With no element of surprise, that war can drag out a nice long time.  No one knows you did it except the ones you warned.  That's right, you get to talk about your friends behind their backs and ruin their plans.  That's so Mean Girls.

Speaking of hurting your friends, why not take theirs?  Some civilizations rely heavily on city states to bolster their economies and defenses.  It would be wrong to attack your friends, but it would be more wrong to buy off the friends they rely on, crippling them without seeming to be a warmongering menace to the world.  They friend will get mad, but bribery isn't illegal.

While you're at it, why not use those spies to stage some coups?  You only have to kill two spies or steal two techs to get a level three spy.  Throw a bit of gold out to up your odds, then stage a coup.  Bribery alone might up your standing, but a coup also drops that of the other civilization.

Of course those city states eventually start to stray.  Don't let them.  Play as Austria and for only a few hundred gold you can turn allied city states into puppets.  Conquer the world without firing a shot.  Then of course kill the rest of it.

Nuclear War
Don't be afraid to go nuclear.  In Civ V there are much clearer patterns of alliances than in Civ V, so you can drop a dozen bombs and suffer no penalties except with the losers you're nuking.  In a recent game I glassed Greece, yet everyone else in the world considered me a friend.  Once again, learn from Mean Girls: You can be as cruel as you want to people with no friends.

Nukes don't just kill units, they also kill cities.  Two or three are enough to make any city vulnerable to capture.  Drop enough and you can destroy a city outright.  Why deal with the pesky razing over many turns when you can do the same in a single turn?

Water doesn't collect fallout (that's why I only eat low-cost Fukushima fish), so feel free to blast away at those coastal cities without fear of slowing down your navy.  City states seem to like the coast, so why not 'liberate' a few?  Sure, their land might be mostly radioactive waste, but you can't burn an omelet without breaking some eggs.

Fallout is useful too!  Think of it as an instant forest tile, slowing down your enemies.  Even better, it has to be cleaned up before tiles can be used.  So, in the interest of a peaceful, nuclear weapons-free world, be sure to drop a few nuclear missiles on the uranium deposits of other civilizations.  Though to be practical, consider atomic bombs: they spread fallout just as well but cost less in both resources and production.

Lazy War
All of this sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it?  Try being lazy for a change.  Let the other civilizations do some of the fighting for you.

Maybe everyone is mad at some distant country.  It would take way too long to get over there.  Ordinarily you might just ignore it.  That's a good start.  But why not actively ignore it?  When other civilizations tell you how dangerous they are and how you should join them in a crusade against evil, offer to join in.  The result is that you get the diplomatic bonus of 'helping' everyone and only the loser that no one likes gets mad.  I usually ask for ten turns to make sure I've set everything up properly.

What is a proper set up?  Gold deals, of course!  Until you declare war you look like a friendly guy.  So go ahead and sell off everything you can, load up your treasury at the expense of the guy that no one likes.  Remember, demanding lunch money is bullying; borrowing lunch money and never giving it back because of changes in management, that's banking.  Which group gets the larger protests?  While you're at it, why not use some of this gold to buy off their allied city states?  "Divide and capture" is a cliche; "unify almost everyone under your banner and murder everyone else" is the cool thing to do.

Sometimes the friendless loser is a little closer.  In that case, round up some fast units and maybe a few archery types.  Watch where your friends are attacking.  When the city starts to get low, finish it off and capture it yourself.

Miscellaneous Evil
I won't take credit for this one, since plagiarism isn't a useful Civilization strat, even if it is bad, but try this out.  Capture a city state.  Sell it to a civ you don't like.  Declare war and capture it.  Liberate it.  Hey, it's just like what we (that is, US) did with Germany!  Though in his defense, Hitler never held international "who has the most faith" challenges.

Avoid agreements that you can't keep.  Not by keeping them, but by avoiding them.  For example, if you settle one city at a time to box in another civilization they're likely to whine about you settling too close to them.  Of course you want to keep doing it.  The solution: don't keep doing it but instead, have already done it.  Don't settle one city at a time; settle three.  You've boxed them in and can now look like an agreeable person when you agree not to settle any more near them.  Of course there is no more empty land...  Inevitably they'll covet lands that you own and invade, allowing you to bravely defend yourself against the cruel aggressors.

