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Killing Loaf posted:Anyone else feel like there's a huge difference between Prince and King difficulty? I roll all over the AI on Prince but can barely keep up on King. There is definitely a bit of a hurdle from Prince to King (and every difficulty thereafter) as the AI starts to get more advantages in the form of bonus production, extra units, etc. On King they start with an extra warrior and a free builder, they also get 20% production/gold bonus and a free Boost. It is hard to say without knowing in particular what you are having trouble with, but it all comes down to analyzing your surroundings and specialization, as well as what civ you are and victory type you are going for. But some general tips for Prince->King might be: Change Civic Policies often. To beat the AI and make up for the bonuses, you need to be more efficient. Focus your cities upon what you want to do and use the Policy Cards to help with overall goals, remember that you can change them every time you research a new civic so you can be switching them as frequently as your needs change. Use your workers to chop trees/rainforest/marsh. Chopping down trees will usually get you pretty close to a full settler or district. Creating a district ontop of these tiles will destroy it and thus not provide the production or food, so try to chop where you will place districts. Magnus will increase the amount you get from harvesting, but don't feel like you need to have him before chopping. His other abilities to have a city create settlers with no population lost and providing bonuses to internal trade make him a strong governor in the early game. Build Warriors. Warriors cost nothing to maintain and can be pumped out pretty quick, you can then upgrade these troops with gold which will be much faster than trying to produce a whole new army of swordsmen. This has the added bonus of making the AI less likely to attack you and ability to nab barbarian camps for +50 gold. However, you could also get past most threats with 4-5 archers if managed effectively. Spend your gold. Try to keep some gold in the bank for emergencies and upgrading troops, but be sure to convert your gold into whatever you are neglecting. If you are building lots of troops, buy builders or buildings. It can be quite effective to buy traders due to their cheap cost and powerful benefits. Hammers. Production is probably the most important resource because the less you have, the slower everything happens and it necessary to every victory type. Consider if a city has enough hills or other means to generate production like via trade routes when settling. You should always have at least one city focused on production with which to constantly pump out units.
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Sep 8, 2018 16:50
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I really want to like this game, since I loved Civ IV and Civ V, to a lesser degree. But even with the new stuff from Rise and Fall, I still find myself growing bored with the game by the medieval era. I don't know why, but unlike with other games I doesn't feel like I get momentum towards victory, instead things seem to stagnate and slow down, and I just can't be bothered finishing it.
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Sep 8, 2018 23:03
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I kind of wish the Civ series would die out but it seems impossible. It feels a bit like its simple existence stops others from developing history spanning strategy games. I know TBS is kind of niche but really.. I cannot think of a single alternative. The Total War series probably come the closest but they are limited to narrow timeframes and are more tactical combat oriented. Paradox's games can be played in sort of turn based manner by pausing but their games prescript too much.. your basically step into some other empire's shoes, you dont build your own. I wish there was a company that rebuilt Civ from ground up. Will probably not happen until Singularity hits and I can ask Siri to 'Make me a new turn based civilization building game'
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Sep 9, 2018 01:21
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SirTagz posted:I kind of wish the Civ series would die out but it seems impossible. It feels a bit like its simple existence stops others from developing history spanning strategy games. I know TBS is kind of niche but really.. I cannot think of a single alternative. The Total War series probably come the closest but they are limited to narrow timeframes and are more tactical combat oriented. Paradox's games can be played in sort of turn based manner by pausing but their games prescript too much.. your basically step into some other empire's shoes, you dont build your own. Endless Legend?
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Sep 9, 2018 04:47
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Roadie posted:Endless Legend? Yeah, I guess, if they make a reality mod for it. Fantasy isn't really a good setting for civilization building. Also as far as I know, a big part of the appeal is the very different play-styles the races offer and I am not sure how well that would translate to Gengis vs Gandhi.
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Sep 9, 2018 14:47
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The Civ series sets a very low bar and Endless Legend completely fails to clear it.
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Sep 9, 2018 14:52
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Straight White Shark posted:The Civ series sets a very low bar and Endless Legend completely fails to clear it. This, but also, and frankly, no other Civ-style fantasy 4X clears it either. If Civ6 has too many systems piled on top, well...so does every fantasy Civ-style 4X I've ever looked at. I think a lot of that has to do with trying to go epic or high-fantasy, which just does not work well in Civilization terms. It maybe could work if they built on top of Call to Power instead, given CtP's improvement system is separate from unit activity, but nobody seems to remember CtP.
