Sid Meier's Civilization 5 released today

[Don]

One of the modder reports that unit maintenance cost is exponential. The exponent seems to be a number between 1 and 2 but your first X units are free (might be dependent on difficulty, heard it's usually around 3). This explains why disbanding a Scout saves you 6 gold/turn when you have like 10 units.

Makes you wonder why you have a supply of 100ish units from your city/population if there's no way you can possibly afford an army of that size. Right now it's looking like the modding community will come up with their own patch to address the game's problems before any official patch comes out.

[Julius Seeker]

It's a little disappointing that the project seems to have had a rushed release. Luckily there aren't any real fatal flaws on the core design level (hopefully the AI is tunable to behave correctly), just really poor balancing and some bugs that need fixing ASAP.

A few things I would like to do:

* Take away production maintenance (that Don mentions)
* Fix military economy (it would be nice if a good border defense could actually be built).
* I am unsure if the level of unique civ units/buildings can be altered; if so I would like to make things more historically accurate - IE. Add Roman Baths building (eliminate Balista if need be), which would have benefits towards economy and happiness, but would be obsolete as soon as someone hits a certain Middle ages tech, which would mean the dark ages for them since their economy would sink along with happiness (if that can even be modified in that way).
* Era specific buildings would be cheap with low maintenance, so that when the tech is available, they can be built quickly and useful as long as the age is preserved.
* By the modern era, no civilization will have any building advantage.
* I would disable Songhai, America, and Ottoman from being added to the game; but still allow myself to choose random opponents (I do not like playing with "civs" which have less than 1000 years of history). While some (like Iroquois) are relatively young in name, their culture and bloodlines are very old on that land; so I see them as more legit.

[Don]

You can flag civilization as unplayable for you or the AI or just delete it altogether with the editor though deleting anything from the game will most likely crash the game due to foreign key constrains that the game doesn't warn you about until you run the game.

You can edit/add/delete any cultural bonus/building with the editor, but this is a rather painful process.

The gold/production upkeep can be rather crippling if you try to field an army, and what makes it worse is that there isn't even a hint that you're paying for this stuff (never saw anything about production maintenance, but it's mentioned in the XML files) or that it scales up exponentially.

Thankfully a lot of this stuff is already being worked on by the modders, so you can just take the mods that do what you want. Now if you want someone to make a Roman Bath House you might have to know someone who has a lot of time and is bored (well it's not really that hard, but unlikely people will just spontaneously decide to do that). There's a mod that eliminates the exponential scaling for gold on unit upkeep, but it only works some of the time.

I noticed people make some really overpowered civilizations, like one guy had a Celtic where all foot, mounted, and gunpowder units get double attack and that was the guy doing the tutorial for how to use the SDK. I mean I realize the point is to demonstrate what you can do with the SDK but that isn't even remotely balanced as this game greatly favors the aggressor.

Some of the changes I like (from mods) are the lowering cost of Stables (it's rare you'll ever train enough units to make up for the time it takes to build it), and take away maintenance costs on some buildings like Granary and Water Mills (upkeep on them is pretty high for the minimal benefits).

I'm not sure what's meant by an effective border defense. Obviously you can stop AI easily once inside your border if you have Oligarchy researched with just the radius around your city assuming you're not hopelessly outmatched in both technology + numbers. It remains to be seen if this is an effective defense mechanism against real players. I've been experimenting 3X culture rate, which means you'll have pretty large borders and relatively easy access to policies (just disable cultural victory, it's kind of dumb anyway). With a large amount of culture you'll have large borders, and this makes Nationalism easy to get, which means you're very vulnerable while fighting outside of your border due to the stacking bonuses and hopefully this will see more movement and tactics since I imagine you cannot wage war against a 100% combat strength deficit (from being defender to aggressor) for extended amount of time, which means the defense only need to delay people inside your border for a few turns before the reinforcements get there and force the other guy to retreat. At least, that's how I envisioned it could work out. Here's some hypothetical example, assuming you get Rifleman (25), Artillery (range 25?), Cavalry (28?) as your only units, and everything else is exactly equal and the guy with more troops will have a flanking bonus (obviously).

