And the game has just been updated with a free DLC (Genghis Khan). So great! I wasn’t really expecting that. The Babylon Civ is now available for sale as well ($5).
Nope. The cash -> hammers conversion isn’t very good even with the discounts. I’d rather use the cash for bribing city states, upgrading units, or research agreements. Though I’ll grant you purchasing stuff is more attractive after the patch - puppets generate lots of excess cash now, and once you start pulling ahead the other players no longer agree to research agreements. Prior to the patch cash flow was always a problem, and a discount to do something I almost never did wasn’t all that attractive.
Ooh, looking forward to Genghis!
Babylon is a lot of fun, for anyone on the fence. The free GS (with Writing) is crazy awesome for pulling off an easy CS slingshot, and double GS generation means oh shit that’s a lot of great scientists. The UU (a 6/8 archer replacement) and UB (slightly less shitty walls) are unimpressive, but that’s okay.
Thanks for the info about the Babylons. I’m really on the fence about that. Even though it’s really cheap there are so many civs already and I haven’t even played with half of them… I think I’ll wait some more before biting on the Babylon DLC.
I wouldn’t blame you. If I didn’t already have it, I’d probably wait until I’d at least won a real game with each existing Civ.
Babylon is one of those few civs where you really notice its unique bonus having an effect, at least in my experience. Too, it has one of the cool and memorable leader movies (it’s one of my top three, for sure).
I like the variety that the extra civs bring to the table. Playing on the larger sized maps, the more civs you have available means that you are more likely to get different combinations. To me, it’s part of keeping the game fresh.
Guess the hotfix to get old saved games to work with the digital deluxe version wasn’t included in this new DLC. At least my old savegames aren’t working.
Reldan
3988
I think these are all good suggestions, but I think you are underestimating the complexity of some of the tactical situations that occur quite regularly. Each unit has significantly more than 8 moves available, given that they typically can move between 1 and 12 squares in any direction depending on terrain, roads, and the sphere of influence of enemy units. Even still, I’d still say that finding the best possible move for a single unit would be easy. However, it is not even close to true that performing the optimal individual move for each unit results in anything even close to the optimal set of moves for the army as a whole, and it just becomes worse and worse the larger the army. An AI that simply did the best possible move for each unit individually would still be pretty weak (although probably stronger than what we’re dealing with now). Factoring in group tactics increases the complexity and number of branches exponentially.
Personally I think the significant increase to the movement speed of all units in Civ V is a huge detriment to their ability to create a good tactical AI.
I’m having an odd yet mild issue that I didn’t experience before -
Using Greece:
When I need two monuments to qualify to build a Wonder, I get the following in red text - “2 Sparta Corinths needed”
Next, when I need two barracks to qualify to build a Wonder, I get the same exact thing - “2 Sparta Corinths needed”
Mind you, the two cities I need to build them in are Sparta and Corinth so I guess I’m just looking at a text bug (I recall that the patch was going to tell you which cities needed the improvement), but it’s an awfully funny one.
edit - loaded it back up and it’s reading fine - maybe I imagined the “s” at the end. Ah, well.
Miramon
3990
Yeah, I think game-tree search is out of place in this kind of game anyway. In order not to just suck (like the current AI does) you need:
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good pathing – that they have, more or less, with the exception of the stupid embarking-in-combat thing that should have a trivial fix.
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simple heuristic rules – like “don’t throw siege engines into range of known melee units”. I assume they have these, but that they suck. It’s hard to imagine not having heuristics, but evidently Civ 5’s need improvement.
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some notion of strategic objectives. I assume they have this too. Like “attack this city”, “defend this city”, “destroy enemy units”, etc. This part doesn’t need to be very good, but it has to exist, and it looks like it does.
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some notion of multi-unit forces. This is one thing that is completely missing, I speculate. Without this, you have each unit stupidly working on its own to try to satisfy the strategic goal. Together with the poor per-unit heuristics, this makes the AI look very dumb.
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some kind of position evaluator. Like “should I win if I’m not stupid?” and “should I retreat and defend instead of throwing away my inferior army on the attack?” This also seems to be completely missing.
So 1) fix the broken and missing heuristics, and 2) and 3) add the last two missing pieces. Should be doable with no game tree search at all.
Tony_M
3991
You make some good points. But rememeber that the growth of your Civs power is exponential. So a small advantage in the early game is often better than a large advantage in the late game. The Order social policy should be crazy powerful because it is available so late.
I agree the specialist social policies are great.
Tony
Oh, I agree. You may recall that I was pointing out earlier that spending some culture points early will get you to the big discounts (Freedom and Cristo Redentor) earlier, for a net savings over simply hoarding them.
