Taking off the Training Wheels
Beat the game on the Chieftain difficulty level.
25.8%
Baby Steps
Beat the game on the Settler difficulty level.
16.6%
The Alexman
Beat the game on the Warlord difficulty level.
14.8%
Charming. Really.
Beat the game on the Prince difficulty level.
12.9%
The Once and Future King
Beat the game on the King difficulty level.
4.6%
The Golden Path
Beat the game on the Emperor difficulty level.
2.2%
The World Is a Mess, and I Just Need to Rule It
Beat the game on the Immortal difficulty level.
1.1%
Flawless Strategy
Beat the game on the Deity difficulty level.
0.9%
78% of Steam purchasers have beat it at least once. I do find it implausible that when someone manages to beat a higher difficulty level for the first time they abandon the game at the breakpoint rather than trudge through to the victory scene.
I guess I should get around to playing the game enough to develop an opinion…
SlyFrog
4943
Out of curiosity, do we know that it is 87% of people who play the game, or 87% of people who have purchased the game?
Do we know how many people who play games on Prince lose? Do we know how many efforts or tries they make at it?
My gut feeling is that the data is tainted by a number of people who buy the game and never even try it on Prince, or buy it and play a couple of games and just move on to the next thing.
Bear in mind that I’m willing to admit that being overly concerned about good AI for a big budget game is probably a mistake from a financial perspective. But I’m not sure these stats are really all that valuable from the standpoint of determining whether the game’s AI is good enough to give the average person a run for his or her money.
(Which is really a different question from whether the AI is good enough to sell the game or even sell the game and beat someone once or twice, which seems to be the attention span of the average gamer anymore.)
Certainly many people out there may just dabble at the game and really not put forth much effort or interest before moving on to the next thing. The AI may be good enough for that, but that is a separate question from whether it is good enough to beat the average human who actually wants to beat it (as opposed to experience the next flashy toy for 10-20 hours).
“who actually wants to beat it” is an undefinable and unknowable qualifier. How much effort and practice is one obliged to put into trying to beat the game before the qualifier applies? That’s not a sensible question to ask. The stats show how people actually play the game, and that’s all there is to it.
And if you’re trying to make the argument that only people who dabble for 10-20 hours could possibly enjoy the game I’ll have you know that I’m at 160 hours now, and mostly playing on Prince. So that’s just not true.
Also, I repeat again that Civ5 is continually in the middle of the most-played Steam Top 10 games, ever since its release. So it’s certainly not something that everyone just played briefly and then moved on.
What about people like me? I’ve effectively beaten it on Emperor, but can’t be bothered to slog through to the actual game finish once the writing is clearly on the wall. I could likely beat it reliably on a higher level but am turned off by that much AI cheating.
My stats probably read that I’ve beaten it on Warlord or something, from when my son was playing, or perhaps a higher level if my wife ever finished.
Or, put another way, such stats in a game like Civ are essentially meaningless – there are too many unknown variables.
Yes, it does contradict it. You concluded: The challenge level is in fact perfectly adequate for most players, with the slight cheating on King already putting victory out of their reach. The small minority that does walk over the AI on King then proceeds to beat Civ5 on any level, right up to Deity.
This is telling us that you think that the difficulty levels players are winning on are the only ones that they are capable of winning on because every player will move up the difficulty ladder until they cannot win anymore (“putting victory out of their reach”). I disagree. You can’t even say that people are perfectly satisfied with the level of difficulty they are playing at because those stats don’t tell you that either.
rezaf
4948
Fully agree with you Equisilus.
In fact, I think the numbers support a conclusion I made many pages ago: a lot of people that like/support Civ5 are “casual” players.
They play on relatively low difficulties and just mess around a bit in their games, they build a few cities, research a few techs semi-randomly, they improve their cities a bit, build some units, fight a war or two … and then they call it a day. The AI players, to them, are somewhat like the scenery, somebody’s gotta control those armies I’m obliterating.
But they don’t want to be seriously challenged by them.
This group of players has a high tolerance for the kind of stuff that drives players that want to have a more “meaningful” (I’m sure that’s not the right word, but I can’t think of a better one right now) experience insane.
rezaf
I’m among the small percent that have won several games easily at Emperor, I have not finished an immortal, nor actually played a game since the new patch. I suspect that I could win at immortal most of the time. Perhaps even Diety if I got lucky. This is certainly a full level below Civ IV for me. As I and many others have said the tactical AI is bad enough that much of the challenge of the game is diminished.
All of the being said, I’ll admit that the statistics surprise me. Clearly a lot of Civ games are “won” but not finished. On the other hand I doubt that I am only one who has completed the rather tedious end game simply to unlock an achievement. In addition when you look at the achievements with >20% achievement. There are things like fully explore the tech tree 37% (I haven’t done this), completing late game policy tracks vs spaceship victory only 20% which show that plenty of players are playing the game until the end but aren’t winning. I think Chris’s conclusion that we, the Civ experts, both in this thread the CivFanatics website, who find CIV V AI pathetic, are in a very small minority, and is supported by the data. There are plenty of Civ V casual players, just like there are some (a lot?) of casual WOW players.
