Chuck
5461
I’ve been on the fence with Civ5, but this thread made me fire up Alpha Centauri again, playing with the huge map of the Planet as Lady Dierdre (she’s so pretty … and green to boot). I’ll be playing for weeks! I love this game, and have never been happy with Civ3 or Civ4. Stack of Doom be damned, it’s great to see all the detail beneath the hood and have factions that really have differences.
Brian Reynolds crowning achievment, for sure.
PeterK
5462
I’m not seeing a lack of aggressiveness at the Prince level. I just started a game recently and I was attacked by Rome as soon as they got legions. Later I was attacked by Russia after they eliminated Rome and were on my border (stealing the allegiance of their city-states may have also contributed). And there have been several wars elsewhere, with another civ being taken out. I’m playing on an inland sea map, though. Maybe the map type has a large effect.
I’m ashamed to say that I’m actually struggling a little at the Prince level. I’m in a distant third place as far as military and technology. Does the AI really have no extra bonuses or benefits at the Prince level? The reason I ask is that it seems like any city I turn into a puppet grows much faster than one of my own cities.
The advisors are funny. They keep telling me that the war with Russia is going badly, even though they’ve never made a serious attack and I’ve taken three of their cities. They’ve killed maybe two of my units so far. I suspect that the text is based purely on army size as their army is probably twice the size of mine and with slightly better technology. Most of their units are probably on their other front fighting Japan. I keep waiting for the horde to arrive.
Try to wait until main city is 4-5 then spam settlers for a bit…
The AI is still aggressive on Prince difficulty and are quite competitive (especially after recent patches), but it feels like everything the AI does is amped up to another level on King and higher difficulty. When it attacks, they hit you hard and they keep hitting you. Now maybe this is only caused by the extra bonuses the AI gets as Chris pointed out, but it makes a big difference.
My last game on Prince was on a medium/small continent map and I was on a small continent with Persia. It may have taken them until the middle ages to attack me, but to call it an “attack” is a huge overstatement. Needless to say, I demolished their forces and easily took their capital and next biggest city. Had I been on King difficulty, that declaration of war would have brought with it tons of units that would have stormed my border and made a serious attempt to take one of my cities.
Diplomacy also seems vastly different between Prince and King. On Prince, you can easily establish open borders, friendships, defensive agreements, and be on good terms with most civilizations. However on King, it seems like almost every AI is trying to start crap with you, like denouncing you over nothing (which I hate). Which in turn means little actual diplomacy happens.
I feel I don’t do too much fancy stuff, other than to keep finding good spots for cities and build them, find the spot and grab them early.
Then if a war starts, find the best place to defend, terrain means almost -everything- in civ, border cities too should have some consideration on how defensible they are.
I find that you cannot keep up with an AI who has too much space to expand, and you can’t do diplomacy if you are so weak it won’t respect you in any way.
Well you could, but then you would have to accept his ‘offers’
Quitch
5466
Developers say no, but AI mod thread says yes.
The developers don’t say no. They say it is the fairest of the settings. Looking into the xmls show the various benefits they get. The biggest one is that the AI players get a bonus to happiness and a bonus against barbarians.
Yeah, that stuff isn’t hidden if you know where to look. The top level that doesn’t grant any bonus is cheiftain, iirc (and I think there’s a minor penalty somewhere for the AI, but I might be wrong on that).
Yes, I believe Chieftain has some penalties for the AI while Prince has a few small bonuses. As I recall the AI always gets Chieftain-level happiness penalties, that’s how it can sustain larger empires than the human player.
Just in case you’re unaware, you shouldn’t sign Open Borders unless you actually want to move through their territory. There’s no trade benefit like in Civ4, and aggressive AI players will use Open Borders to scout your territory for an attack. If they see you’re weak they are more likely to attack you.
There is a quirk in how the game works. Sometimes the AI wants to declare war on someone over ‘yonder’ and needs to get there. The stupid thing WILL declare war on anyone he can’t get open borders with on the way to his target. In multi player this is especially bothersome as he can’t contact you, the player has to offer.
So in order to avoid wars, you may have to open borders…its not optimal, but its a stop-gap.
Not always, Janster. My most recent game had Khan embarking a (stupid huge) force of Keshiks and longswords around my territory on a generational mission to attack Cathy. He didn’t declare on me at all. I did later open borders to him since I needed the help against the crazy lady – she’s been declaring on me about every 30 turns literally since the game began.
Also, Knights are awesome now. It helps that I’m playing Ramkamhaeng, of course, since his elephants are 22 strength for 120 cost (versus say 16/150 for muskets).
Man, the Thai are awesome in this game.
Thai game was a total walkover. Cathy had the bad judgement to pick a fight with me as I was researching Artillery, so I spent some of my huge-ass treasury upgrading my Cannon and went over and kicked her in the face for good. Got oil, finally! Not that it mattered; Khan busied himself beating up on city-states (which was kinda annoying since they were my allies and all, but eh. I had more where those came from) and Askia, who was as usual a minor power. Building to a diplo victory was just as easy as can be.
Yeah, it’s only King, but still. This one was easier than I thought it would be.
Started up a Cathy game of my own on a random map type. Yep, archipelago is still broken. Not a bad thing, though, since we the Russians have literally zero horses or iron anywhere in our vast empire. I dunno if I could pull off this crappy of a start on a map type that the AI had any idea how to play.
So yeah, it’s back to Pangaea or Continents. Oh well.
Now that this has been patched a bit (right?), let me ask you people who are still playing it a question. I’m sure this has been covered if I read through the thread, but I’m hoping for more of a “yea/nay” call.
My wife loves Civilization games in theory. She played Civ III a lot. Her laptop wouldn’t run Civ IV. I was never into them and I said she could play it on my machine if she wanted to buy it, but she never did. The reason she stopped playing Civ III was because she wanted more of a diplomacy game and less warfare, and she always got frustrated/bored when everything devolved into fighting.
I can get Civilization V for like $16 on Amazon with a $10 discount that I have. Given the above, would she enjoy it? Or–and I know this is opening a can of worms–is the answer “just buy her Civ IV instead”?
If she likes playing as a builder in a low-challenge sandbox, the AI is not terribly aggressive on Prince or lower in V and she can enjoy all the new shiny. If she likes actually playing with the levers of diplomacy and such, IV has a better diplo game.
Is Dawn of Discovery a better builder? I have that and I love it.
No diplomacy game. Diplomacy is ust the framework for the wars you wage in Civ 5 (or any other Civ).
Civ III was notorious for the AI ganging up on the human player and was one of the reasons I hated it. Civ IV fixed that and made it so that you could really manipulate other civs via diplomacy. Civ V, while it doesn’t gang up on the human player, it does play purely to win. Which means unprovoked declarations of war are to be expected.
That said, while I love Civ V, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it over Civ IV for its diplomacy. And I would assume that Civ V has higher system requirements than Civ IV.
well system requirements aren’t an issue–she’d be playing on my shiny new PC. And now that I think about it I’m not sure if she wants just diplomacy with no war or just not-so-aggressive AI. Maybe it was the Civ III AI ganging up that annoyed her, if that’s the case.
Totally different game. As a pure builder experience, sure, it’s better. That’s its whole mission.
