Saturday Diary: Snake hats

Hello one and all! I’m Grimmie and I like to play strategy games.

I’m sure you’re used to seeing the scribblings of Dog Pants on this page, but this week I thought I’d try my hand at reporting the scintillating events of our Saturday games. Civilisation V is a bit of a weird game. It’s great for those late night stints of strategising, continuously pulling you along in to the next turn with its hundreds of countdown timers ticking down to to zero, each and every one getting closer to completion with a click of the Next Turn button. You can take your time, place units across the hex map like pieces on a chess board, carefully plan your path to victory thanks to its turn-based format.

Barbarar the Barbarian was a constant source of teeth-gnashing.

It’s a little difficult to organise multiplayer games though, as a game that might take four hours to complete solo suddenly takes sixteen thanks to having to wait for your fellow players to decide what they’re going to do next. We rarely re-visit save games as getting the exact composition of 5punkers together again is quite a feat. It also means that there’s an awful lot of waiting followed by a sudden sprint of activity, and as a result, most of the 5punky shenanigans take part between turns.

Game notes follow. I had to do something between turns, right?

As soon as the game begins most of the players complain of Barbarians skipping in to their territory and nicking their workers and settlers. You can get them back if you can kill the captors and move in to the same hex as your captured workers, but at the start of the game it’s very much a Benny Hill scenario, but played in slow-motion.

Barbarians! Barbarians everywhere! Run, run run!

Then there’s the issue of movement and exploration across the map. It gets harder as civs expand across the map as you can’t move in to their territory without formally declaring war on them. One way around it is proposing an open-boarder treaty, but you have to do some research for that.

Shot2Bits laments not paying attention at civilisation school
upon arriving at Wiggy’s borders.

Occasionally nation states crop up around the map. You can influence them by your actions and they’ll often give you some sort of boon if you’re allied with them. They do tend to be a little sensitive about the most minor digression though, like stepping in to their borders for a single turn.

Mr Johnson shows us what he thinks of Edinburgh’s support.

Strategic resources (they let you build more powerful military units) and luxury resources (you can use these to trade and increase your civ’s happiness) are much sought after during the game, and often dictate where your next city’s going to be placed. Some of your cities or nation state allies will request particular resources to be added to your trade network. Anery, playing Rome, seemed to have constant requests for Marble.

Sorry.

It’s best to run Civ V in a window so you can browse the interwebs between particularly long turns. You may only have to set your workers off to build a farm or a road, but other players might be fighting battles on several fronts and managing a bunch of sprawling cities. Sometimes we find weird stuff.

Snake hats are classed as a luxury resource, by the way.

Barbarians will sometimes merrily skip in to your territory not only to steal your precious workers and settlers, but sometimes just to fuck up your tile improvements by setting everything on fire. Shot2Bits learned this the hard way when they set his marble quarry on fire. Somehow.

Needless to say the Roman sex toy industry was ruined.

Anyway, this is where people started dropping out of the game, and their AI replacements began spending all their accumulated gold and declaring war on other AI players, so we saved up and stopped for the night. Maybe we’ll finish this game next time the planets align and we have this exact mix of 5punkers online again?

Till then.