jpinard
4061
I was wondering if that was just me - LOL. Watching a bankrupt Civ build a huge cobweb of railroads. When I take over territory the first thing I do is send my workers out to delete all those excess roads.
Tony_M
4062
I’ve seen the AI stop work and retreat workers when an enemy military unit is spotted. My guess is that a barbarian or 2 came by in the early days, frightening off the workers, and the AI hasn’t been coded to resume work on old, half finished improvements.
Tony.
Ha! Me too. Make those captured workers that much more useful.
mystery
4064
It was 970BC, and my brute squad had been travelling the countryside, inspecting ruins and upgrading itself with the weapons it found there. It had just completed another find and managed to upgrade itself to WW2-era infantry. Oddly enough, it had done this 4 hexes away from the Japanese capital city.
Fastest game I’ve ever won.
Looks like AI city/empire management has been improved. I just played my first game post-patch, and promptly lost – even though the three civs on the other continent were busy fighting wars, the one that survived (Bismarck) actually stayed ahead of me in the tech race and eventually won on points. That hasn’t happened in a long time!
That is encouraging news! I finally pulled the trigger on the game last night and I hope the AI will have been further improved by the time I get the chance to play (which won’t be 'til the end of the month).
How is the much-maligned tactical AI?
I haven’t actually seen a fight in this version yet because we were all sitting on our separate continents. I heard this part hasn’t improved yet, though; they want to take a look at it in a future patch IIRC.
Miramon
4068
Still seems pretty weak, especially in combination with the weak strategic AI that has trouble assembling forces or dealing with threats. However, I deliberately provoked it last night by moving some archers out into the open, and at least it jumped in to smack them with melee units. That’s something.
But it also just wheeled this trebuchet out into the open, apparently en route somewhere else, but right in front of my swordsman. Come on, that’s an expensive vulnerable unit, you can’t just path it somewhere without paying attention to enemy units.
Also, in this game Germany and Rome attacked Mongolia when I wasn’t on a war footing yet, but eventually I decided what the hell and took down an annoying little city they had just built in my territory. It was a completely unimportant outpost, and I had no threat on their main territory, but they surrendered to me anyway with one of those ridiculously subservient peace treaties that gives away everything. Didn’t stop Germany and Rome from continuing to attack their capital though :)
jpinard
4069
Was there a new patch today and I somehow missed it? Or are you talking about the one from two weeks ago?
Yes, the one from two weeks ago.
I just had my first game on Kung playing on a Pangea-map (for my first time ever, but apparently Steam has turned me into an achievement whore). I’m right in the middle and moved took out my neighbour with horsemen.
After a bit two of my other neighbours attack in concert and both pick and outlying city to sorround with pikemen - my horsemen turned out to be pretty useless and while they still did a few stupid moves with individual units, their concentrated attack wasn’t a bad idea.
… or I just suck as a player and has to go back and play an island map on Prince.
I’ve beaten pikes with horsemen, but they have to have a promotion advantage (i.e. +40% for terrain vs. nothing) and you have to be willing to take some damage to do it, though you don’t need to lose units since you can dance away from counter attacks if there aren’t rivers limiting your mobility.
Horsemen after all are stronger, 12 vs. 10. The pike’s +100% versus mounted helps, but not that much if it’s Shock II, 2 vs. 1 flanking in the open versus unpromoted. That’s +55% on one side versus +67%, or 18.6 vs. 16.7.
I’ve been following some threads on Civ Fanatics, and getting some grotesque results. The most recent was a Emperor difficulty Spaceship victory in the mid-17th century as the French. Despite all the effort put into Civ V to discourage runaway expansion, it’s actually more rewarding to do so than in Civ IV, which used a much better limiting mechanism. The basic principle is that size-2 cities have 0 net unhappiness with a Colosseum, can reach size 3 with Meritocracy, and size 4 with Forbidden Palace. So you can add an infinite number of them, and they all contribute hammers and more importantly cash income and research. You can run a few larger cities using the happiness from luxuries and the more advanced happiness buildings.
Spaceship and 1000+ research a turn by turn 236. The original post had managed it by turn 200 in Deity, though of course he played a lot tighter game than I did.
