Civilization V

[Sarkus]

That’s my impression of King vs Prince as well. I’m reluctant to give much credit to rumors that the AI plays “smarter” at higher levels because that’s what people always say about games with weak AI, and it’s never true (for strategy games – shooters where “better AI” means psychic snipers are a different beast). Looking through the handicaps XML file, I don’t see any element names that might refer to such a setting – just the usual list of bonuses.

In this case the idea comes from actual developer comments, where they stated that the lower difficulty AI was intentionally made to have a higher likliehood of making a “bad” decision then later levels. Then this tendency is supposedly reduced as the difficulty increases. What isn’t clear is when the “bad” decision chance drops to zero - at midrange difficulty levels or at the top of the difficulty levels, where the AI also benefits from other advantages its been given.

If you want a source for those comments, I’m pretty sure it came from that two hour streaming video thing Firaxis did a week before release. But I’m not going to sit through that now to make sure. ;-)

[Netriak]

That’s my impression of King vs Prince as well. I’m reluctant to give much credit to rumors that the AI plays “smarter” at higher levels because that’s what people always say about games with weak AI, and it’s never true (for strategy games – shooters where “better AI” means psychic snipers are a different beast). Looking through the handicaps XML file, I don’t see any element names that might refer to such a setting – just the usual list of bonuses.

Then you aren’t looking very well, are you?
Take a look at the following three settings in the handicaps xml:
CityProductionNumOptionsConsidered
TechNumOptionsConsidered
PolicyNumOptionsConsidered
Those are the AI intelligence settings they were talking about. Basically, if the setting is set to 1, the AI will always choose what it considers the best option. If set to 2, it will randomly choose the best or second best option, if set to 10, it will randomly choose between the top 10 options. Also, it only effects research choice, city build choice and social policy choice.
Settler: 10
Chieftain: 4
Warlord: 3
Prince: 2

It remains at 2 from then on, so the AI will always be somewhat random. As you can see, Prince is first the difficulty setting which has the AI play with minimum randomness, that is maximum intelligence.

[Chris_Nahr]

And what does that have to do with combat AI which is what we were talking about?

That aside… the AI is also pretty bad at maintaining a productive empire at Prince. Whatever the AI considers its “best” choices in terms of city production or technological research, they don’t seem terribly good.

[Netriak]

It has nothing to do with the tactical AI, no. But it is where the rumors about the AI playing better at higher difficulty levels comes from: the developers commenting that the AI intentionally makes bad decisions at the difficulty levels.
Since we can safely assume that Firaxis was referring to those three XML difficulty settings when they mentioned the AI playing stronger on higher difficulty settings, there is no longer any reason to suspect that the tactical AI is supposed to be affected by the difficulty setting.

[Sarkus]

Actually, I found the spot in the prerelease video where they discussed the AI difficulty levels. Here it is, around the 7:35 mark, where the game’s producer explains difficulty.

It isn’t clear if it applies only to the situations noted by Netriak above or also to combat difficulty since he doesn’t differentiate the two in his comments.

[Chris_Nahr]

Okay, then I guess it’s really just those three settings for empire management, and they do max out at Prince (for whatever they are worth).

[Dejin]

Anyone else having trouble getting strategic resources? I’ve had a bunch of games playing as Rome, where there is no Iron to be had anywhere (both Rome’s special units need Iron). Just had a game where there was no Coal to be seen anywhere on the map – I probably had about 1/3rd of it uncovered.

I would have thought one consequence of giving us limited amounts of strategic resources, would have been small amounts of it scattered about the map – i.e., we won’t give you a lot of Iron, but here is a small 2 unit source, you’ll have to think carefully about how to use it.

Instead the resource distributions remind me a lot of Civ3, where you could get completely screwed by not having access to the right resources.

[Hans_Lauring]

That has never happened to me.
Every game I have played have had at least one SR pop inside my borders (once I researched the tech) with more avaliable close by (invasion, trade or settling depending on map size and how far the game had progressed)

[Dan_Theman]

(I’m assuming you’ve already researched the tech that uncovers iron on the map, right?)

I haven’t had any such issues - iron seems harder to come by than dyes, for instance, but it’s always somewhere not terribly far away on my continent.

