3641

So. After winning my 4th full game I’m ready to play with mods… but does using any mod turn off achievements?

3642

I’ve seen the AI build cavalry, but only if it already had a substantial force of infantry and artillery.

3643

I’ve seen a fair number of Companion Cavalry and some kind of mounted archers (maybe Camel Archers?). So definitely special Civilization-specific cavalry gets built. I can’t remember off hand if I’ve ever seen regular mounted units.

Also I’ve definitely seen lots of Tanks, which is kind-of the modern cavalry equivalent.

3644

Yes. As far as I know, use of mod = no achievements.

3645

There are a few achievements for using a mod, though!

3646

As the others said, I saw civ-specific units; the Mandekelu (sp?) cavalry and the Arab’s camel-cavalry.

This is actually the second time units have swarmed my civ and stopped before actually attacking cities. The first was when a tech-advanced England swooped down from the upper third of the map after I finished wiping out a smaller civ and losing most of my army. I had nothing to defend with but a couple of injured units, while they had a dozen or more in my territory with more following. . . yet they didn’t attack a single city while I built up/bought defenses.

3647

I had a game the other day where I was handily winning so for S&G I gave my City-State allies who were at war with other Civs a bunch of units.

Copenhagen had been unsuccessfully trying to taking a Strength 19 city owned by Rome nearby with their Swordsmen, so I gave them 4 Cavalry and a Rocket Artillery. They never used the Rocket Artillery to bombard the city and they parked the 4 Cavalry 2 squares out from the city and let them die over about 30 turns to the city constantly attacking them. So freaking pathetic.

3648

At a couple of stages in my invasion of Rome, I was swarmed with knights which were very dangerous to my primarily swordsmen force. Fortunately, my ruins-upgraded cannon held out in a recently taken city with no health in the midst of them for about 20 rounds pelting them with fiery death as they persisted in having seriously damaged crossbowmen as their frontline, with no actual melee units within range to take the broken city back. The AI gives a little fear, then takes it all back. I’ll tell you, though, that’s the last time I go to war with a civ that has over 10k in their treasury when there are other, weaker options around.

3649

Oh, you’re right. I’ve seen the civ-specific unique cavalry, like the Indian elephants and the Greek companions. I just tended to forget that since I never see chariot archers or horsemen. Well, almost never - I did see a chariot archer defending a city once.

3650

Maybe it was a gift from a militaristic city to the AI player?

3651

I’ve seen the odd chariot archer around, and I’ve seen the AI build a few knights. It was Queen Elizabeth of England with the knights, and she was teching ahead fairly quickly.

3652

Yeah, Elizabeth does like her tech.

Thus far I’m finding Emperor a challenging foe after waltzing all over King. At this level I don’t need perfect play, but I get punished for my mistakes. In my current game an alliance between me and Alexander the Great against the English was going to give me a comfortable chunk of land and help take down a bigger opponent, until he got cocky and took on Japan as well and left me to fend against the English. They’re in heavily forested terrain and their longbows make mincemeat of me. I’ve slowly been driven back while Greece has been conquered and I’m about to sue for peace and hope that England and Japan (monsters compared to me now) keep each other busy. I also appear to have allied with the wrong city state, my allies neighbour traipsing about with catapults while mine manages a single unit of spearmen.

If I’d only reinforced my initial attack against Elizabeth (Lord Elizabeth for some reason) I could well have had the numbers to have her sue ME for peace. Balls.

EDIT: Are defensive pacts working right? They’re not listed on either the diplomacy or global relations screen (unlike open borders). I was also able to make a defensive pact with Japan on turn 159 and again on 181, even though after the second one it is now greyed out because I have one (but the history screen shows both).

I’m also seeing a prime example of AI thickory in action where Elizabeth is assaulting me with twelve units of longbows, but no units which can actually capture my city. All that’s happening is she’s getting herself shot up by my otherwise defenceless city. On top of that, the all mighty Japan has just invaded on the other side of her territory and she doesn’t seem in a hurry to move this army back there.