With Oligrachy + Nationalism the Cavalry will attack with a strength of 44.24. From my experience this will easily take out any unit the other side can field unless they've a ridiculous troops advantage, so there's no way the aggressor can fight for extended period of time. Now of course your army cannot be everywhere at once. Let's say you only have 2 Rifleman as a garrison along the border, and say you expect the enemy to have a 15% flanking bonus on you (since they have more units than you). You'll probably be fortified but you won't be attacking, so you get no bonus from nationalism, so the numbers will look like:

Your Rifleman - 25 * 1.83 = 45.75
Their Cavalry - 28 * 1.15 = 32.2

This is pretty strong odds for the defender but then your Rifleman can't be attacking either. If you tried to attack, it'd instead look like:

Rifle - 25 * 1.58 = 39.5 versus 32.2
But now on the defense, you're not fortified and you don't get Nationalism on defense, so the defense looks like:
Rifle - 25 * 1.33 = 33.25 versus 32.2

So you certainly can't just counterattack and kill the attacking army with minimal troops. You can defend pretty well but then they can just try to walk around you or bombard from range if you're not leaving your fortified positions. Also if you're really just staying fortified the whole time there's nothing stopping the enemy from attempting to completely surround you, and at that point they can definitely overpower you. However it takes a while to get a large flanking bonus due to ZOC. In theory, a good defense would stall the opponents long enough until your offensive units can get there, if you assume the other guy is smart enough to withdraw when he sees the Cavalry coming.

[Don]

I made some basic mod taking the good ideas I've seen around. I didn't do anything fancy yet since it's complicated and there's balance stuff to worry about.

Units now have 25 HP
Cities have 50 HP and heal 2/turn
Population gives 0.75 unhappiness (down from 1) per population.
Cities give 1.5 unhappiness per city (down from 2).
Occupied cities give 6 unhappiness (up from 5).
Occupied population gives 1.66 per population (up from 1.34).

Stables cost 50 instead of 100 (I've never built one so this is just a conjecture)

On Marathon setting, units/improvement/culture is increased by 200%. Population growht is increased by 33%. Note that Marathon settings slows everything down to 1/3 speed so let's say it normally takes 50 turns to research something, build a unit, or whatever, on marathon you'd get:

Research - 150 turns
building - 150 turns
unit - 50 turns
improvement - 50 turns
population growth - 111.5 turns
culture - 50 turns

You'll most likely have to turn off cultural victory on the marathon setting because otherwise no other kind of winning is likely.

The ideas behind these changes are:

1. More units gets fielded before they become obselete, and it might actually make sense to build a stable. Note that on the marathon setting you'd probably get more units if you just keep on crank units out instead of building a stable (since units effectively have 1/3 discount), but given the game's very high maintenance I think it's better to keep a small army and be able to increase your production in a hurry rather than just cranking units out nonstop, since with the exponential upkeep cost it'll simply become unaffordable even if you can crank out 20 Knights. It'd be far more important to be able to crank out 5 Knights quickly, at least that's my hope.

2. Units are a lot more resilent in battle. This will almost certainly make the AI much, much harder because now you can't kill them one at a time as they walk to their doom and their entire army might actually arrive at the same time.

3. It is easier to keep a large population of your people. It is now harder to keep an occupied population. I'll probably tweak the numbers when hotseat comes around to see what are the expected outcome against human opponents. Against the computer it'd probably make the first couple cities easier to absorb but it'd actually get worse at a quicker pace if you continue to annex cities.

4. You'll actually able to research more than 2 tabs on the cultural tree if you have more than 2 cities, and your border might actually get somewhere. I've seen suggestions on tweaking the civic tabs but I think I'll ignore them for now, since there's a lot of balance involved in them.

I didn't upload this to the civ community because it requires a GameSpy account, and this mod will almost certainly limit your ability to play the computer on any of the higher difficulties. It's meant to create a more drawn out game but clearly with the computer's massive advantage that kind of game favors them.

[Julius Seeker]

What I meant was that I would be able to field enough troops where the only way an enemy army could get onto the lands I wish to settle, would be by breaking through my units occupying my forts; The Roman main defense of the Rhine and Danube were archers and siege units; it was fortifications and Legions.


Another question, since you seem to be making good progress with the modding (I think I will take in many of your ideas). Can you edit the number of options available for taking a city? For example, would it be possible to set up a city with even greater independence than a puppet state? Say, instead have a client state which adds nothing, and subtracts nothing from the economy, but will occasionally provide units? Essentially the same idea as an allied city state, except with the option to annex or create a puppet state.