[Dejin]

(I’m assuming you’ve already researched the tech that uncovers iron on the map, right?)

I haven’t had any such issues - iron seems harder to come by than dyes, for instance, but it’s always somewhere not terribly far away on my continent.

I started the game in the industrial age, which means Scientific Theory was already researched before I started the game. It’s possible there’s a bug that’s preventing Coal from being displayed, since I started with the reveal tech instead of researching it. I’m teamed with England (using custom start) and going against Germany and Japan. Between England and myself, I can see most of the continent. A bit of Iron and three Oil locations spread across the continent, but no Coal to be found anywhere.

In other news, team play with the AI doesn’t seem to work as nicely as it did in Civ4. First off, everytime I talk to my partner, she glares at me and is quite unfriendly repeatedly telling me how much she dislikes me – I suppose it’s just cosmetic, since England is stuck with me whether or not she likes it. What’s more annoying is that I wanted to recreate WW2 and play US & England vs. Germany & Japan, so I declared war as soon as I ran into them, planning to keep the game in a permanent state of war. The English AI overrode my decision and arranged a peace treaty as soon as she could. I don’t remember that happening in Civ4.

[Lucidvizion]

Has anyone else tried multiplayer yet? Engaging in wars with simultaneous turns can be quite frantic and rts-ish. I’ve actually had a lot of fun with it.

But, so far I’ve found two things that I find really, really ridiculous:

1. There is no way to differentiate between a ‘To All’ message and a private message in the chat box. Can you really tell me that nobody thought that was important?

2. If you click your next turn button while others are playing, someone can declare war on you and you have to sit there hapless, unable to go back and move your units that still have moves left. You’d actually be better served just waiting for the turn counter to timeout - thus slowing the game pace down.

[Wolff]

OMG yes multiplayer needs some love, combat is so broken in simultaneous turns. Depending on lag or what have you, I had times where I couldn’t move any of my 8 guys while my opponent was free to get the first strike in vs all my front line units. It really makes being an aggressive CIV a pain since there one catapult can just decimate your melee guys before you can strike.

[Tony_M]

everytime I talk to my partner, she glares at me and is quite unfriendly repeatedly telling me how much she dislikes me

You should probably take a break from Civ and take her out to dinner. All the gaming you’ve been doing lately has obviously taken its toll.

Tony

[Blackadar]

You should probably take a break from Civ and take her out to dinner. All the gaming you’ve been doing lately has obviously taken its toll.

Tony

Well played, sir!

/salute

[Lizard_King]

That has never happened to me.
Every game I have played have had at least one SR pop inside my borders (once I researched the tech) with more avaliable close by (invasion, trade or settling depending on map size and how far the game had progressed)

I have a feeling (probably obvious) that this is one reason why it pays to keep an eye on those settler recommendation sites, since they seem to take into account latent resources, or at least have a high rate of correlation for at least getting them in the 3x3 radius.

[Sam_Jones]

Is anyone else getting pausing in the game? I’m on my first proper game after the “Learn as you play”, and every so often the game will lock for a few seconds. It was tolerable at first, but now it’s getting worse and worse the further I get in this particular match, like every minute or so. It also occurs badly on the diplomacy screen regardless of how long I’ve been playing.

[Cold_Blooded]

Anyone else having trouble getting strategic resources? I’ve had a bunch of games playing as Rome, where there is no Iron to be had anywhere (both Rome’s special units need Iron). Just had a game where there was no Coal to be seen anywhere on the map – I probably had about 1/3rd of it uncovered.

I would have thought one consequence of giving us limited amounts of strategic resources, would have been small amounts of it scattered about the map – i.e., we won’t give you a lot of Iron, but here is a small 2 unit source, you’ll have to think carefully about how to use it.

Instead the resource distributions remind me a lot of Civ3, where you could get completely screwed by not having access to the right resources.

Happens all the time here. Playing Rome, no iron anywhere nearby. Playing Russia, no iron or horses nearby.

[Dan_Theman]

Maybe consider the “legendary start” option?

[Sepiche]

If you setup a custom game you can set resources to be balanced as well. Never had too many problems with resources on standard myself though.

[Be_Szpilman]

Me I always play them on Sparse (has always been my dream to have this option on vanilla). No issues finding SR’s either.