[ESO] [Civ5] Monday Update

Enchanting doesn’t level quickly. OTOH, level 25 lets me enchant up to VR5 level now, so it’s still “current” for me. Go figure.

So there I was, with the TSW launcher open and updating but it was taking a bit of time and I haven’t yet bought the points to buy the new issue yet and I was looking at my desktop and saw the Civilization 5 icon there.  Since TAGN’s been doing multiplayer on it lately, and thus I’ve been kinda thinking about it a bit more, I launched it.  Pulled up my saved games and had a game as Venice in there.  Launched it and vaguely remembered where I’d left off.  I’d turned off all victory conditions except conquest for that game and I had battleships and destroyers on an island map, so nearly every city had ocean access and they could just clean up — bombard with battleships, then the melee destroyers (with their bonus to attacking cities and 2 moves per round since they were built as privateers in a city with the 3 military upgrades plus the Brandenburg Gate wonder, then upgraded later) come in and finish it off.  Works very well on the maritime maps.  So anyway…. became a major warmonger and took over Brazil since they were closest in power to me.  Then took out the Shoshone since they had a lot of cities, though they sued for peace before I finished them off and offered me all the rest of their cities too, then finished off Siam and Persia since I’d fought them before and had them down to a single land-locked city each.  Hadda build some ground troops for that, bit wasn’t a big deal.  And yeah, eventually had the whole planet all sewed up except for the Shoshone capital and I had 8 battleships and 4 destroyer parked just off his coast, so… nothing else to do but finish him off.  So I did.

Lighting a fire inside a sentient tree somehow endears me to said tree? Not sure how that works, but ok. . .

Then is twas time to “do it different” so this time I went with India and only disabled the “time limit” victory.  But by the early 400’s in turns I had 4/5 cities dominated culturally, and the Maya inexplicably decided that our worldwide alliance of all civilizations sucked, so they denounced everybody.  Which of course led to 3 of us jointly declaring war on Pacal.  I took his 2 coastal cities on his continent, and then he sued for peace with me.  I accepted.  His capital was landlocked and I didn’t have any ground troops other than my self-defense garrisons at the time, so I wasn’t any real threat to him anymore anyway, and with Morocco and the Iroquois sending large land-armies over, I thought they’d get him, but he had a 140 defense rating on that puppy (Red Fort wonder helped, I guess) so they expended themselves against his walls but never were any real danger to him.  My separate peace treaty with Pacal expired, so I declared war again and during the 10 turns of the peace treaty I’d built and moved an infantry unit into position to land and march in.  He was still within range of bombardment, so I softened the city up with 8 battleships attacking it for a couple of turns and as a result when my infantry got there they just waltzed on it.  There was much rejoicing, so even though you typically get a lot of “we hate you now” messages after completely destroying a civ, I didn’t get any this time.  And since the Maya were the only civ I wasn’t yet influential with, wiping them out bizarrely gave me the cultural victory.

I really like how the colors turned out in this shot

I kept playing after the win, though and consolidated my gains and was working on building up the former Mayan cities (my 3 Indian cities were all maxed out and doing research production by this point) when the Iroquois (who shared my continent with Austria and me) asked me to go to war with Austria too.  Since Austria’s built a city up against my borders yet well away from theirs I thought that this would be a good excuse to take that one, while leaving the rest of their empire alone, so I accepted the treaty and declared war.  Very next turn the Iroquois denounced me.  Say what?!?!?!?!?!?!  I’m helping you in your war and you denounce me for it?  Silly diplomacy. So I wiped out the Austrians instead.  And since Morocco’d pushed Brazil to a single city near me on the other continent’s coast (before I’d ever met anyone from that continent, even), I took it and got rid of them now being mad at me too.  And then since I’d already won, I turned it off.  It was also 2 am.  Yes…… just 1. . . . more. . . .turn. . . . . . had gotten me good that night.

***

Watching a play after I’d helped the performer find her props and supplies.

Didn’t really do much on the ESO front as a result of all that time spent in Civ5, but I did get my NB tank to level 21 and my caster sorcerer is about 29.95.  At level 30 I’m planning to upgrade her to the sets that give 5% spell crit each so with the 19% she’s getting from Inner Light, the 4% on her weapon and the new set bonus she’ll be at 33%.  Once Light Armor is up high enough she’ll get another 10% and Inner Light is “getting there” to that final percentage point as well.  Looking forward to the 44% crit rate.  She’s managed to hit Mage’s Guild 6 and is thus working up Fire Rune, plus she got Equilibrium and Surge from her class skills as well, so they’re all in the bar to level them up.  Makes the current leveling build a tad… less than optimal, but once they’re leveled and morphed they’ll open up a lot of new options for me, so I’m looking forward to it!  plus in cases where I actually need an “optimal” build, it’s easy enough to swap skills back in.

Happy Gaming!