[Don]

Wouldn't the defense be dependent on your terrain? If you got a wide border with a lot of flat terrain you have to be able to cover it all. It doesn't have to be a one hex choke but it can't be completely open. I'm just not sure how you'd go accomplish it. Maybe make ZOC have a radius of 2? But that's a pretty drastic change and I don't know if that's something you can change (probably can, but won't be easy to figure out where to change it). I'd think having more time to build units will give you enough units to guard your border though. It's true AI gets those bonus too but they already have a huge production advantage and seems like their limit for army size is the exponential upkeep, whereas for humans the limit is the inability to produce as much units.

I haven't thought about how conquering city options. I know you can set it so that you can raze even capitals so what you want seems doable. It might be easier if you just make puppet cities able to build their own units since they'll make stuff like Barracks on their own.

You can mix and match mods assuming they don't conflict with each other (i.e. one change unit HP to 15 and another to 25), so you don't have to have one mod that does everything you need. The 2K forums and Civfanatics have a lot of activity on modding, and you can of course just try random mods from the Civ 5 interface itself. Modding Civ 5 really isn't too hard once you get past the fact that the SDK is a joke and wouldn't tell you if you made a spelling error that invalidates your entire mod leaving you to wonder what the heck is going on.

I can upload my mod files when I get home today if you're interested in them. I think I'll put off any significant testing until a major patch since like a lot of people are saying, it's really futile to try to test stuff like combat versus AI when it is this bad. I think you can actually mod the AI behavior but that will be a pretty significant undertaking since none of the AI variables are obvious as to their impact. Sure you can change AI_AGGRESSIVE from an 8 to a 9 but how would you possibly know how that impacts your game? I guess you can just keep on play the game many times to get a feel of the difference between the two but that's got to take way too much time.

Generally speaking if you want to change the value of anything, or some kind of behavior that can be answered as 'yes or no' it's pretty easy to do. The tutorial shows how you can change Granary to make you keep 30% of your food, and a Hosptial give medic promotion to all units created in city (while losing its original effect) and they're all pretty easy once you get past Civ 5's lack of documentation (i.e. it took a lot of work for the guy to figure out what variables to change, but changing them is easy once you know what they are), so that should give you an idea of the scope of relatively easy changes. It's actually slightly easier to create a new unit/building than update an existing one since there's less places to type something wrong when you create a new entry.

[Don]

I barely played Civ 3 & 4, but I'm seeing a lot of people saying Civ 5 isn't as good as Civ 4 because the combat is dumbed down. This appears to be because the AI sucks in Civ 5 in combat compared to other games. I really don't get it. I never measure the combat system of a Civ game by what the AI does. Do everyone think they're Sun Tzu, Genghis Khan, and Ceasar incarnated at the same time which is why they can easily withstand the 1 to 5 or worse odds that computer at higher difficulty can throw at you in any of the Civ games? The first time you withstood a Deity level comp attack on any Civ game, it should be rather obvious that the computer absolutely has no idea what it's doing which is why it needs 5 units to every 1 you got to make it even remotely challenging. It seems like Civ 3/4's combat system favors the 'send a ton of units and hope some of them makes it' so that's challenge? Civ 5 doesn't really favor that system since if you got 5 units versus 1 it really is like 1 units fighting 5 unit at the same time due to flanking bonus, whereas in older civilization you get, at best, the best stats of all of your five units combined, but that is still nowhere like fighting 1 versus 5. So yes computer units gets destroyed in Civ 5 easily because they don't move in a formation, and you can probably win 5 versus 1 indefinitely without ever losing a unit as long as the AI moves one unit at a time to your kill zone. That's a problem of the AI not the system. If the AI can actualy get all their tens if not hundreds of units there at the same time they'll probably just run you over under the new flanking system since the side with more units have a guaranteed advantage in this system.

If people want to test their skills against the AI, they should try a game like ROTK 11 where the hardest difficulty gives the AI less than a 2 to 1 advantage at the start, and they only have a 20% or so bonus on attributes, because otherwise you'd just die the moment the grace period for war is up. It's actually pretty humbling when you play a ruler that's rated 'no way to win' and then lose every single time the grace period is up even when you saved after every attack for the optimal outcome, and the AI doesn't need to cheat to do this (the rulers rated impossible to win are intended to be very weak). If it has even a 2 to 1 advantage in raw power, it'll pretty much beat you every single time unless you've some incredible position to work with. To this date I've yet to hear anyone beating the challenge scenario in ROTK without using the instant kill exploit and that's about a 3 to 1 advantage for the AI. Basically you have to use an exploit to kill half of their units before the fight even starts, and then you better play extremely well to actually be able to defeat them before the time limit. There's just no way Civ AI can support this kind of sophistication with the amount of resources they get. I don't know if the AI in Civ is bad on purpose or that it's just not very good, but 3 to 1 odds for Civ AI against human would be grossly in favor of the human, and yet apparently some people are very proud to be able to beat that.

