Of course, I bought it cheap off the amazon sale, $12 for the entire thing plus DLC.

Right now 38 studios is in bankruptcy. The state of Rhode Island has a $110 million albatross around its neck.

hundreds of people lost their jobs and poor Kurt Schilling lost at least $50 million if not more as various creditors go after him.

Read more here:

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/2012/07/38-studios-end-game/print/

But I picked up the game. And I really like it.

I really like it.

I haven't liked a fantasy game this much since the original World of Warcraft. It's really lush. The towns don't feel like boxes, but instead they feel like organic towns. The writing is interesting enough to make me think before making choices. The combat is like God of War but customizable. Pretty smart, and still deep.

If 38 studios hadn't gone bankrupt, I'd be eagerly anticipating project copernicus.

Civilization has many variables which should have interesting "synergies," but usually I find halfway through that the synergies don't pan out.

So here are a few.

Iroquois and forest-roads. The idea is to keep the Iroquois territory wooded and connected to other Iroquois cities. Especially with Liberty and the early settler.

why it doesn't work: the tile only works as a road if it is within your cultural boundaries. So you're going to be happiness or gold locked anyways, as new luxury resources to alleviate unhappiness are usually far apart geographcially. And since I at least build my cities far apart, I'll not have the gold for buying the tiles

The liberty tree in general. It's supposed to give you an early and fast settler. But since you're happiness/gold locked, it doesn't really work out.

And the early settler is located 3 down the liberty tree, making it too inconvenient. The tradition tree is much better.

and it's late, and I'm irritated at this game.

The answer is simple, yet so obvious.

Make units cost more in maintinence.

Civ 5 works pretty well in the early game. You're ruthlessly economizing everything in the first like 100 turns as you go from Ancient to Classical and medieval.

It is the late game that is a chore. And that is because of unit numbers. Basically, by the time you get to late game, if you want to conquer a city, you have to build many many more units. In the ancient game, a smartly manuvered army of like 3 swordmen and 2 catapalts are enough to wage an effective assault on an enemy civ.

By the time modernity rolls around, you need at least 20 units built up to invade an enemy civ. This is because units cannot attack more than once unless they have a late game talent.

20 units is annoying. It's a lot more clicking. Finess goes out the window. It's just not fun.

The solution I believe is in unit maintinence. Modern units should cost more in maintinence. This makes sense. By the time modernity rolls around, I'm usually running hundreds of gold in surplus. So, I don't even think about it when I build more units.

Because modern units only take up 1 gold per turn in maintinence.

In ancient times, if I overbuilt, I'd be facing a deficit quickly. In modern times, that's not a problem.

So, in modern ages, the units should be more expensive. They should also all be able to blitz I think.

This reduces the number of units overall and that alone would solve the late game.