Great People

Gaining Great People

You earn Great People by accumulating Great Person Points (GPP). Each type of Great Person has its own type of GPP, and they are earned independently, so you can easily accumulate points for several different types of Great People at the same time. You can earn these points through specialists, through Wonders, and through Social Policies. While you can accumulate points towards any and all Great People, you should focus on ones that fit your game strategy. If you are going for a Domination victory, you should focus on Great Generals and Great Admirals in preference to Great Artists and Great Musicians. But if you are going for a Culture victory you might want to reverse that. That is not to say you won’t gain a few random other Great People along the way, just that you should know what you are trying to achieve. And Great Generals and Great Admirals are a little different in that you earn them by winning battles.

Types of Great People

• Great Artist – Can start Golden Age, or create Great works
• Great Musician – Can do Concert Tour (+Tourism), or create Great Works
• Great Writer- Can write a Political Treatise (+Culture), or create Great Works
• Great Engineer – Can hurry production (including Wonders). Can create Manufactory
• Great General – combat bonus to units within 2 tiles, or steal land when creating a Citadel
• Khan – Unique to Mongolia, replaces Great General, moves faster and heals adjacent units, and can create Citadel
• Great Merchant – Trade Mission (+Gold and +Influence with a city state). Create Customs House
• Merchant of Venice – Unique to Venice, replaces Great Merchant. +100% Gold and +100% Influence from Trade Mission, or can puppet a City-State. Can create Customs House
• Great Scientist – Can Hurry Research, or create Academy
• Great Admiral – Combat bonus to naval units within 2 tiles. Can repair adjacent naval and embarked units
• Great Prophet – Can Found or enhance Religion, can spread Religion, or can create Holy Site

Every type except Great Admiral can create something, but that uses up the Great Person. And the main action for each also uses up the Great Person (e.g. do a Concert Tour, Hurry Production, etc.). So you need to consider which one works best for you. As a general rule, compare which option pays off the best. For example, if it is early in the game and you get a Great Scientist, creating an Academy will give you science points per turn that will pay off over the whole game. But once you hit the mid-to-late stages the one time hit of science points from Hurry Research makes more sense because you don’t have the time left for the per-turn bonus from an Academy to add up. And if there is a key Wonder you need to make your strategy works, keeping a Great Engineer on hand to hurry it up can pay off very nicely. This is the only way to Hurry Production on a Wonder.

Trade

In Civilization V, the amount of Gold you earn from terrain is much lower, so the path to a full treasury requires that you set up Trade Routes. You have limited number of Trade Slots available, but that limit grows over time. You can earn slots two ways. The first is through discovering techs:

• Ancient Era: Animal Husbandry, Sailing
• Classical Era: Engineering
• Medieval Era: Compass
• Renaissance Era: Banking
• Industrial Era: Biology
• Modern Era: Railroad
• Atomic Era: Penicillin

So just from keeping up your research you can get up to 8 Trade Routes. In addition, the Wonders Colossus and Petra each provide an additional Trade Route.

You can establish trade route with your own cities, with City-States, and with other Empires. Trade routes are always city-to-city, and are limited by distance, so it can make sense sometimes to move your trade unit to a different city. The city that produced the unit will always be where it shows up first, but you can make a move on its first turn to transfer the unit to another city, though note that Cargo Ships can only be placed in coastal cities. This can bring a desired destination city within range. Note that for land units (Caravans) you can increase the range by building roads.

Effects of Trade

Trade is generally pursued for the gold, but there can also be Science, Culture, and Religious effects, so it is worth paying attention here. Even if Gold is the main object, you may have several options that provide equivalent amounts of Gold, and a potential gain of Science or Culture might be the tie-breaker, depending on your strategy for victory. If you establish a trade route with a City-State, you can receive Gold, provide religious pressure to convert them to your religion, and gain influence with them, This can be very helpful if you are going for a Diplomatic Victory, But I would not accept a large difference in Gold just for that minor Influence gain. You can gain far more influence with Gold in long run. Setting up trade between your own cities can be helpful in giving a boost to a city because you can send Food and Production. In the earlier phases of the game that might be a good idea to get a city up to full development. The city where the route originates does not lose Food or Production, but some added amount shows up in the destination city. However, for Food trade to happen you need to have a Granary in each city, and for Production you need to have a Workshop in each city.

Plundering

Trade routes can be plundered by Empires you are at war with, or more often, by Barbarians. When that happens, the route disappears, and you need to build another trade unit and set up another route.

Empires/Civs

There are 43 possible Civilizations in Civ 5, so I don’t propose to discuss all of them in depth here, but if you want to dive into this more you can go to the Civ Wiki for a chart that shows them all. Instead, I want to discuss why they are different and how you should make choices depending on the Victory type you are choosing. Of course, if you let the game make the choice for you randomly, knowing what each Civ is good for can help you to determine what type of strategy to pursue for your best chance of a victory.

The first thing to know about each Civ is that they have a starting bias for where they will spawn at the beginning of the game. This can be either positive or negative, i.e. you are either more likely to spawn in certain terrain, or less likely to spawn in certain terrain. England, which is a naval power, will be biases to spawn on the Coast. Whereas Egypt, a famously desert country, will have a negative bias to avoid Jungle or Forest locations.

Second, all Civs have one or more Unique Abilities. For example, the Carthaginians have two abilities that come from history. The first is Phoenician Heritage, which means that all Coastal cities get a free Harbor. And once they have earned a Great General, their military units can cross Mountain tiles, and they are the only ones that can do this. And the French have the City of Light ability, which grants doubled theming bonuses for Museums and wonders that are in the Capital.

Third, each Civ has a Unique Unit. These units replace one of the regular units in the game, but are enhanced in some way. Spain has two of these. The first, the Tercio, replaces the Musketman, but it has a +50% bonus against mounted units and an increased Melee strength, making it a combination of Musketman and Pikeman. The other unit, the Conquistador replaces the Knight, but it has some interesting abilities. It can move after attacking if it still has movement points, embarked units have double defense, it can see two tiles further, and has no penalty when attacking cities. Finally, the Conquistador unit can be use to establish a city, though that uses up the unit.

Finally, most (but not all) Civs have Unique Building or Improvement. As with units, these tend to replace ordinary buildings/improvements but offer something better. Arabia, for instance, has the Bazaar, which replaces the Marketplace. But it provides an additional 2 Gold per turn more than the Marketplace, it adds one additional copy of each improved luxury resource near the city, and provides +2 Gold for each Oasis and each source of Oil.

What you need to consider is how each of these unique attributes of a Civ will fit in to your strategy. And timing matters. The American Unique Unit of the B-17 Bomber is nice, to be sure, but comes very late in the game. It probably won’t help you conquer the world. But the Roman units of the Ballista and the Legion are excellent for an early campaign of conquest. For a Trade-oriented strategy, Portugal is excellent, as all of its Unique attributes help with generating Trade and Gold. And Gold is the key to many possible paths to victory. So keep these points in mind as you plan your strategy. And to illustrate all of the things we have been discussing in the Civilization V series, I will play a game where I aim for a Diplomatic Victory.