Miramon
3821
This is indeed pretty funny. If you sit there next to some AI country which isn’t at war and hasn’t yet officially noticed you’re about to crush it, you can see all their units sort of pulsing back and forth alternate turns, like some kind of really slow idle animation. Barring some other priority, the AI really wants to move every unit every turn, and I guess it’s probably wasting a lot of cycles on this fruitless activity.
Hey, AI, you’ve got no posted goals, you’re not trying to do anything, just take a deep breath, sit down, shut up, and stop rattling around. Maybe then you’d have enough extra cycles to realize it’s a bad idea to attack with a trebuchet in front.
Yeah, my concern would just be the sheer amount of ranged fire you’d be able to concentrate on a unit - you’d have to make all ranged units worse, which would make armies composed of significantly more ranged than melee units. Whereas, with the weaker 1-hex thing (and you could have skirmisher units in the ancient/medieval eras if you wanted), you’d be able to have the ranged fire from those units generally do fairly little damage, but the dedicated ranged units still do plenty.
Dejin
3823
That’s good to hear. If nothing else, at least it means the AI is capable of using them. Now they just have to tweak the building-units code so the AI builds them when they aren’t Civ-specific units like the Zero.
So the Ottomans are really weird. Their bonus is interesting, but not very powerful, though it’s definitely helpful in a lot of circumstances, as long as you make sure to get a boat out there. Janissaries are amazing, and Sipahi look like they are pretty good if you’ve got a bunch of open terrain, but here’s my issue: both units come at about the same spot in the tree. That means you have to choose between them when you are building your forces. And it’s not like they are all that complementary - Janissaries kind of suck on defense too, so you are either fighting on open terrain or rough terrain and you basically choose between them based on that (assuming that you don’t just choose Janissaries all the time because healing fully when you destroy a unit is unbelievably good and they cost less). Just seems weird. I kind of wish that instead of Janissaries they’d given them a building that gives all land units a weaker version of the Janissary ability.
Warren
3825
The English Longbowman is the poster child for your concerns. It has a 3 hex range. As such there have been times I’ve had to have other units up closer JUST TO BE SPOTTERS for the Longbowmen, massed up and mowing down everything before they had a chance to even SEE the bowmen killing them. And it lead me to counterfactually keep using them even into late game, where they finally became useless because tanks could finally get to them before the combined arrow fire in packs could kill them. It’s was disconcerting to have cannon that were out-gunned and destroyed before closing to fire a single shot by some bowman. And riflemen/infantry even more so. It is the Civ V version of the pikeman/battleship debate.
flyinj
3826
How the heck do you save up points? Everytime I have enough points for a policy, it forces me to chose one before it turns the button to “next turn”.
Right-click the notification icon and it goes away
I haven’t played the English yet, but I was wondering about that as the 3 hex range makes them very difficult to knock off. In my current game, I have my carvel and frigate both upgraded to 3 hex range and they sit unmolested bombarding coastal cities. And with the AI not building any navy, there’s nothing that can touch them aside from a wandering barbarian ship which gets smoked the instant it is spotted.
3 hexes seems well overpowered.
KevinC
3829
I think the combat system should have been designed so that typical ranged units (archers, etc) had a range of 1 hex, they could just inflict damage without counterattack. Only siege weaponry like catapults, cannons, etc would extend beyond one hex. I’d also up the 1UPT to something a little more, like 2 military + unlimited civilian units. Cities and forts would also be able to garrison more than one unit.
1UPT and the combat system were what I was looking forward to most in Civ5 but in practice I just don’t know if I like the way it’s implemented, I don’t think it works very well, at least for my tastes. I’d love to see some mods come out that really tweak the mechanics, but man, the AI already has a hard enough time with the vanilla rules…
I don’t mind the one unit per tile, but I do mind that having a great general on a tile means I can’t have my workers there. I’ve heard of big egos in the military before, but too big to share a tile with workers? C’mon (in short, my argument is simply to remove great people from the per-tile limits)
I think the proposed changes that are in store for the patch should (ostensibly) help the AI manage their military much better, so I’m not too concerned unless serious problems still exist after that’s been touched.
But … hasn’t anyone here played Battle Island or any wargame whatsoever? Lots of ranged units, yet nowhere overpowered. Yes, you were glad to have that artillery or those railroad huge artilleries in History Line, but without cover it’s pretty useless against tanks. So, a corresponding proper overhaul of the combat system is very well possible, I think. And using spotters for your guns can be a very valid and even necessary (and satisfying to counter) technique.
Also, where’s the option to lay mines? I mean, all this constant shuffling of the AI units has got to be useful for something! :)
KevinC
3832
Why is there even a limit on stacking civilian units? I don’t know if I understand the reasoning for that. It’s also be nice to be able to move my workers under that douchebag spearman Brussels has had parked on my road since 2700BC.
