Episode: 4465
Title: HPR4465: Playing Civilization V, Part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4465/hpr4465.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:58:19

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,465 for Friday 12 September 2025.
Today's show is entitled Playing Civilization V, Part 3.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Al Hukah and is about 17 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
We continue our look at the game mechanics of Civilization V.
Hello, this is Ahuka.
Welcome you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our ongoing discussion
of computer strategy games and we're on Civilization V right now.
Going through some of the mechanics of this, we'll ultimately do an example of how to put all the stuff together and win a game.
But you've got to lay the groundwork first.
So what we want to talk about first here is victory types.
And when you're playing this game, you have to match the type of victory you're going for
with the terrain, with the character you've chosen, the empire you're working with, etc.
And it's important to understand these things.
Now, you can always change your objective as the game goes on.
There's nothing starting you from doing it.
There's two basic approaches.
One is you can just take a random start, just see what you get, the luck of the draw.
But then what you want to do is you want to adapt your strategy to the empire that you're playing.
The other approach is to say, I really want to do a certain kind of victory type.
And then what you want to do is pick an empire that is very suited to that.
Now, either way, you've got to know how these things work.
Let's run through the different victory types we have in Civilization 5.
The first one is domination.
Now to win a domination victory, you must keep possession of your own original capital and capture everyone else's original capital.
Now, original capital is the first city founded by each empire.
It can never be destroyed, but it can be captured.
Now, once the original capital city of an empire is captured, another city will become the current capital.
But capturing that does not count towards victory.
And a current capital can be destroyed.
Original capital cannot.
Next victory type, science victory.
This hasn't changed a whole lot.
To win this, build and launch a spaceship to Alpha Centauri.
That's been true of every game from the very first version of Siv.
Now, to build a spaceship requires technologies at the end of the technology tree.
You don't have to actually research every possible technology to do this.
You build the parts in your various cities and assemble them in your capital.
Now, once you've assembled all the parts, the spaceship will automatically launch and you win the game.
Cultural victory.
Now, this depends on your culture compared to the other empires, and involves the tourism mechanic.
If you attract tourists from another empire, your culture will become more dominant over theirs.
There are six levels for your empire vis-à-vis the other empires in the game.
Unknown, exotic, familiar, popular, influential, and dominant.
And these are defined by the amount of tourism you receive from an empire
compared with their own production of culture.
If the tourism you receive is at least equal to their own culture production, you are influential.
And to get a culture victory, you have to be at least influential with every other empire still in the game.
Now, the basic source of tourism comes from great works of art and artifacts.
Great works of art are produced by great artists, and artifacts are dug up by your archaeologists once you discover that.
Your own culture production both defends against tourism of other empires.
I.e. your own citizens would rather enjoy your culture than travel to another empire.
It also helps to produce great works of art.
Now, this victory type and the tourism mechanic is one of the innovations in Civ V,
and carries over and is developed further in Civ VI.
Now, the next victory type is diplomatic.
To witness, you have to be voted in as the world leader in the United Nations.
You gain votes in several ways.
First, you can liberate the conquered capital of another empire and return it to them.
That will guarantee that they will vote for you in the United Nations.
Or, and this is most common, you can ally with city states and get their vote in the UN.
Finally, if a city state has been previously conquered by another empire,
you can liberate it, and they will vote for you in the UN.
Now, once the UN is achieved, and that comes later on in the game,
votes take place every 20 turns.
So if you fall short on one try, you can try to line up more votes for the next try,
which usually means allying with a few more city states.
Finally, time.
If no one has won by any of the above means,
the empire with the highest score when time runs out will win.
In a standard game, that is 2050 AD and is turned 500.
But note that 500 is not a turn where you can make a play.
Your last chance to actually do anything is turned for 99.
So once that ticks over to 500, the game is over.
Nothing more you can do.
So those are all of the victory types.
And we're going to elaborate on that as we go through the mechanics of the game.
But the other thing I want to talk about here is terrain.
Now, Civ V changed the game board from squares to hexes, which was the first big change here.
But another change makes terrain even more important in Civ V.
And that is you can only have one unit per tile.
The giant death stacks of units that you could employ in Civ III and Civ IV are now gone.
That means that any military campaign will be mostly fought on a variety of tiles.
Most of this we will discuss later when we look at the military and how to fight wars.
But knowing how terrain affects your units in terms of strength and mobility will be a big part of that.
So first we need to know what the terrain types are.
Of course, the other reason we need to know this is in terms of where to settle, where to farm, where to mine, and so on.
And special resources are a modifier.
But first we'll look at the terrain types by themselves.
They can be analyzed in terms of their base production.
That is what they will produce without any improvements, such as farms and mines.
Their movement cost, that is how many movement points it takes to move into the tile, and defensive bonus.
That is how the strength of your units is modified if they're in combat.
A grassland has a base production of two food, a movement cost of one, and a defensive bonus of minus 33%.
So in other words, your defense is lowered if you're on grassland.
That kind of makes sense. You've got nothing to protect you there.
Plains, base production is one food, and one production.
So, little both there.
Movement cost is one, defensive bonus, still minus 33%.
Desert, base production is nothing, movement cost is one, and defensive bonus, minus 33%.