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Sep 9, 2018 15:17
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I'm pretty sure there's something central about Endless Legend's combat system I just don't grasp, because I don't understand why a human being would design the experience I've had in that game.
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Sep 9, 2018 15:21
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I've tried to like the endless series, I really have. It's just too goddamn tedious.
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Sep 9, 2018 17:10
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Personally, I've grown to hate unit designer things. It's particularly a cancer with space 4X games, but I like how Civ just presents you with a premade set of units for everyone. CBE's upgrades are about the most complicated I like for that.
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Sep 9, 2018 17:14
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Cythereal posted:Personally, I've grown to hate unit designer things. It's particularly a cancer with space 4X games, but I like how Civ just presents you with a premade set of units for everyone. CBE's upgrades are about the most complicated I like for that.
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Sep 9, 2018 19:38
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same, endless legend was fun for a couple games but ultimately i didn't care for it. i'm told it lives or dies by whether or not you like the story flavor text, but i'm gonna be honest with you: civ has the right amount of text for a 4x game imo. the UAs are irritating because they generally aren't bonuses for you, but maluses for your enemies, so it isn't fun to play against. and as has been mentioned, customizing each individual unit with a bunch of RPG equipment slots? and then you have to upgrade it manually every time you reach a new hardware tier? no thanks, that's a few layers of micromanagement too many for me. plus its UI is sooooooooooo bad, it makes you long for civ 6 even
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Sep 9, 2018 19:44
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the right amount and also right text in a game was alpha centauri but I mean you couldn't do that for civ for various reasons
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Sep 9, 2018 19:46
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The endless series is fun if you surrender to the idea that they are war games. I'd prefer an empire simulator where I don't have to manually equip helmets on each of my soldiers, but as long as I'm willing to accept what they are, the endless games are very well done. I agree that Civ needs a direct competitor. I think 10 Crowns is attempting to do that. Haven't heard anything about it since it was announced though, so it might be dead.
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Sep 9, 2018 20:11
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I've been playing Civ V exclusively against the AI. When I evaluate deals, I look at whether the other party is deriving more science benefit from the exchange than I am. When you're doing the same against real-life people, do you base the decision on whether you think your opponent is going for a science win?
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Sep 9, 2018 22:02
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Flavor-wise, I miss the Civ V civilopedia. It had all the information you needed, presented clearly and concisely, with hotlinks to anything that might be relevant, as well as bit lore dumps if you were in the mood for those.
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Sep 9, 2018 22:13
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I enjoy Endless on occasion but man even when compared to other 4x games their AI is impressively bad. They just don't really do anything. I've played two games of Endless Legend and I don't think the AI ever even declared war on me once. Civ isn't amazing but at least you'll sometimes run into early warmongers or betraying allies to keep things interesting. And I'm not sure if it's the AI failing at tech/production or failing to understand the unit designer but in both Legend and Space after the first handful of turns they just stop upgrading their units.
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Sep 9, 2018 23:31
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I love EL but I've honestly sunk a lot more time into Civ5, with Civ6 being rather lackluster apart from districts. EL is very much about giving a poo poo about the combat, but as mentioned the AI is noncompetitive in keeping up in the arms race. I feel the fault lies with the programmers not reinforcing just how much better elite units are. A squad of units with 10% higher stats in all categories will dunk over a half-dozen stacks with proper micro. So the AI is running about with the Civ5/6 mentality of 'total army strength' rather than realizing they have no chance in hell of beating your doom stack and they need to spend their production bonus' on that instead. Otoh, difficulty scaling is much more rough for EL than Civ games. In Civ, with careful micro you can engage in early wars for space to place new cities, and then play tall and catch up on your victory conditions. Trying to pick a small fight early on in EL on higher difficulties generally has resulted in me getting comically smashed as the AI can burp out stacks faster than you can kill them. I can play Civ5&6/Beyond Earth/ESpace2 on Deity but EL is another story entirely.
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Sep 10, 2018 01:45
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Gobblecoque posted:And I'm not sure if it's the AI failing at tech/production or failing to understand the unit designer but in both Legend and Space after the first handful of turns they just stop upgrading their units. it's probably the one place where a (very conservative) AI handicap would be really useful, but i think what's happening in the Endless games is that the AI simply doesn't have the resource income to support upgrading. it's like playing against Civ 5's AI on a medium-high difficulty where they get a reasonable handicap, they're able to execute certain fairly interesting plays if they have the gold income to support it, but if they don't have enough free income, they'll just sit around with -40gpt and do nothing forever
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Sep 10, 2018 01:50
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Yeah if you look at the dust production graphs in EL, the AI just never goes above a couple hundred, while a human player will easily break 10k in era V. The AI just doesn’t get that dust is better at making things than hammers basically from era II onwards, or how to get dust.