[Julius Seeker]

Civ 3 and 4.... I played a lot of each; but in the cases of both games, I got quickly bored. Civ 5 needs tuning and fixing (released too early), but it is already more fun to play.

The biggest issue that exists in the game right now, in my mind, is that ranged units are the only key to winning major battles. It's no longer the Roman legions sweeping through their enemies, but the Roman Ballistas wiping out the barbarians. At no point in history do I recall a couple of Trebuchet's being able to wipe out an army on the level of Napoleon Bonaparte's. Siege equipment was used for bombarding defensive structures, not wiping out whole field armies. The very idea that an army of 5 thousand musketmen would stand there until they are wiped out by a catapult is a little bit ridiculous. Siege units should have a bonus vs fortified units, a huge bonus vs cities, and be relatively useless against armies on the field. This is a similar sort of issue to the Civ 1 phalanx that can kill a tank.

The 100 years war is the most oldest example of warfare where ranged weaponry was the main weapon used to win the battle. That is when the French Knights were massacred in the swamps by the Welsh and English longbowmen; and then returned with Crossbows to defeat the English forces. History aside, the over-powering of ranged units in Civ 5 makes the game less fun than it should otherwise be. I want to actually have that readily present fear that my long standing, and very experienced Legions (upgraded to Longswordsmen) are actually in great danger when they go into battle; it would be a huge step up from them being fairly irrelevant in the outcome of the battle (since it's the catapults/trebuchets that will be the forces that win all battles).


Rotk 11 is one I should play; I liked the series quite a lot in the SNES and PSX eras.

[Don]

From looking at the raw values the range units (which are mostly siege units after the gunpowder era) do not have higher range attack value than the combat strength of melee units of the same era, so I think the problem is that unit HP values are too low causing your units to die before they can possibly get into position to attack the siege units. Now if the siege unit is fortified inside a city you can't effectively counter that by melee but that's pretty reasonable I think. I did some simulation and it looks like 2 units of equal strength ends up doing 5 to 6 damage to each other, and this seems to hold true as you scale up, so in their current incarnation, assuming range attack = combat strength a range units just need 2 shots to kill a melee before it gets close, and that's imbalanced. But if a melee can get close to a siege unit, they'll do a ton of damage to it since those units have very low combat values.

Now change to HP would have no effect if you've a fight that looks like trench warfare (melee unit front line protecting siege units completely) but then historically trench warfare does require special units to break through, and Civ 5 does provide them once you get to the modern era.

There is no expansion for ROTK 11 in the US which means you can't get the highest difficulty (which balances a lot of cheesy stuff you're able to do even on Hard to gain an edge) or all the challenge scenarios, though I think the US version has a few of them. The AI is not particularly good at stopping you once you start winning but then very few games can do that. It's not hard to win as a major power, but trying to play with anybody rated 3 stars or worse (more is worse) can be rather challenging if not frustrating. While the AI don't particularly hate you for just being the human player, they do tend to attack the weakest person first which is often you on the higher difficulties.

[Don]

So the guy who's been working on maintenance cost figured out that unit costs are adjusted for INFLATION. A warrior in 2000 BC costs more to maintain per turn than 4000 BC. Thankfully building costs are not subject to inflation.

This is ridiculously stupid concept but it does explain why unit costs seem totally erratic. I have no problem if more advanced units costs more to maintain, but it shouldn't just get more expensive over time. It looks like it'll take a lot of work to fix it, so keep your eyes open on the mod community to see when people made a breakthrough. I think they were able to get it down to a fixed cost (1 per turn) but the guy making the mod would really like higher units cost more to maintain, which is pretty reasonable.

[Julius Seeker]

Yeah, I noticed that, I disbanded my workers which I wasn't using, received nearly 300 gold, and my economy skyrocketed. Civilian units shouldn't really have this kind of upkeep, in my opinion. The whole "inflation" idea is totally stupid, I agree. It doesn't imrpove the game whatsoever, what it does is makes it so units have to be sacrificed.