Ocean, base production, one food, and one gold, movement cost one.
Now, there is nothing about defensive bonus here, because ocean terrain does not, any combat you have,
and the ocean is going to be between ships, and the ocean is equal for all of them.
Same thing for Lake. Lake has a base production of two food, and one gold, movement cost of one, but again, no defensive bonus.
Tundra, base production is one food, movement cost is one, no defensive bonus.
Snow, base production, none, movement cost one, defensive bonus, minus 33%.
So, so far, just looking at base, all the defensive bonuses are minus 33%, or they're nothing at all.
But now this gets modified by terrain features, and these are stackable.
And what I mean by stackable is you could have two of these features on a given tile, and it all adds together.
So, you could have hills.
While those hills could be on a grassland tile, it could be on a plains tile, it could be on a desert tile, you know, that's what we mean by stackable.
Now, for hills, the base production is zero food and two production.
The movement cost is two, and the defensive bonus is plus 25%.
So, being in the hills is good.
It's nothing like having the high ground.
Now, note that the base production for hills will be zero food and two production, regardless of the underlying terrain type.
So, if you have hills on grassland, then you're going to get two production period.
You're not going to get any food.
Now, forest.
Your base production is one food and one production.
Your movement cost is two.
Your defensive bonus is plus 25%.
So, being on a forested tile is going to improve your defense.
You can hide behind the trees in other words.
Note that the base production for tiles with forests will be one food and one production, regardless of the underlying terrain type.
But forests can be cleared by workers once mining is discovered.
Jungle has a production effect of minus one production.
So, jungle will reduce the production that you might otherwise have.
Movement cost is two.
Defensive bonus is plus 25%.
Now, jungles can be cleared by workers once bronze working is discovered and should be.
They don't do anything good for you.
Mountains.
Production is zero.
Movement.
Well, except for air movements, you can't travel in mountains.
But there is one exception.
And that is carthage.
Carthaginian units, once they have earned a great general, can actually pass through mountains.
This is in recognition of Hannibal's notable crossing of the Alps in the Punic Wars.
Now, river.
Okay, there are rivers in the game and rivers run along the borders of tiles.
And they add plus one gold.
Attacking across a river reduces your attack strength by 20%.
Crossing a river will end movement for most units unless there is a road with a bridge.
So once you get the technology, you'll probably want to build the bridges.
It goes in there.
Marsh.
Production effect minus one food.
Cost for movement is two.
A marshes can be removed by workers once masonry is discovered.
Now if you have a marsh tile in your city, have the workers remove the marsh before you
attempt to work the tile, because it's pretty useless otherwise.
Post.
Now these are the water tiles with relatively shallow water along the coast of a landmass.
They're lighter in color than deep ocean tiles.
Most tiles can be traveled on by early water units, which cannot travel on the deeper
ocean tiles.
And coast tiles produce one gold each.
I think the idea is that if you're on the coast, you can engage in trade over the water.
Now floodplains.
These tiles can be found sometimes along river banks.
They produce two food.
It's good, but they can also produce disease outbreaks.
And oasis.
Oasis tiles produce three food and one gold.
However, they cannot be improved other than to add roads and then when you get the right
technology, railroads.
Ice.
At the top and bottom of the map are ice tiles representing the north and south poles.
Airplains can fly over these tiles and submarines can go under them, but otherwise they are completely
impassable.
Fallout.
Once nuclear weapons have been discovered, you can have tiles that are covered by Fallout.
This would of course be the result of a nuclear exchange.
When any tile covered by Fallout reduces the food production by three, reduces production
by three, reduces gold by three, and movement cost is two.
In practice, this will mean the tile produces nothing.
A worker unit can clean this up, but it will take time.
So until that happens, you should look for opportunities to move your citizen into
some other occupation until it is cleaned up.
Remember last time we talked about citizen management in cities.
And you have to clean it up before building or restoring any improvements.
Now A-tall is a type of tile that was added in a patch with the Polynesian downloadable
content, or DLC.
It is an ocean tile that produces one food and one production, movement cost is one.
Now admittedly, this is a lot of detail to take in, but there are a few basic rules you
might want to keep in mind.
First, you don't want to settle cities where there are lots of desert, tundra, or snow tiles.
One or two tundra tiles are okay if there are other positive features like access to a
luxury resource.
But desert and snow tiles are pretty useless.
Again, if there are lots of desirable tiles available having one or two desert or snow
is not a problem.
In most cases, you will never work all of the tiles in most cities.
But look for good tiles.
Similarly, mountain tiles are not generally useful.
However, if you are going for a science victory, they can be handy.
If you settle in a city immediately adjacent to a mountain, you can then build something
called the observatory in that city.
So the ideas observatories have to be on the top of mountains, which kind of makes sense.
They cost zero maintenance and add 50% of the science output of the city, making them
very valuable if you are going for a science victory.
Mountains are always handy as barriers to keep away from your enemies.
Jungle tiles can also cause disease outbreaks, but clearing the jungle from the tile will
put a stop from that.
I will always clear away any jungle or marsh tiles within my cities.
Active bonuses are also important, but we can cover that better when we get to warfare.
So with that, this is Huka for Hacker Public Radio signing off and encouraging you to
support FreeSoftware.
Bye bye.