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Sep 11, 2018 12:20
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4X game designers should abandon the idea that an AI should play the game in the same way as a human player. If Genghis Khan is supposed to be a terrifying mid-game threat with a huge horde of horsemen, just give AI Genghis a huge horde of horsemen in the mid-game. Making the AI play the same game as a human player means setting yourself a high bar which many developers never get close to clearing, and even the best ones have to make their AIs cheat to some degree in order to provide a challenge.
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Sep 11, 2018 16:33
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Gort posted:4X game designers should abandon the idea that an AI should play the game in the same way as a human player. If Genghis Khan is supposed to be a terrifying mid-game threat with a huge horde of horsemen, just give AI Genghis a huge horde of horsemen in the mid-game. That's a fun idea. Harder to adapt that concept to civs without a unique unit, though ones with a unique improvement seem to do ok.
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Sep 11, 2018 16:46
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Gort posted:4X game designers should abandon the idea that an AI should play the game in the same way as a human player. If Genghis Khan is supposed to be a terrifying mid-game threat with a huge horde of horsemen, just give AI Genghis a huge horde of horsemen in the mid-game. But then it's not Civilization. Unless the human player can meet a set of conditions to do the same thing, that is... (Which might be interesting.)
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Sep 11, 2018 17:53
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Aerdan posted:But then it's not Civilization. Unless the human player can meet a set of conditions to do the same thing, that is... (Which might be interesting.) It's weird how the Civ series started with Civilization III then, considering that I & II didn't even bother pretending that the human and AI civs used the same mechanics for everything.
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Sep 11, 2018 18:05
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Its kinda amazing that AI advanced so much in the last 10 years or so but videogame AI in general seems so dumb now as it was in the 90s
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Sep 11, 2018 18:51
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I really do feel that Civ 6 is repackaged Civ 5, in that it doesn't do things different enough to be enjoyable to play. I actually have a better time playing through Civ 5 because I still despise that completely brown fog of war. Civ 6 took the ideas and framework from Civ: BE which was just a rehash of Civ 5 and rehashed them again. Each time they do this they strip a bit more out, in this case the city production screen. I don't get it. Firaxis seems to continue to pour resources into animated characters that interrupt you during the campaign, as if this is a feature that strategy fans have been clamoring for. In reality it seems to be an attempt to make the game more exciting and story oriented for the "I buy civ on release, play it twice, and park it till the next one" market. I don't mean that as an insult, I'm saying that's precisely who Firaxis seems to want as their customer. And sadly I just don't think it's working at this moment. Civ 5 was released in 2010. It took a while to get playable but even 6 years of basically identical gameplay is a bit too much. Here's hoping they actually clean some of this up. Finally just because one mediocre game designer decided on 1UPT in 2010 shouldn't mean we're stuck with it for a decade here, Firaxis. Maybe we can try something new.
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Sep 11, 2018 18:54
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Someone posted some tips and tricks for higher difficulty earlier and they really seem to be helping. I have a solid grasp on king, but emperor was kicking my rear end. With the new tricks, I am actually holding my own in my current ai game. I think being Germany and having 5 city states near by helped too, lol.
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Sep 11, 2018 20:51
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Elias_Maluco posted:Its kinda amazing that AI advanced so much in the last 10 years or so but videogame AI in general seems so dumb now as it was in the 90s Well that's because commercial AI runs on massive supercomputers, game AI has to make do with some of a PC. And while even PC AI can benefit from good coding, it takes an awful lot of effort that can only be achieved by dedicated programmers (see: chess), or decades of incremental improvements (chess again) or contributions from a huge community (chess) For a game dev it's a case of spending as little dev time as possible and getting away with an AI that throws up a reasonable challenge, even if it breaks completely when the player does something specific or it occasionally trips up and falls into an insanity hole. Game AIs have to be custom made so they won't benefit from advances in commercial AI, though AFAIK something like DeepMind just needs a bit of training on the inputs/goals before it can be let loose. I'd love to see what DeepMind would make of Civ. Again though, even if you made a great AI that way, you couldn't install it on anyone's PC. E: what you could do i guess is let something like DeepMind figure out some basic strategies / rules and then hard-code them into a basic AI. Firaxis don't got the money for that, but they could at least hard-code some things that players do, like "always use that policy card that reduces military costs", instead of just "pick any policy cards, yolo" Microplastics fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Sep 11, 2018 |
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Sep 11, 2018 21:34
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The next iteration of slick neural network AIs like DeepMind / OpenAI should be able to run on consumer GPUs so if the game is not terribly graphically intensive (ie strategy games) and if the AI devs can deal with the GPU neural network limitations (much less flexible than CPU implementations) then yeah I wouldn't be surprised to see some pretty decent stuff. OpenAI can currently run 5v5 realtime dota and make it work with a limited hero pool, looking forward to seeing some good stuff for strategy games next year or two.