Well, reinstalling didn’t help and my game is crashing about every 7 turns, so I think I’m just about done until next patch :-(
Synth
4074
I decided to play a game by teaming up all the civs into pairs. An entirely frustrating experience. I got stuck with France who proceeded to expand rapidly, attack Bismarck and then give away all his cities in the peace settlement. So then France’s entire role in the game was to annoy me. I had permanent open borders and every time I got attacked France conveniently made peace with them before I could retaliate. Still, its an interesting way to increase the difficulty level.
Lost another Prince game on points to Bismarck! I don’t believe it. The AI still has the same one-trick strategy – spam lots of cities for science, gold & unit production, compensate with happy buildings as necessary – but now it actually hits the proper balance and can keep up in the research race. The AI has learned that twenty mech infantry are better than fifty swordsmen. Looks like I’ll actually have to do something to defeat it, rather than just waiting until it stagnates due to unit upkeep costs.
Spamming cities yourself is incredibly powerful if you do it correctly, as I mentioned above. Do this or mount a Horseman rush, and Emperor isn’t all that challenging.
Yeah, ironically despite Civ 5’s anti-city-spam efforts it ended up re-creating the original Civ 1 city spam – it pays to create a very large number of cities and then intentionally stunt their growth.
What’s interesting to me is that the amplifier mechanic used in Meriticracy and Forbidden Palace – get a flat, unlimited bonus for every asset you posses – is used in card and board games without feeling so cheesy. Partly because that kind of “hurry up and win” amplifier mechanic feels better in a table top game, where you don’t want things to drag on for hours, and partly because when you’re playing against real humans they’ll do everything in their power to keep you from reaping that advantage. Whereas in Civ 5 the AIs don’t seem to prioritize the Forbidden Palace (and of course there’s not much they can do to stop you from getting Meritocracy, other declaring war.)
It’s also the fact that the mechanics encourage a lot of cities but only if you keep them small, which runs counter to your intuition about what should make a successful empire.
But it’s only sustainable because you can buy happy buildings without actually having to build them in your low-production cities, right? Perhaps Civ should replace buying buildings with something like the “food boost” in Settlers 7: spend money each turn for a production bonus rather than buying outright. That should make the happiness limit more effective. Besides, I never liked the simplistic buy-everything-in-one-turn mechanic anyway.
Another idea would be to give each newly founded city all buildings for free that already exist in all owned cities. That would provide a big bonus to players who expand slowly and intelligently while also reducing busywork. You’d have to combine it with a removal of the building purchasing option as outlined above, though, or else you could just buy the desired building setup you want in each city.
Yesterday I decided to play a different way. Usually I like to play peaceful and reject offers from civ X to declare war on civ Y, but this time I accepted almost every offer - with interesting results. Saying ‘no’ meant a diplomatic hit, continual hoarding of their units, and eventually they attack me instead. But by saying yes the AI’s waste the units on each other, and if you dont have a common border with the enemy civ then the chances of retaliation are remote. As an added bonus, when the enemy asks you for peace they sometimes give you goodies even if your friend did all the work, and you dont seem to take any diplomatic penalty like you do when you declare war on your own.
Interestingly, after numerous war campaigns, Alexander loved me so much that he accepted a defensive pact offer, something that was impossible with my old “peace for the world” strategy!
No, that’s not how it works. Rather, you shift the production in the tiny cities to production when they hit your current size target. If you have a single Maritime city state providing 2 extra food for secondary cities, you can work 2 hills. 2 trading-post hills + the center tile gives you 6 hammers and 5 gold. 6 hammers will build a Colosseum in 25 turns, and a surplus of 2 gold / turn when you’re done.
In some spots you can work 3 or more hills if you have 2 Maritime city states, but 2 hills is a lot more common.
Once you get libraries built though, look out. By that time you’ve got size 3 cities because you have Meritocracy, and once they’re done building their Colosseum and Library, you can shift 2 citizens to scientists for 10.5 total science and 6 Great Scientist points per turn. For no cost to total empire happiness. You may want to shift them back out for production once Education drops, because a University brings these small cities up to 20 science / turn. Add Secularism and it’s 30 science / turn.
Plus cash. ICS play tends to generate a lot of surplus cash. It’s not uncommon to run +200 gold / turn without a golden age.
The most expensive building these cities might build is a University at 200 hammers. Usually it’s just Colosseum, Library, and maybe a Monument if you’re not French. They don’t build Theaters or Stadiums. They don’t get big.