3653

I’ve had the opposite happen. One of my city state allies finished off a Civ with 5 cities who were lower tech with a single rifleman and single artillery. They must have had a ton of experience on those units.

3654

Hey guys. Just a quick update. Sorry for the recent absence, I’ve been traveling quite a bit lately.

There are several things which we are looking at improving with Civ 5. Most of my time since getting back has been spent working on the interface, particularly with making more information accessible. These changes will go out with the next big update in a few weeks. The plan is also to make major revisions to the diplomacy system, and while I can’t talk about the details yet, I think you all will find them an improvement. That will be added with an update later this year. Also included will be a number of AI upgrades.

Thanks to all who have purchased the game - the plan is definitely to continue improving the experience for everyone playing. The game isn’t perfect, but we feel good about the foundation laid so far, and expect Civ 5 will stand up with every other game out there and continue to get better over time. I can ensure that I’ll be working on Civ 5 as long as I’m able to.

Jon

3655

Thanks for the update, Jon! I also hope you had a great time travelling - I take it you were doing research on unique units while abroad? I’m pretty sure that would make it tax deductible … ;)

3656

Just to clear some things up - on Prince the AI plays by almost the exact same rules as the human. It receives a marginal discount to unit gold and supply costs, but that’s pretty much it. There’s no cheating with construction, gold production, happiness, puppet rules, research agreements, visibility, combat odds or whatever else. It has basic insight into the total military strength of other players, but no more so than what’s available to the human via the demographics screen.For anyone digging throught the XML files: there’s actually a number of fields from Civ 4 which we never cleaned up, and some of them misrepresent what effects there are on various difficulty levels - so don’t take all of those numbers as gospel. The values in the AI strategy files are for steering AI preferences, and have nothing to do with bonuses.

If it seems like the AI has a lot more cities/happiness/units than the human at that level, it’s merely that the AI focuses much more on those aspects of the game than a human does (perhaps too much so, in fact - at the expense of buildings and gold, in particular). One of our goals going forward is to shore up some of the biggest and most obvious AI deficiencies. The new rules added to Civ 5 pose a pretty big AI challenge, so we’re spending as much time as possible working on this part of the game.

Jon

3657

Jon, I’d like to say thank you for the hard work on making this game. Despite its flaws, and there are definitely flaws, I think you accomplished the goal of making a Civilization where important decisions are not removed from the player and micromanagement doesn’t make you dread getting into the mid- and late-game.

Even Civ IV didn’t come out of the gate with a stellar AI, and I hope that you’ll have the opportunity to continue working on that aspect of the game until it shines.

While I’m sure you have a massive list already of things to work on, one thing I would really like to see that I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned would be a way to better control the automated mode on workers. Currently a worker is either automated or not, but what I’d be interested in would be assigning workers different tasks or prioritizing their work. Like tell one worker to just build trade routes, or to connect resources, or to go out and build just farms, or just trading posts. I hate how right now they’ll just go chop down forests to build farms that the city doesn’t need, or mines that aren’t on resource tiles. I don’t particularly like micromanaging a group of workers, but I also think they make bad decisions when put on Automatic right now.

3658

I’d like workers to have something to do mid-late game. Cities seem to stop expanding early so they’re just wasting space. Making farms/granaries suitable instead of just abusing City States wouldn’t hurt either.

3659

Is this just on Prince that there’s no cheating on these things? I’d like to say I was right about the AI actually only doing Research Agreements if they can afford to, but I’m not so sure now.

3660

I usually cash them in for the 20 gold and the drop in Unit Maintenance (which is by far the larger benefit).

It’s crazy the amount of gold having too many workers can cost you during the game. If a worker you don’t need is putting you over whatever maintenance plateau you’re on it can be 4 or 5 gold per turn you’re giving up, which adds up to hundreds of gold over time.

That’s another key thing we need - more detail about what is comprising our Unit Maintenance costs.