I suspect this is working as intended. Unless you’re using some weird settings, your games will usually end long before you’ve exhausted the tech tree, and you’ll have to choose carefully which advanced techs you want because you’ll only get a few.
-Tom
Yes, I think so too and thats fine. But I would like to make it to 1 end stage tech.
My first game ended on an ambition and points victory (both at the same time) on turn 158. I had gone off the end of the tech tree. But I was very passive about attacking the AI after a very frustrating early war against Rome where he kept dodging around and ambushing me and then even after I cleared out his units the city near me was effectively invulnerable (so I pillaged all the improvements and went home).
It reminds me a lot of endless space 2 in that the AI is able to maintain a lead early, but cannot stack the econ bonuses correctly and falls behind. On the other hand the AI seems very capable of using its military, so its different from ES2 in that respect.
Having played both games extensively, I’m going to have to stop you right there. There is almost no way to continue this sentence without me objecting. :)
I’ve been very critical of the AI during the game’s Epic release, and since then I’ve seen the Old World AI struggle and especially improve. But most importantly, I’ve enjoyed some wonderfully competitive games of Old World that Amplitude’s games will never be able to achieve, precisely because Amplitude is notoriously bad at AI. There are certainly issues with Old World’s AI, but it’s head-and-shoulders – and then some! – above Amplitude and other similar strategy games.
-Tom
The Old World AI is actually quite good overall, except that it doesn’t have the ability to take advantage of the very deep and micro-management intensive economic development sub-game, especially in terms of urban developments. It takes a lot of pre-planning to create a powerful urban economy in Old World but if you do, the output basically rewrites what is possible in the game. To build a potent urban economy, you have to do a bunch of things the AI just doesn’t have the capacity for including, pre-building of resource structures to bring in the necessary resources while not sealing off the spaces you need to build the urban buildings into, leaving space for the urban buildings that need adjacent pre-reqs to have them, and then taking advantage of as many of the adjacency and other bonuses as you can, and building up your growth so you have a lot of citizens and building up your city-civic production so you can crank out specialists, and then building the urban buildings and pumping out the specialists. If you do all that, you end up with vast multiples of production - ridiculous civics to further the pump, ridiculous training to crank out units by the bushel, ridiculous research, like 5X to 10X the pittance of research you start with, and so forth.
The AI just can’t handle all that (and in fact it tends to make many players insane with OCD) and that’s where the Old World AI cannot keep up with a human.
I consider that an inevitable side effect of the amazingly deep economic development system, not really a flaw in the AI.
It’s just the nature of Old World having both a very deep military game AND an even deeper economic game.
I don’t consider the limitations of the Old World AI to be a “flaw” but rather an inherent limit of what AI can do these days compared to the depth and richness of the economic part of the game design.
With random maps, I don’t believe there is any way to make an AI that can do the kind of layered planning that is necessary to truly crank out an urban economy in Old World. There’s a truly staggering amount of tasty juicy min/max synergy in the Old World economy but it takes a human brain to build it. Maybe eventually AI will get there but I haven’t seen any AI in any game that would even come close to the kind of multi-tiered planning that would be required. So I don’t fault Mohawk for having a “flawed” AI - I think the AI does as good a job as current technology allows; the issue is the game design would require an AI that hasn’t been built yet, and when that AI is built, it will take all our jobs and render us obsolete. That’s how intense the economic part of the Old World design is. Once AI can play the Old World AI game as well as a human, we may as well throw in the towel and worship our robot overlords.
i’ve felt that micromanagement burden at times. I second the suggestion to automate scouting once available, and to go with suggested worker improvements until the game feels more legible and you have a more intuitive sense of what to build next. Also, if you’ve extra orders, feel free to just not use them and let surplus convert to gold. There’s no need to pay 10-30 gold to adjust the position of a military unit if you don’t immediately know what to do with it.
I didn’t pay close attention in my last campaign. Does an automated scout use up orders in roaming about on its own?
edit: answer appears to be yes, something to keep in mind should you consider turning this on.
In one of his many designer notes, not sure if it was written or podcast, Soren, talked about when it is ok for the AI to cheat and when it is not. The player facing system, like military, trade, and diplomacy the computer should play be the same rules as the human. The economic stuff is fine to be asymetrical aka cheat. When you take over an opponent city you sometimes look at say that’s not very advanced or well layed out, but it doesn’t really affect how you play the game.
When a formerly peaceful Gandhi nukes you now that impacts your game.
And I did! scored 1 bonus point for an end-line tech. But by turn 100 I knew I was going to win, and I let the game drag on more than I should have.