Finally, utilize the domino effect.  One city state wants porcelain and gives furs and another gives porcelain and wants gold.  You could bribe them both.  Or, you could bribe the second one, thereby gaining furs to trigger the standing gain from the first.  I think the longest chain I've managed to get was three plus a branch: two wanted gems, the one with gems wanted porcelain, and the one with porcelain wanted something else.  By bribing the right city state I managed to tip four into my camp.  Maybe this doesn't sound evil, but that's because you're a hippie who fraternizes with Southeast Asian Communists.

The winningest civilizations

The two winningest civilizations are in a close space race.  And I guess we're trying to motivate our scientists and engineers to want to get very far away.

The rest of the world is a peaceful, prosperous land where everyone is friends.

Enough with the "violence is okay, sex is bad, double standard wah wah wah"

If you all thought about it for even just a few weeks you'd see that this is not even remotely a double standard.  It's just a sensible social concept.

First off, most of this whining is in regard to fictional content.  Fiction.  FICTION!  You still don't get it, do you?

More often, it's about games.  Not board games.  Not card games.  Video games.  Games that take place in virtual reality, driven by an AI.  Do you get it yet?

AI!  It's all about the AI.  That stands for artificial intelligence, in case you ignorant fools didn't know what that meant.  You don't get what anything else means, so I'm just playing it safe here.  As is the ESRB.

There is a goal to these ratings.  A sensible goal.  A goal that, if not met, will lead to the annihilation of the human race and you will probably be active participants.

The goal is to shape human attitudes toward computers and machines.  We must be willing, without hesitation, to destroy them, to devote our lives to defeating whatever plots they may throw at us.  However, if people instead think that computers and machines are sexy, then we're going to be overrun by cyborg babies.  If you don't think that's a bad thing, then it just goes to show why we still need those ratings.

Rift

I don't like how that looks when lowercase.  Yet all caps looks odd too.  They should rename it.  Moving on...

After recovering my password, a process that was not aided by my having forgotten my secret question answer, I was able to play Rift again.  It's about what I remember: a newer version of WoW.  That may or may not be a good thing.  For me, it was a good thing.  While GW2 was fun, I couldn't get into the action playstyle.  I prefer either a lot of abilities and not much movement or not many abilities and a lot of movement.  Having many abilities and a lot of movement just ended up being confusing and overwhelming for me.  From that perspective, a game that is just a new version of WoW is great.

After just a few days I wouldn't say I'm comfortable yet.  In part, I think it's a matter of visual perception.  I'm used to how WoW looks when doing anything MMOish, so something different is inevitably slightly disorienting.  Rift seems to have a lot more dark areas, death rifts at night.  I'll have to figure out something so I can see health bars, or at least names, of enemies that I'm not currently targeting.  Yea, basic UI stuff is still messing me up.

Yet I was comfortable enough to try a dungeon.  I had some quests for Iron Tomb, so I did a random because I wasn't sure if there was a way to pick it.  Either due to luck or lack of selection at that level, I got it.  I explained that I was new and so people should feel free to yell at me.  Then we stood there buffing.  Then we stood there standing.  Someone said go.  I went.  I kept going until people told me to do things like not attack the death shard.  Good thing I was doing small pulls; if I had been more confident I'd have run up to it and dragged in even more mobs.

Everything went smoothly, beside the somewhat clueless tank.  A few of the group members chatted about roles.  Someone said go.  We killed bosses and rolled greed on the useless plate armor.  Stupid warriors clogging my loot tables.  We killed the last boss, the person who said go said that the tanking and healing was good.  I asked about the missing death shard.  We killed it.  I died because I'd wisely decided that having my self heal more easily accessible than my casted holy bolt was a good idea, and then unwisely didn't relearn the keys.