Yet I’d argue that many of the Ancient policies don’t give that much of a boost even when they’re available, and the Classical and Medieval trees aren’t that far away if you’re shooting for the key techs of Horseback Riding and Civil Service.
rezaf
3993
It’s true that the weaker boni can have a pretty large effect in specific early game situations - I pointed that out myself - but there are many crap boni in there that just stink regardless.
For example, the one giving +1 culture is crap no matter how you look at it.
It can be relevant for early border expansion, but even then, if you really need/want that bordering tile, you’d better buy it straight away, and if you can wait, you can also wait a bit longer.
And even +1 culture over 150 turns is completely pointless when, by late game, you can have cities that produce >500 culture each single turn.
Even the, at first glance, far more useful double culture for each city that produced a wonder is highly situational.
I usually have only a few cities that have enough production to be liable for wonder construction, so the policy only affects maybe three cities, and means you get 30 instead of 15 culture each turn - again, later on ten times that is a decent base value for any developed city.
Anyway, it’s cool that policies can be weighted different for different play styles, and for different situations to boot. When I’m in a place where I’m sure I’ll have to go on the war path sooner or later, I’ll usually pick the experience policy from the Honor tree as well, even if it’s normally not important for me because I’m not too aggressive a player.
What I’m hoping for is a couple of decent policy mods that completely change this part of the game.
While this is basically possible even now, the Policy screen has been designed in a very sloppy way by Firaxis, with hard coded policies and stuff. A modder will have to go through the trouble of completely redesigning the screen for it to be flexible.
rezaf
+1 culture is a lot better on a huge map…
A new mini-patch is out to fix various recent issues…
Update 1.0.0.621 (26 October 2010)
- Legacy saves for players who own Babylon will work correctly.
- Mods that broke (will not load, and saves would crash on load) as the result of the .62 patch (full Civ mods mainly) now work correctly.
- Scenario menu glitch corrected.
- Exploit – Raze/Annex happiness fix.
Genji
3996
The new Mongolian civilization is very powerful if you go for a military win. Rushing horsemen is already sort of overpowered against even the highest level computer AI. With +2 healing Khans (unique great general that can also move 5) and 5 movement horsemen it’s not hard to keep a few units alive until the endgame (mine were lvl 9). Fun, but not much of a challenge.
As you say, the Horseman rush is already overpowered with standard units. It really surprised me, I was taking the “infantry + artillery” approach, starting with Swordsmen and Catapults, after reading Scipio’s comments. Then I saw a thread on Civ Fanatics on how powerful an early Horseman rush was, so I gave it a whirl - now it’s hard for me to consider doing anything else.
It’s kind of odd that the standard generals are so slow. One of the few limiting aspects of Horsemen is that they often outrun any generals you might have generated. That, and they’re eventually a dead end, since Cavalry are the most powerful horse unit and they don’t upgrade to anything unless you get lucky with a ruin.
I’m awfully glad that they changed trading luxuries back to the way it was prior to the 62 patch. 621 allows for 1:1 trades of luxuries again. I was really finding it tough in my last game to get anywhere since I had a scarcity of resources in my area and the few trades I could make were eating up my resources since I had to do 2:1’s all the time. I didn’t pull out a victory, but came in second in points (on an England time victory) after being near the bottom for most of the game on an 8 civ Pangaea map.
KevinC
3999
I didn’t the 2:1 ratio both for gameplay as well as flavor purposes. I hate when an AI is set up to play against me at the expense of playing for itself. If I’m on good terms with a Civ and I offer them a luxury bonus in exchange for another, it’s idiotic to reject it and shoot themselves in the foot just because I’m a Human and they don’t want to deal with me.
Wow, I just got ganged up on by all the other civilizations, lol. Playing Babylon (on King difficulty) and I thought I was doing really well: I weakened Japan and took a bunch of their cities very early on (they were spreading like rabbits, so I had to!), and then not long after did the same to the Ottomans for building a city in a spot I was a turn away from settling in (oh no you didn’t!). So, I settled in for a while after that before attacking Greece in the late middle ages because they were becoming a big threat after conquering America. I won the war pretty handily and settled for halving their empire.
At that point I decided to hunker down and not go to war anymore as I was having big problems with happiness and I wanted to settle the new world (terra maps rock). I knew full well that Persia was busy knocking the other civs around on the other side of the map, but I shrugged him off figuring he wouldn’t bother me. Boy was I wrong.
Around the 1700s just as I had about contained my happiness problem and already had two cities in the new world Persia struck with units a tech above me. Suffice to say they ran through my cities and I was in quick retreat. I figured I would be all right as long as I pulled back a little and regrouped. And then…holy hell India just declared war on me! Okay, they’re not that strong. Next turn… Japan, Mongolia, and those treasonous bastard Americans who I liberated from Greece many centuries ago. What the hell Washington!? I guess they all smelled the blood in the water.
Argh, well time to start a new game and figure out what I did wrong.