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Sep 11, 2018 21:38
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Aerdan posted:But then it's not Civilization. Unless the human player can meet a set of conditions to do the same thing, that is... (Which might be interesting.) The set of conditions a human player needs to meet in order to have a huge horde of horsemen in the mid-game is to do some economy stuff in the early game, then pump that all into horsemen in the midgame. Civilisation AI's not good at stuff like that since it's just a simple "pick from a list based on the leader/civ flavour" machine which doesn't do long-term strategy, so you'll get a better player experience by just pretending it did all the build up and granting it the horsemen in the mid game. Illusions that work are always better than simulations that don't. For example the wargame War in the Pacific simulates every bomb a plane drops when it's attacking a target, like a ship. Each bomb has a percentage chance to hit its target. Because of this, planes that drop large numbers of bombs (like the larger 4-engine American bombers) have an unrealistically high chance to hit ships when they attack them. If they'd just gone "Let's say four-engine bombers have a naval hit chance of 0.5% and do 10 damage if they do" instead of going for their crazy "Let's simulate every bomb separately" plan, they'd have gotten a far more plausible outcome. In Civ it's the same thing. They try to pretend the AI players play by the same rules as the human ones, but that just means you get poo poo like Montezuma sitting around with his ten unique warrior units not declaring war on anybody because the exact right diplomatic situation didn't come up, or everyone playing on difficulty levels that give the AI players tons of bonuses because even when it's one human versus six AI players, the AI is so weak at the game that the player wins every time. Gort fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Sep 11, 2018 |
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Sep 11, 2018 22:02
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I went back to Civ4:BTS to see whether the rose-colored-glasses memories hold up. And I gotta say, they actually mostly do. Sure, the systems are all shallower, but thanks to that, the AI, despite being over a decade old, is way more competent than in both of the newer Civs. It's far from perfect or actually good at the game, but it's pretty clear that it has a better grasp of the systems and is able to leverage those difficulty level bonuses to present a decent challenge. This is mainly due to two things. Number one, stacks. Civ AI doesn't have the spatial and predictive reasoning to carry out anything more than the most basic tactical manoevers on a 1UPT board. Even given a significant advantage in unit quantity and quality, it easily gets into traffic jams or dumb logical loops. In Civ4, on the other hand, while stack combat may not be the most intellectually stimulating thing in the world, it's something the computer player understands: I have more and better units than that guy, or units that counter his units, so I should throw them at one of his cities, preferably parking them on good defensive terrain along the way. There's no need to set that army up on terrain, take ranged units into account, guard its flanks, move it efficiently through chokepoints etc. There's just stack composition, judging favorable or unfavorable fights, and choosing targets, all of which are easy for an AI to handle. Numer two, simpler city management. Civ4 has a much higher floor and lower ceiling in terms of city efficiency. With the AI's bonuses, it's decent at grabbing lots of land through conquest and expansion. In 4, this means it just gets stronger because more land is overall better even if it's not as well-developed as the player's. Meanwhile, 5's dominant tall-and-efficient playstyle and punishments for overexpansion and 6's districts with their cost increases and adjacency planning both leave a lot of room for the player to easily outdo the AI's lovely, inefficient empire. It's sad because basically this means the game has gotten too complex to be fun, but that's my conclusion. The complexity went in directions where it's much harder both to adapt AI to them and to give it useful bonuses to overcome its stupidity, and in the whole design process they clearly never took that into account.