[Don]

The upkeep/happiness makes playing computer on a higher difficulty an exercise in frustration. You can probably win since they're still really dumb at the combat front but it's like whenever you start winning you probably get held back by unhappiness. It's unlikely the computer will turn things around while you're managing your happiness but it just delays it. The computer will constantly send one unit at a time to their doom until you finally killed enough of them to take their cities, and since the unit maintenance costs are very high even the computer gets their economy crippled despite their advantage, so you don't have to worry about them doing much with their gold (most importantly for bribing city states).

After running some fights with roughly equal forces, I think the problem with range units is that units have too few HPs. You can usually get a 10 to 2 or so kill ratio (and it'll actually be higher if the units had more than 10 HPs) with a melee unit versus ranged, but the range units can do say 3-4 damage to you at range, so by the time you get to melee range your unit with 10 HP is almost dead. With say 25 HP they'd still have a good 15 or so HP left and 15 HP melee should trounce a 25 HP ranged unit of the same era rather easily.

I don't get how people are posting like they're out-teching the computer on King or higher difficulty. That to me seems inherently impossible given the computer's massive advantage. Yes they're not always going to build in an optimal way but when your cities produce 50% more of everything for being a computer you don't have to build everything exactly correct. I believe some people say on the higher difficulties the computer can have 4 cities up before you can build your first settler and that wouldn't surprise me at all, and yet you're supposed to out-tech them like that? With the limitation on happiness (and computer gets more than +10 here) it seems like it'd simply not be possible to have a higher population/income than the computer until war occurs (at that point you can take their city). I suppose it's possible if the computer just attacked each other enough to cancel each other out, or maybe they built so many units it killed their economy so they can't get an edge. But in that case that has nothing to do with you playing well and everything to do with computer being stupid. My experience with the Microprose-branded strategy games is that no matter how well you play, the computer will always have a signifcant unit advantage and probably some tech advantage on you until you're able to beat them. Given the nonexistence of the AI, it has to be like that or you will never lose as the AI sure cannot beat you while given equal resources.

Even on difficult like Chieftain it appears the computer still can produce more units (in terms of production) than I do. Now on the lower difficulties it's pretty trivial to out-tech the computer, but if you don't invade them the edge isn't actually as big as you think it would be. Leave a computer alone and they'll be within striking range on technology even on lower difficulty settings.

Another problem I noticed is that strategic resources are just really rare. It almost feels like the game doesn't spawn the later era resources at the beginning and then you end up with stuff like the world has only one source of aluminum. I ran an Earth map and there appears to be only one iron deposit in the entire Eurasian continent. One of the game I won with scientific victory, I was never able to build any advanced unit because Aluminum, Oil, and Uranium practically didn't exist in the world. Sure everyone suffers the same but what's the point of having a modern army if the best unit you can build is mechanized infantry?

[Don]

I was trying to win the game with diplomatic victory on a game with more than than 3 civilizations and realized it's actually harder than winning by conquest unless you have enough money to bribe all the city states because everyone always vote for themselves anyway, and if you eliminated a player they don't vote at all. There's absolutely nothing 'diplomatic' about this because a nation will never vote against themselves! It should be like Maste of Orion's Orion Senate, people get vote % to their power (say, your civ's score out of sum of all civ scores), and you can only vote for the top two guys or abstain. In MOO when you get say 1/3 of the galaxy you're obviously capable of winning it by conquest (eventually), but at this point the Orion Senate will start to convene and you can't afford to just wage war on the entire galaxy and then have the other 2/3 vote against you and then you'll lose (unless you're strong enough to fight the entire galaxy at once and defy the Senate but in that case why even continue playing), so you have to pay some attention to diplomacy to either stay another 1/6 of the people to vote for you (which isn't really easy), or at least keep them busy long enough until you can conquer enough to move your control to 1/2 (at that point voting for yourself alone is sufficient to win). It's also pretty interesting if you're say, the #3 or #4 power and you've to figure out who to vote to prevent them from winning, while knowing voting against a guy means they might invade you (voting against someone lowers your relationship with them).

Right now in my game I got like 4 cities and like 15 of them as puppet. I can never make any of them annexed without going below -10. I'm pretty sure I can win the game comfortably by conquest but I might run out of time since you got to stop to deal with the unhappiness. Maintenance cost is like 100 gold/turn even though I'm only able to field 4 units per battlefront (2 of them).

