blue_mai

General thoughts on large changes:
* Having three ages with only some things carried over between them actually works really well. If you do well on the victory tracks on one age it helps in the next age, but it's not impossible to catch up. And it's meaningful to pivot from science one age to conquering in another age to economics in another.
* Adding hexes to cities is simpler and meaningful, but confusing to people used to earlier Civ games. Each tile has a natural yield. When you grow the city (when you get a new pop) into that tile, it gets the appropriate improvement. Hexes adjacent to city tiles (within 3 of the centre) don't produce any yield but count as controlled by the city. (That's where you can expand into) Placing buildings also grows the city. Building count as urban hexes, they all need to be contiguous with the centre.
* Gaining influence spent for diplomatic actions works really well. It makes investing in diplomacy meaningful, for warlike civs as well as friendly ones. It makes a difference which civs you butter up, but you can't infinitely butter up a civ that doesn't like you. And influence is used during war to influence war exhaustion, so a more/less popular war makes a real difference.
* There is a soft cap on the number of settlements which I like. It's less runaway victory/failure than how many settlers you can build. But it's less dramatic when building a settler isn't A Big Deal.
* Independent powers make a bit more sense. There are villages which can be hostile (like barbarians) or can be befriended (when they become city states). Late in the age you get auto-hostile ones who act like barbarians. It feels more organic.
* I like mixing and matching leaders and civs, and mixing and matching different civs appropriate to the region between ages.
* They got rid of rock-paper-scissors units. But overall the balance of military seems fairly good. I really enjoy it when I have good unique milirary units, like horse archers (just always OP), or elephants with machine gun mounts (Siam FTW) 🙂
* Some of the victory tracks are really fun. In modern age, economic requires connecting a rail network and processing factory resources. In exploration age, military/expansion track rewards settlements in foreign lands, extra if conquered, extra if your religion, so it can reward a variety of play. But some feel more unfinished, just "do X amount of Y".

( Read more... )

Ultimate edition of Innovation (photo on FB), with tweaked rules and all the expansions. I didn't know there were *any* expansions.

I assumed the expansions would be more variety of base cards, but no, instead they're *all* add ons which add a new sort of card to each age. The cards from each expansion are drawn in a different way, and act differently, but can be melded into the player board somehow like base cards.

So far the extras only come up every so often, but matter when they come up.

I can't believe the new edition added a new age, age 11, prudence, after age 10, the information age. But it *does* seem to fit. More powerful than age 10, but less wildly accelerating. I guess they can add a new age every 15-20 years when real world society has moved on far enough...

This game was with cities. I *again* relied on mathematics to skip through ages, but this time managed to score just enough to get the achievements first rather than second as I went. The game ended when I got computers, internet, and a couple more cards that meld and execute a card from age 10, catapulting my board into three age 10 cards, one age 9, and one age 1.