Dejin
3833
Probably to make it very clear that the old “stack 12-workers in a tile” method of speeding up tile development is no longer available. The alternative would be to allow multiple workers in a tile but then disable the ability of the second worker to actually perform actions. My guess is of the two options (disable buttons or not allow them to stack) they decided that not allowing them to stack would be less likely to be misunderstood than allowing them to stack and disabling the action buttons.
It is my favorite use of the culture bomb, to displace intrusive city states. They get all pissy for a turn or so, and then revert to the +20 default that the policy has in a while. Totally worth it.
McCrank
3835
Can’t put my finger on it, but for some reason this game just isn’t catching me. I’ve played the Civ series from the very start, and have played each game for hundreds of hours. This game, I’ve put less than 20 hours in, and I’m already pretty bored with it. From what I can tell, it appears that it’s heavily military based now, and doesn’t flow very well. Something just feels “off.” All of the Civ games in the series were radically different in ways, but they all kinda felt the same in how they flowed, and their scale… This game feels like the recent console release, ummm Civ Revolution, which I didn’t care for. In the other games in the series, you can plan your wars… You usually had to prepare, focus on a goal, execute on it, and hopefully be successful. In this game, I just feel like I build a mass army and plow through everything. What was the point of my post? I dunno, I guess it’s to declare that I don’t like the direction they’ve gone with this game thus far, at all.
Would you like to sign an open borders treaty? ;)
The combat is easier than it should be due to the AI issues that are being addressed (we all hope successfully). In a water-flowing-downhill analogy, players will most often gravitate toward the easiest means to accomplish a goal (winning the game) and the weakness in the AI means domination victories become the primary focus.
Once combat becomes more challenging, players will hopefully have to focus on the other aspects as the situation befits. Don’t get me wrong, I like crushing another civ under my heel just as much as the next dictator, but Civ is about more than just that.
DeepT
3837
I think its more then what is easiest, the domination victories. You always have one or two empires taking over the world. Eventually they come to your door and you have to beat them back. You know if you just knock a few cities back they will come after you again in a few turns. Why stop attacking them when you have destroyed their armies? No, the game forces you to conquer huge amounts of cities. It is like the only AI strategy being used to any effect.
I have never seen an AI build a space-ship part, or start or even get close to a utopia project. I did see an AI build the UN once, but of course it did’t bother to get votes from city states they were almost all conquered in any case.
Civ V naturally encourages the conquest victory by the very nature the AI plays. The only real challenge is to place a peaceful civ since the game gives you dozens of reasons NOT to.
The AI definitely builds spaceship parts. I’ve seen it do that multiple times, though you really have to play on a high enough difficulty that the AI can keep up in tech.
Currently I seem to be doing OK with Emperor, but one thing that happens consistently on this difficulty is that one of the AIs on the other continent steamrollers the others. The resulting large empire techs quite quickly, so I’m generally on par with them when I finally make contact. If I don’t focus on building a intercontinental invasion force, they’ll eventually start working on a Space victory.
Something that’s true of both Civ Revolutions and Civ V is that if you don’t get big, at least one AI will throw a big army at you, so playing peacefully isn’t really an option. I’m OK with that, though it does tend to make the alternate victory conditions sort of pointless - they’re something I pursue after I’ve beaten the daylights out of all my rivals.
Something I forgot to mention: on higher difficulty levels, the Horseman rush is the most viable tactic. For Greece especially with those move-5 / +2 strength Companions, but it works for everyone. Spearmen are not a counter, since horsemen can double-team one and then run away from any counter attack. Typically you don’t even need to deal with spearmen, though, since you can get 3 horsemen very early (turn 40ish) if you focus on getting the tech and planting a city next to a 4-horse resource.
So far (without going higher than Prince difficulty), I’ve not had a single city taken by any AI civ and I always try to play peaceful and relatively small, building culture and tech over anything else. I’ve played on different sizes and types of maps, too, so it’s not because I’m isolated. It’s also not that I’m left alone, I’ve been attacked at least once in all games, but that the AI simply isn’t effective in throwing a “big army” at me. My current game as Egypt on a large Earth-type map has me with the most cities I settled myself (8) simply because I was attempting to keep all of northern Africa from becoming a zone of contention. I’m approaching the year 1900 and only Catherine (in the southwestern Asia portion of the map) has attacked me; she barely got a couple of armies into my borders before I sent her packing (she eventually requested peace). In past games, I think the most I settled myself was 5 cities.
I do agree, though, that it’s really tough to avoid someone coming after you. The AI seems to be geared towards war, sadly enough.