I think @alcaras should promote his Youtube channel much more actively than he does. Recently, he posted a series of excellent videos about capital founding, one video per nation. They are great for both beginners and intermediate players, and I believe that experts would find them useful too.
Thank you! New to making videos :)
Open to ideas of what folks would like covered in a video.
When I get caught up in life I’ll have to check these out :)
I just finished my 4th recent game. The first 3 on The Good, the last one on The Noble. I’ve been using the Old World map, but playing different nations. The first one I lost, then I won the last 3.
I love this map. Each starting location felt very different. I don’t think I’ll continue to use it once I get through the nations, but it’s great to try from the different spots. It’s a huge map, so much of the game I have no idea who is doing what on the other side of the map. The downside is that turns can start to crawl a little towards the mid game, even on a new computer - but it isn’t anything intolerable.
A couple of weird thing about the 3 games I won. Each was an ambition victory at turn 140 +/- 5 turns. Also, in 2 of the games I don’t think I had any wars with a major nation. The other I think I briefly fought with one and made peace which was never broken. It’s been very easy to maintain the peace, so my game mostly consisted of fighting tribes and barbarians - then building peaceably checking off the ambitions. Not saying it is a bad thing, but I didn’t expect to be able to play so peacefully.
On my last couple of games I did turn down event frequency to low, and it did help. Towards the end of the game there can still be a lot of event / character upgrade windows - more than I’d like.
So, I tried not to dwell too much on the characters, and it did help. I focused on keeping the families happy. In the mid game during expansion I usually hit a spot where it gets a little rough to keep everyone happy, but then I sort it out. I try to pick a Chancellor with good discipline to pacify cities; a spymaster with good wisdom for science stealing; the diplomat doesn’t seem to matter too much since they only seem to get mission bonuses with the high synod. Of course the stats can help with the resources they generate.
This is probably the last time I’ll comment on it unless my opinion improves, but the character stuff feels like busywork. I don’t enjoy scanning the lists (even though they aren’t that long), assigned people to jobs. Maybe I have no imagination, but the characters are just bags of stats to me to fulfill some role. In RPGs with a story focus I totally get into the characters (think Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Guardians of the Galaxy). It’s just beyond the scope of a strategy game to make the characters that engaging, and that is kinda what it takes for me. Other wise they are just tools to try and win the game.
Luckily there is still a bunch to the game I do like, and I think that is a testament to the economy part of the game. I’d love it if the game also had some sort of logistics aspect for getting food / iron / stone and wood to the cities they needed to get to. Maybe the ability to define trade routes or maybe they automatically travel through the trade network. Then when at war you could try and strangle the enemy’s supplies and have to protect your own. Maybe it would bog the game down too much, but if anyone could get it to work I’d have faith in @SorenJohnson :-)
What map size and difficulty settings do people like? Once I’m done with the Old World map and go random, I think I would like to step the size down from huge so I could play faster games. Also I tend to be a player who tries to win via the path of least resistance. At what difficulty do you think it forces you to engage in the military side of the game more? Maybe that is also a factor of the map size? With the huge map I’ve had a very peaceful existence on The Good and The Noble.
Any other settings you find really improves the game?
I think mid size maps work very well and one of the best for forcing you into conflict with other nations while also having reasonably defined borders is Inland Sea. Also, if you want to increase your conflict a bit, try playing at one more player than the recommended number (like on a 4 player, play with 5 players, which means 4 opponents.) One more than recommended does not break the game but it does bring the elbows closer.
One note: the Inland Sea map can be kinda random - its possible to start in a corner with the Assyrians up your nose and the Romans up your hindquarters, and that can be bad. I will sometimes use a mild form of cheating to pop open the editor and use the reveal/unreveal map commands to take a peek at the map and see if I have an OK start. However, the temptation to then pre-scout the map and cheat like a cheesedog is present. I do not always resist.
It sounds like you might be the target audience for the no characters game mode!
I wanted to try and get through each nation before I turn them off, but we’ll see. The starting characters seem like they are part of the hand crafted experience. I will definitely try the no characters mode though.
If you want just less character stuff, you could also try turning event level down.
I’ve been playing the last couple games on low. It does help.
I like the character events a lot, and managing my heirs, but I don’t like doing frequently recurring jobs like influence and diplomatic very much. If I could set those to automatically happen when the requisite resource is above a certain level, I would.
It seems like that would be tough to automate as it may be difficult to programmatically decide who you think it is important to improve relations with and it can really burn through your resources. Civics are usually short on supply until a bit further into the game. I see where you are coming from though.