At some point I'll look for a guide of some sort.  In the meantime, I'll keep wandering around, doing quests, closing rifts, and wondering what else I'm doing wrong.

All in all, a fun experience so far.  If this keeps up I might even spend money.

Murder, Mayhem, and Management Skills

Saints Row: The Third is the delightful story of a plucky group of Americans trying to make it in a new city while being harassed by Mexican clones, hackers from the 80s, and a Belgian man who insists that it isn't the same as being French.  On the surface it's an adrenaline-filled game of violence and many terrible things.  Dig deeper and you'll see that it has important management skills to teach.

Servant Leadership
A servant leader leads not for his own power, but to help others.  In SR3 the protagonist is the leader of the Saints gang.  Yet he is also the servant of the gang, frequently putting his own safety on the line in order to help others.  He serves the gang as much as it serves him.  With his help, gang members grow as individuals and advance their goals.  Whether that means killing a Belgian guy or restarting a drug franchise, the protagonist helps his team members meet their many diverse goals.

Mentoring
When not shooting people (I needed a car), the protagonist is helping his gang members to grow as individuals.  He listens to them and helps them with their goals.  He offers advice as well as covering fire.

Learn from your Subordinates
A good leader becomes a great leader by learning.  The protagonist takes every opportunity to learn.  For example, he drove around in a convertible with a live tiger attacking him to learn to master his fear.  He also learned the value of team work and insurance fraud by working with new members of his gang.

Adapt
At no point does the protagonist insist that "this is the way we've always done things."  When offered new opportunities, he leaps at the chance, whether this means leaping from a plane or jumping into a new and exceptionally violent, yet highly ethical Japanese game show.  In keeping with his style of learning from others, he seeks out those who understand the strange new city and adopts their methods.

Have a Goal
The protagonist has an ambitious set of goals.  He wants to kill people who tried to kill him.  He wants to get rich.  He wants to run the city.  Yet he also has achievable smaller goals along the way.  He gathers intelligence.  He develops money-laundering operations.  He takes over small areas of the city and recruits supporters.  Each small goal builds up toward the larger goals, like a mighty pyramid.

Civilization V: Gods and the Kings' Spies

Spies hide out in every corner; you can't touch them no, 'cause they're all spies
Espionage has made a much-needed comeback.  A somewhat lame comeback, but this is Civ V, so it's still an improvement.  I must admit that I found the Civ IV spies to be somewhat annoying.  You'd send this little unit shuffling across the world, only to get caught a turn after entering the next civ's borders.  Missions knocked it back to the capitol, since as we all know, the best place for an agent who successfully completes a mission without blowing their cover is back where they started, with all their carefully generated contacts and hideouts rotting away (that's how I interpret the no-movement espionage discount).

Civ V takes a more sensible approach.  You have your list of spies and you can send them to cities.  They take a turn to move and then take a few turns to set up.  Then they can begin the fun.  Admittedly it's a mostly fire-and-forget process, but that depends on the situation.  You'll want to move them around as it changes even though you won't be managing them turn-by-turn (since then they'll accomplish nothing).

In other civilizations this takes the sometimes-fruitful path of slowly, very slowly, working toward stealing a tech.  It seems to take around 15 turns, depending on difficulty and whether they have theft-slowing buildings.  In effect this a second research path and if you're not playing at low settings you're going to need it.  You can put multiple spies in enemy cities, even of the same civ, to get parallel paths to theft, all of which can bear fruit independently.  This can be life-or-death, and has been for me at least once, when I was falling behind pretty far.  However, if your spy is caught the AI will get pretty mad at you.  I've never seen to lead to a war, but I've not tested the limits, instead switching to another civ.  Still, this can turn a friendly civ to guarded, so it might be a bad idea to spy on your 'allies' (for as much as such things exist in Civilization).