Some fun tricks I found:

Start a game in the future era and then surrender (alt+Q), you'll end up with a score like 28000. Of course you'll never be able to come close to beating that kind of score ever. So far I've found the best scores are achieved by starting and then surrendering immediately before doing anything. I assume this is because there's a significant bonus for ending the game early to the point even if your civ score is 0, you can still get thousands of points for the time bonus.

Make a trade with computer (or anyone really), offer whatever you want for their gold (not gold per turn), and then declare war on them immediately. You'll get your resources back since you're at war, but they can't get their gold back since you already have it. Just trade your luxury to the computer for all their money and declare war. A lot of time you'll end up doing this without even noticing since it's clearly a good idea to trade excess luxury good for gold, and the computer obviously really likes to declare war on you. Also, if you have a research agreement and then declare war, the research agreement is completed immediately, giving you (and your opponent) a significant tech boost. In fact if you found someone weak and you've a lot of money you could do like:

Sign research agreement (give them money if needed).
Declare war.
Negotiate piece, offer research agreement as part of the condition. You might have to give them extra gold prior to declaring war to ensure they have enough to sign it, because while on peace treaty the computer doesn't like you very much and might not sign a research agreement, but will sign it if it's the condition for peace (assuming they're losing of course).
This will get you a new technology every 10 turns for a cost of 50*era to 100*era (if you have to pay for the cost for the computer). The computer always has massive boosts to everything but tends to waste them on units, so you may want to help them out by obliterating their army to make sure they can't waste their money on stupid things!

Like the luxury for gold deal, this is actually hard to avoid doing it unintentionally just because you really want to sign as many research agreement as you can and yet the computer will declare war on you all the time because they perceive you to be an easy target no matter how much you build up your military.

I noticed the range units defend against ranged attacks with their range attack strength. That seems to make no sense. Just because you have a really big gun to shoot at people doesn't mean you can use that to defend. Right now ranged units probably do a little bit less damage to other ranged units (depending on era and promotions) than melee. It's not a big concern since you might as well always attack the melees but just feels weird.

[Julius Seeker]

I played a single city challenge as India; England had a funny insult for me "Well, if it isn't my favourite City State."

I managed to win, but only because I chose a teammate (Germany) who helped expand a lot with what limited resources I could offer.

I hit cultural victory around 2000 on King Difficulty playing Epic time scale.

Watching Germany play: Germany, Japan, and France were managing FAR larger armies than I could ever imagine holding in any game; it would have cost them hundreds per turn to maintain; yet they all seemed wealthy. I am wondering if the same inflation rates effect Computer Players? At the time, my one city suffered to maintain its 3 units (had to disband), and we were by far the largest city in the world - and with the possitive effects of 17 world wonders and more civics than any other civ.

[Don]

I think it's 100% of your production/income at Prince and 200% at Deity, and negative income cuts into science but if computer was just given free technology it wouldn't really matter, not to mention science numbers tend to be bigger than gold numbers, and they get a bonus to that too. I was producing like 700 science/turn in the endgame with like 6 cities and certainly a computer has no problem matching that on the higher difficulty. Also even if you go so far negative that your science is 0, it doesn't appear the game force you to disband units so you can still just keep on building. What kind of gold and gold per turn number did they have?

Of course it might be possible they just don't need to pay maintenance. Computer also has pretty ridiculous happiness ratings on the higher level, higher than what you could get even if you had nobody in your cities!

[Don]

Sometimes I wonder if the higher difficulties on the most turn-based strategy games are ever tested. Did someone at Firaxis really loaded up the game at Deity and think there was any way to beat the AI without relying on their utter stupidity? It seems to me all the higher difficulty does in this game is make you an Internet tough guy so that when someone complains about legitmately losing against impossible odd you can say, "LOL NOOB I beat it easily!" I mean yes the AI is so bad that two units can probably take out an entire civilization on Prince (AI does not improve past Prince for sure, though it's hard to say an AI even exists in this game), so if you save & loaded often enough you can probably still exploit the AI's utter lack of combat prowess, though I'm skeptical even here because it seems like there's got to be a time where the AI accidentally moved 20 units in the right way and then owned you just due to sheer luck. I remember the Chaos campaign on HOMM4 was actually impossible on the impossible setting. You start out with an army that is incapable of taking the first city you need no matter how many times you try (the Medusas will instant kill your hero from range and get you a game over, no matter what you do).

