In Which the Civ 5 mod Vox Populi has balance issues...

Good morning, my friend, dear reader of this post! Wish you a happy Friday, and an excellent weekend that is to come next! How are you? How have you been across the week? As for me, I am okay, overall. The weather on my end has been more consistent, as the days have been relatively hot over a number of them. Not ideal, I hope for more rain to cone at some point! 

I, for some reason, decided to take the dust off Civ 6, and play it a bit. I trust this is due my Civ 5 current fatigue. Is it my favorite civ? Absolutely. But that said, as I already saw what I wanted on the vanilla, I did mention this time and again, I have since shifted towards mods such as the big Vox Populi one. That gave this entry a rich afterlife with me, specially as Civ 6 fail to sit well overall. 

Alas, this mod is not a silver bullet to revitalize a game that I have play more than enough at this point. I am happy to still try it, but this particular mod has a huge issue concerning wars, which is borderline of a deal breaker for me. I shall explain as briefly as I can, and specially using an example from my other game. My Civilization was bordering Morocco, lead by sultan Ahmad Al-Mansur, hardly a warmonger. And that was very friendly until some moments before. After, he turned into a fire of rage and chaos, decided that he wanted to annex my empire, and threw an inmense army my way, again and again. Huge waves, that after a while I decided were not worth trying to mitigate the war towards, and I quit that game. I think this is the main issue in a nutshell, the war balance, how opportunistic the AI can be, very unreasonably so. I don't think Civ 5 was designed for such exhausting action, because when a Civ declares war on you, you nust convert your whole empire into a war workshop, specially if you, like me, does not create enough units. It is so draining to see your work going away because some leader looked at you funny, and the mod even has an option to make the AI pretend to be your friend, while planning an invasion, which I usually turn off. 

This is how the game ends for me, because you have to keep your army going as to have a continuous swarm of your own, you usually starts lagging behind other civs on other metrics that are more dear to you, such as the commission of wonders and city improvements on my end. The pace of the game is ruined, the desire to keep pushing over a seemingly unending conflict runs dry fast. I wish that was not the case. Vox Populi is a mod that has so many amusing things in it, and the extensions of this mod make it even more enjoyable, but such issues cause me to be frustrated, another example would be the envot for the city states. Because most city states are very distant, you cannot really reach them by envoy or great diplomat that easily, causing remarkable hurdle. For some reasons, other Civs waltz around, build all the units without a care and send envoys to those city states their diplomatic units as fast and as frequently as possible, like their economy is always booming and much money can be spent. It is deeply frustrating as I wonder "must this mod really be it for me? Hence my desire to try Civ 6 again, specially as I am not junping towards the (aberration) 7h entry of the franchise. It is what it is.

Maybe the mod could be carefully chopped into different segments someday? Not sure if it can be done, given how big it is and how one submod leads to another mechanic hard to disentangle from any conflict. I have tried editing the prompt for Vox Populi, may try and do it again, it is never practical, though, there are constant updates and bug fixes being released for it, and at each fresh install, here I am having again to redo my steps. It is exhausting, and such drain in a hobby is unberable. I don't know for how long I will give such attention to Civ 5 still, given when the mod works, it is quite an engineering feat and a delight...  but when it does not, it is just painful.

As I am findinf ir hard to keep my eyes open right now, I trust I should reduce the friction for now and wrap up today's post here. It is great to wrire down my thoughts and ideas and life routine, share with the friends, but I feel sleepy, even if I for now do not desire to sleep much, because I want to stay awake for now. Hopefully I should be back soon, hopefully next week, with more of those thoughts of mine. Until then, fortgive my word errors specially today, should you can, as I am writing wirh the eyes half closing and in a touchscreen, and I wish you the best, this weekend and all of the weekends! Cheers