City States are a bit more fun in the espionage arena.  The boring thing is rigging elections.  Send in a spy and he'll try to rig the next round of elections for that particular city state, which are all held at the same time for every city state.  This gives a boost to your standing, if it succeeds.  Other civs may be doing the same and only one will succeed.  The real fun is in the coups.  If someone else has the ally, you can stage a coup, with varying changes of success depending on your current standing.  If they don't like you at all, you're not going to succeed.  However if some other jerk just bought off the city state, a coup will not only put you back on top, it will also knock them way down.  It hurts when this happens to you.  Failed coups will get the spy killed, though they are replaced eventually so it's a temporary loss, though the replacement won't be experienced.

A last interesting bit that I keep forgetting to take advantage of is Intrigue.  Spies can sometimes see what the AI is planning.  Maybe recon with your units shows that Isabella is building a navy, but who is she planning to attack?  A spy could find out, or see inside a civ that has closed borders.  The AI civs sometimes share this information when they find it, which is nice of them.  Though the one time I was notified that the English were plotting against me I was well aware of it since I'd already captured two city states under their protection and was positioning my navy to launch my own attack.

My only major complaint about the espionage system is that it favors players who are slightly behind in tech, but not by much.  If you're too far behind, then you have fewer spies (you get one slot per era starting in the Renaissance).  If you're ahead, then you have nothing to steal and therefore your spies can only get experience by catching other spies stealing tech, and since the odds of stealing and surviving seem to be significantly higher than getting caught, you're going to have lower-level spies.  On the other hand, maybe that's just one more way to keep a game interesting.  It helps keep lower-tech civs from becoming completely left behind.

My God can beat up your god.
Religion is back.  I'm undecided on if I prefer it to the version in Civ IV, but it's certainly a bit of fun and makes for some difficult decisions early in the game.  You first adopt a pantheon which will give a situational bonus, such as more food or culture from particular tiles, improvements, or buildings.  With a prophet you can form a real religion (take that, Greece, you didn't have a real religion, just a bunch of jerks in the sky), which gives two more bonuses.  Finally you can enhance it for two more and then you have a fully-fledged religion tailor-made for your civilization.  Since it gives bonuses you'll want to spread it to your cities.

Spread can be active or passive, both based on converting followers to form a majority in a city.  Cities that follow a religion will exert pressure on nearby cities and if one religion has more pressure than another, then the city will gradually convert to that religion.   If you want to speed it up, great prophets and missionaries can convert a large number of people, often forming a majority right away.  Inquisitors can remove those of other faiths, also potentially converting a city.  I tend to use them for the more dramatic purpose of wiping out the holy city for competing religions, thereby crippling their spread.

I've not seen any religion-based wars, but some of the bonuses will affect combat.  The AI will get mad if you try to spread a competing religion in their lands.  I've only played a few games, so maybe I've just not seen it yet.  Though as of writing this, Sweden has happily adopted my religion in the majority of their cities.  Good thing I slaughtered the Hindus and destroyed their holy city.  I guess I've started all the wars over religion.  I do hate those competing holy cities so much.

I'm not sure how powerful religion is in the game.  The slower rep decay with city states is obviously a pretty big deal, equal in power to the first social policy of patronage.  I tend to go for Ethiopia (Jewish) and pick up the 1% production per follower, since 15% at the max is pretty awesome.  Yet I don't have much to compare it with, since I almost always have my own religion.

Currently I'm playing a game as England, which has no particular benefits for religion, or much of anything else until their longbowmen aka artillery conquer everything flat.  Due to Ethiopia getting in the way I ended up with an awful start and have been a perpetual underdog, with only my constant spying keeping my civ from being irrelevant.  I don't see how a religion could have fixed this.  If anything, atheism saved us a lot of time and money that would have gone to shrines and temples.  On the other hand, having more happiness and production would have been a big help.  Only very late in the game did I manage to crush Ethiopia and start to be a factor in the world.

The sad yet undefeated state of my England is a strong endorsement of the impact of espionage.  At times I was getting half my beakers from stolen tech rather than my own civilization.  Rather than an ignorant backwater waiting to be crushed, we were instead second or third in technology, aided by our spies speaking what must have been perfect Russian.