I am much more sympathetic now to Firaxis not fixing the AI, just to give better player like myself more of a challenge. I would hope they would make sure that tools are in place to let the mod community do the work though.
Of to start my first post patch game.
So are you still playing or what? If so there isn’t really any problem, is there? If not, are you saying that nobody’s playing anymore? Because that’s demonstrably not true.
My stats probably read that I’ve beaten it on Warlord or something, from when my son was playing, or perhaps a higher level if my wife ever finished.
Your son and your wife are not fully human and should not count as players?
Or, put another way, such stats in a game like Civ are essentially meaningless – there are too many unknown variables.
No, that does not follow at all from what you wrote.
That’s funny, because you’re actually agreeing with me, not with Equisilius, and your conclusion is exactly the same as mine.
Yes they do, 10-20k players keep playing the game at every given moment, every single day. Your assertion that they are all angrily gnashing their teeth at the insufficient level of challenge, in blatant contradiction with the victory percentage progression, is simply ridiculous.
This. The rest of you are countering data with guesswork and anecdotes on how you personally like to play - the stats Chris are presenting are certainly open to interpretation, but combined with the stats on achievements I think Chris’ reading of the data is the best offered yet.
Just to give a counterpoint to Rezaf’s somewhat condescending take on the data (“they’re casual, they’re playing it wrong, they’re not good players”) I’m at 284 hours played. I have won once on King, before moving back to Prince. I finish almost all my games.
But I still want them to fix the AI… I just don’t think it’s the number one priority or that the game without is broken. But Ben made the most compelling argument so far as to why a good tactical AI matters and I can absolutely see it from that point of view - the difference is just that for people like him, that’s enough reason to stop playing, for me it isn’t.
My last game was on a small map to get the One to Rule Them All achievement (just one city) and I didn’t fight a single battle (except for Barbarians).
Sarkus
4954
I just fired this up for the first time since October, according to Steam.
Ryusei
4955
What’s interesting to me reading people gripe about the AI is how the “stupidity” is out there front in center.
In Civ 4, if you’re good enough, it’s entirely possible to run over an AI in ~10-15 turns game time, 30 minutes real-time. This is possible even on Deity, and even when the AI has 8-13 cities. But the thing is, because of the winner-take-all combat, you’ll take losses. The K/D ratio will always be “somewhat” balanced, like 2:1 (for axe rush) to 5:2 (Cavalry). So it “feels” like the AI is doing ok, even though it plays sub-optimally.
In contrast, in Civ 5, especially post-patch(es), AI conquest can take forever, even if you don’t actually lose any units. The greater amount of time means that you can see the incompetent AI for much longer.
I didn’t assert any such thing. I just said your stats don’t support your conclusion and I’m saying that they also wouldn’t support the conclusion that players are satisfied with the level of difficulty they are playing at. They may be finding it fun to play at that level of difficulty, but it says absolutely nothing about their opinion of the difficulty.
The key thing to remember here is that I’m not drawing any conclusions; I don’t have stats to support any claims. I can theorize as well as anyone, but backing it up with facts is another thing altogether.
Don’t forget, I’m not stating that the theory you came up with is invalid, only that you don’t have any facts to support it so you can’t draw your conclusion. In my books, your theory is still a theory.
Context-free data is no better than anecdote. There’s a certain irreducible meaning to 10-15k daily players, but the rest can be parsed to death.
Ben Sones’ post from earlier today summarized my feelings about the game well, and I think that critique is more useful than anything somebody can hang off of these “quantitative data.”
No, I’m not playing it, nor is anyone at my house. That’s rather beside the point of whether the statistics mean anything.
Your son and your wife are not fully human and should not count as players?
My point there, which you are studiously trying to ignore, is that there are 3 people on the account. These “statistics” are irrevocably tainted by such sloppy inaccuracy.
Civ 5’s end game is so tedious that I suspect I’m not alone in starting games then never finishing them when it becomes clear I’ve won. In other words, I think recording how many accounts have finished games at a certain level has very little correlation to how well people can handle the AI’s “difficulty”.
Frankly, the stats are laughable empty. Why are you trying to defend them as if they have any sort of meaning, when clearly they’re not intended to be taken as anything more than anecdote?
Exactly. Bullshit statistics have no meaning. They support no conclusions at all.
I find the number of players still playing to be interesting and even meaningful, but beyond that the data tracked is so muddled that it’s no better than conjecture.
Enidigm
4960
FWIW I have never finished any Total War game nor any Civ game I have owned. I have finished several EU games by contrast.