Yes I know the difficulty is called 'Impossible' or 'Deity' but that's just a superlative adjective. If they're really intended to be like that why not have a nuclear missile hit your city right after you found it and wipe you out instantly? ROTK had some 4/5 star rated difficulty starting positions that are effectively impossible, but they're meant to simulate the equivalent of guys with sticks fighting guys with guns. It is only there for you to try and you'll see the dev team even wrote stuff like: "It's not clear to us how you're supposed to ever win this." The main mode of playing should not be impossible unless you exploit the game's inherent weakness. Put it this way, if you give Deity advantage to a very bad human player, I can guaranteed you that human player will beat the best human player every single time (who plays with normal resources, of course).

[Shrinweck]

The AI gets a bonus based on the difficulty - it raises its own happiness and lowers your own. The same thing happens for upkeep and research. It's basically just playing at a handicap. Why would I want to play an AI who was smart enough to wipe the floor with me? The handicap forces me to play a better game at king than I would at warlord and I can't ask for more. I feel like I learn more from the current state of the AI rather than an AI that's smarter than me coming at me from all sides and owning me before I know what the hell is going on.

[Don]

Civilization is not a very complex game at the strategy level. If the computer just attacked you the moment they met you on the higher difficulties and employ even a barely minimal level of tactics they'd beat you every single time simply because you do not have enough time to mount an effective defense this early in the game, while the computer has no problem mounting an effective offense early on. Even if you manage some kind of miraculous defense they can at the very minimum pillage whatever improvements you made and blockade your city to prevent you from expanding and then the second computer will easily defeat you, even though that alone should've been enough for the first computer to win.

Pretty much every bit of the challenge of this game is artificial, because even a bad AI can absolutely crush the best player in the world with the resource advantage they have. Unlike the player, the AI does not have to sacrifice his economy/research for an aggressive miltary game, and yet the game goes out of its way to prevent the AI from utilizing this, via:

1. Grace periods. The AI is not allowed to declare war on you until certain turn (dependent on difficulty). This is why everyone declares war on you at the exact same turn because you're an easy kill to every computer player but they're not allowed to attack you (unless you declare war first) until the time limit is up.

2. A tremendously bad combat AI where the computer often does not even know how to attack, let alone attack from a favorable position. You will literally see computer just do nothing instead of getting an uncounterable range attack. They seem to be more interested in surrounding a unit for a large flanking bonus but forgetting that you still have to attack that unit.

3. Offering peace treaty with ridiculous terms (in favor of you) when they're winning. It used to be worse when if you ever got 2 hexes away from their capital city they just surrender, but the AI still mysteriously asks for peace when it is not losing.

4. Failing to research Oligarchy which would solve its deficiency at defense.

You can take out a civilization with 2 units on Prince (and not 2 units that are technologically superior) and the AI doesn't get better after Prince. The only time you'd even lose unit is if you get cocky and tried to fight say 5 Samurais with 1 Archer + 1 Pikeman, and yes on higher difficulty such a situation is more likely to happen due to the AI's resource advantage but this situation shouldn't even be winnable. I'm not talking about say hiding behind a one hex choke inside a citadel or anything like that. You can beat 5 units that are technologically superior with 2 on open ground just because computer will do weird things like embark on water during middle of the fight or better yet just move without attacking either of the two units it can easily destroy.

[Don]

On the subject of unbeatable AIs, the best human player in Civilization is not going to be much worse than the very best AI. This isn't like Chess where the best human player is nowhere near the skill level fo the best Chess AI. The very best AI at tic-tac-toe will never beat even a halfway decent human (of course it won't lose either). If you strip AI's resource advantages, the best strategy would almost certainly be a fairly aggressive expansionist but defensively warring via Oligarchy. This is because if you got a superior army there is no way you'll be defeated at your own border (due to Oligarchy) so all you got to do is fence the other guy in and then you can eventually win via either scientific victory or have a big enough tech/unit advantage to overpower the other guy's Oligarchy bonus.

But then you can make things more interesting if you force the AI to be more aggressive than he should be. A 2 to 1 combat strength advantage translates to a 5 to 1 kill ratio in combat, and 1 to 1 combat strength is obviously 1 to 1 kill ratio. If you extrapolate that, a 33% bonus offered by Oligarchy gives you at least a 2 to 1 kill ratio while on your border. So even if the AI is better than you, it is by no means guaranteed it can win a war on your border, and it may suffer a major loss that allows you to counterattack. Sure that's somewhat artificial too but it's far fairer but you can think of it as that since AI is better than you, it has to win by the hardest method even though it can turtle and win by scientific victory. Besides, there's no guaranteed your counterattack is going to be successful.