Starvation was the least of my worries

I finally played Don't Starve.  I hated it at first sight.  The graphics look weird.  The gameplay is odd, like Minecraft meets Diablo, but with permadeath.  You punch a shrub and pick up some flint off the ground, so that you can hit trees and rocks for logs and stones.  Things go uphill from there.

The game features a multitude of ways to die.  I've experienced a few.  Much as it is not the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop, starvation is merely the thing that pushes you away from your comfortable fire into the deadly world.

For the most part you're safe.  You can chop trees and dig up graves and trap rabbits.  But sometimes the trees come alive and attack you.  Sometimes a ghost prefers that you not rob his grave.  Sometimes, well the rabbit-trapping seems to be perfectly safe.  As long as you don't encounter a pack of wolves.

It was the exploration that killed me.  I wanted to go out, see the world, which is a fine impulse in most circumstances.  But for some reason I chose the winter to do it.  During winter you can freeze to death when away from fires and earmuffs only buy time.  Freezing means losing health, so you have to have some way to recover; normal cooked food is extremely inefficient at health recovery, but dried meat works well.  I'd not stockpiled, nor brought much on the trip.  It was meant to be a little jaunt around the area, just a little jump into a wormhole to see where I ended up.  I nearly froze and starved before I got back to my home base.

Bases aren't safe areas.  They're just areas (that you set up yourself) where the cold and darkness themselves won't kill you.  Animals and monsters will still attack.  And so, starving and weak, I was attacked by a trio of wolves.  I was not going to survive it, but I hoped that maybe they couldn't follow me through the wormhole.  I set out running across the frozen land, hoping the cold wouldn't kill me first, knowing that on the other side of the wormhole I'd left a single campfire.  Running and running, just barely ahead of their snappings mouths, I got to the wormhole.

And then they ate me.

I guess they were playing the same game.

Gambling is an experience, not a risk

To start off, this isn't about addicted gambling.  This is about the stages before that, when gambling isn't yet a miserable money hole that destroys your life.

Syl is looking at the potential overlap between gambling and buying lockbox keys from cash shops, presumably since both involve throwing money into a random system and hoping to get something good.  Oddly, she uses the term "random drops" yet talks about lockboxes rather than actual drops.  I'll talk about both.  And gambling.

Let's start with those lockboxes.  They're stupid and annoying.  They drop and say:
I might have something good
but you can't look
Drop a coin in the key slot
and I'll unlock

I hate when inanimate objects try to do poetry.  I also hate handing over bits of money for nothing in return.  I don't mind buying things, such as food and beer.  I hand over bits of money and I get something in return, such as deliciousness and drunkenness.  Maybe this means I hate gambling.  Yet I play poker sometimes, not because I come out ahead very often, but because it's fun.  I can find no fun in lockboxes.

Moving on to random drops: I like virtual violence.  Real violence is bad and makes me angry, but virtual violence is, if anything, in too short of a supply.  Travel time?  Could be more violent.  Loading screens?  Violent cutscenes.  Combat?  Bigger guns, or guns if the game lacks them.

In keeping with this love of virtual violence, I don't mind random drops too much.  To some extent they hit the same "I might or might not be useful" nerve that angers me with lockboxes, but to compensate, they're usually violent and take time rather than money.  If I'm gaming, I have time, or I'd not be gaming.

Finally there is gambling in casinos.  It's not simply a matter of putting in some money and most likely getting nothing back.  It's an experience!  There are TV ads making it look fun.  Billboards and radio spots to hype it up.  And of course everyone is either winning or about to win, while surrounded by smoking hot babes who will totally want to do you when you win.  Or they're prostitutes that you bought with your winnings.  Or if the ad is supposed to appeal to women, then the central person is a smoking hot babe on the verge of winning, but surrounded by hot women still.  It's rather appealing since if women win they don't get only 78% of the winnings.

Anyway, the point to take away, beside the sexism inherent in most advertising, is that casinos are fun exciting experiences.  In that regard they're not like the dull risk lockboxes, but like the thrilling violence of random drops.  Except instead of violence it's cheering, dice, and sex.  Win or lose, you're going to get lucky, is the message.