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Sep 12, 2018 11:14
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I too have returned to Civ4:BTS after having 1000+ hours in Civ5 and 600 hours in Civ6. What I have noticed, is that there's a much higher chance for the AI to develop a true continental and even global superpower. It's not uncommon to end up with a handful of competing nations that each have at least 20 cities. At least on super-huge maps. Which is another thing that makes me stay with Civ4. The fact that it's old, makes it run really well on modern pc's. Even on huge++ maps with 40 civs. And with the revolution mod and breakaway civs it's so much more fun.
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Sep 12, 2018 11:39
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Well that's because commercial AI runs on massive supercomputers, game AI has to make do with some of a PC. And while even PC AI can benefit from good coding, it takes an awful lot of effort that can only be achieved by dedicated programmers (see: chess), or decades of incremental improvements (chess again) or contributions from a huge community (chess) Sounds to me like the answer then is to have a linuxy community Civ project like FreeCiv and iterate on it for years and years and years. For those of us who want a epic digital boardgame, at least -- I know there are people who play Civ for role-playing but that's not why it hooked me in 1991. I'm only half joking -- chess wouldn't have got to where it is in ubiquity and deep AI and analysis and stuff if they were throwing out the ruleset every 5 years so they can have 'Chess V'. ...I'll see myself out
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Sep 14, 2018 05:20
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I had one of the most "interesting" developments in one of my games so far. Gilgamesh attacked me as expected, I fought back... got one of his major cities ready to break, and then - a bunch of Babarian units spawned. I suppose this was because of his war weariness at how bad he was being smashed - but in practice it gave his army a massive boost and took me down a couple of pegs as the new units outside his city only attacked my army. I wonder if there was any tangible downside to the AI suffering what should be a massive setback?
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Sep 17, 2018 20:10
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Marmaduke! posted:I had one of the most "interesting" developments in one of my games so far. Gilgamesh attacked me as expected, I fought back... got one of his major cities ready to break, and then - a bunch of Babarian units spawned. I suppose this was because of his war weariness at how bad he was being smashed - but in practice it gave his army a massive boost and took me down a couple of pegs as the new units outside his city only attacked my army. I wonder if there was any tangible downside to the AI suffering what should be a massive setback? You can shift your forces to another city and maybe let the barbarians just continue to plague the area. In IV I was recently able to make a horde of them run away and eventually sack an AI capital, but I don't think you can trust barbarians in V or VI to run away unless they're scouts or almost dead. It depends on how bad you want that particular city I guess, but it's definitely a setback for you if that city's your target. It actually seems like a plausible scenario. Locals revolt against the government and simultaneously oppose foreign occupation. In-game it'll basically come down to deciding whether you're going to deal with them or move to another city. Or wait for Gilgamesh to build units to throw at them.
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Sep 17, 2018 20:22
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Marmaduke! posted:I had one of the most "interesting" developments in one of my games so far. Gilgamesh attacked me as expected, I fought back... got one of his major cities ready to break, and then - a bunch of Babarian units spawned. I suppose this was because of his war weariness at how bad he was being smashed - but in practice it gave his army a massive boost and took me down a couple of pegs as the new units outside his city only attacked my army. I wonder if there was any tangible downside to the AI suffering what should be a massive setback? Spies also have the power to recruit barbarians near cities as a form of sabotage. Also, cities under siege can declare themselves free and then the city spawns an army.
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Sep 17, 2018 20:52
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Interesting to know, thanks! I think in this case it was just bad timing but it did make the attack more exciting at least.
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Sep 17, 2018 23:13
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Guildencrantz posted:I went back to Civ4:BTS to see whether the rose-colored-glasses memories hold up. And I gotta say, they actually mostly do. This is why I really want a Civ4 with Hexes and Stacks. "Deep" combat where I can fend off the world with two archers and a warrior isn't really interesting to me. Also Civ4 city management was much more "complex" then CivV or Civ6, specializing your cities depending on the terrain, improvements, and great people. I'm not sure where your idea of "shallow" systems in Civ4 came from.
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Sep 21, 2018 05:21
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I tried two big Civ IV mods, Realism Invictus and A New Dawn. I've been really liking RI, but the first impression of AND makes it look like bloated garbage. Is it worth giving AND another chance, or is it over hyped crap?
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Sep 24, 2018 10:12
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Baller Time posted:I tried two big Civ IV mods, Realism Invictus and A New Dawn. I've been really liking RI, but the first impression of AND makes it look like bloated garbage. Is it worth giving AND another chance, or is it over hyped crap? yeah go take a look at C2C or Caveman 2 Cosmos
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