[Julius Seeker]

I hate the assumption made that spearmen > cavalry in civ games made since Braveheart. Spearmen defended better against infantry with short weapons. The reason why the pikes won in Braveheart were because they were a surprise tactic, and they were very long. Realistically, heavy cavalry rode right over Hoplite type spearmen on the open fIeld.

[Don]

Pikeman also take practically no damage from range attacks by mounted units!

I was always under the impression that pikes did not counter horses even effectively, but horses are a rather limited resource so even if you were not defending against them effectively, it's still a good idea since there can't be that many horses to go around. It's sort of like how Improsed Explosive Devices do NOT counter the US military but since everything the US military runs is super expensive if you manage to blow up one guy or one vehicle with your cheap IED it's probably worth it, since US values their stuff a lot more than any nation it could be fighting would value their stuff. If US was in some kind of total war and you don't have to worry about war crimes and stuff, you can just roll the tanks over the village and crush anybody in the way and IEDs aren't going to do anything meaningful.

I actually like in ROTK 11 where the best army for most fights is all cavalry unless you're fighting in completely anti-cavalry terrain (swamps, for example). What stops you from always doing that is that horses are limited and expensive compared to other type of weapons, but if you can afford it there's practically no weakness to an all cavalry army.

[Julius Seeker]

Everyone spams pikemen/spearmen.

Anyway, I am playing Immortal (Deity) now on a Tiny map (vs 3 Civs) with Epic time scale. I am having quite a bit of fun. Although I am falling behind in the tech race, I have a good strategy I think; essentially try to Allie with all City States and sack and burn as many rival cities as possible - always focussing on the strongest rival civ.

I am playing the Greeks, vs Japan, France, and Aztec; all fairly aggressive Civs.

I first declared war on France and Japan with an early military. Took out each of their expansion cities and razed them. I extracted a lot of tribute from both civs.

Then I turned on the Aztecs who had grown very strong (eight cities to my two). I liberated Edinburgh gaining eternal allies. I also donated gold to the othe City States in the thousands which gave me 4 allied cities. So now it is more like 6 cities vs 5 (I razed two more Aztec cities positioned on my border, further out from the core of their empire).

My main force is trapped on the other side of the Aztec Empire (4 Hoplite and 1 archer, two others were killed), but my cities have 4 catapults and 1 Hoplite guarding. The Aztecs have iron, I estimate their forces at 3 Swordsmen, 2-3 catapults, ~10 Spearmen, ~5 Archers. They had Jaguar Warriors but I killed them all. My main force of Hoplites is surrounded, and all are fortified (if I move them they're probably instantly dead); my archer is doing little damage; so they're more like a decoy on the south while my catapults push in from the North.

I am guessing that my main force will be wiped out, but I have catapults now so they aren't required anymore (but they have tons of experience, so I hope they survive until my catapults can make it into the main battle.

I probably will have trouble winning outright if I don't crush the Aztecs, but the game is a lot more fun and interesting compared to playing King on a Huge map.

[Julius Seeker]

Crushed the Aztecs (they surrendered all resources and cities except their capital Japan eliminated France. Japan is sitting on 8 cities, I have 3 (not including the Aztec ones I am razing to the ground).

Workin on getting 1000 gold so I can Allie the last city state.

My army is down to 4 Hoplite, 1 archer, 1 longswordman, and 4 catapults.

The Japanese are weaker in numbers but they may have Samurai, much more powerful than Hoplite.

[Don]

I think Samurais are probably the strongest unit in the game relative to its era. It has no weaknesses and yet it can beat the mounted unit of its era since it starts with Shock 1 and Bushido. I had Germany's pikeman unique version (same as Pikeman but half the cost) with like level 10 XP and with a Great General nearby but you're still projected to lose to a Samurai, and it actually gets worse as you take damage due to Bushido.

[Julius Seeker]

They had three Samurai. took out one Hoplite and my Longswordsman. I also lost one Catapult; but in the end I pushed right through and took 4 cities and it was all that was needed.

Unfortunately, almost as soon as we had peace, they marched right in and took one of my allied city states due to an eternal war they are having (removed the effects of peace that should have been in place).

Gunpowder units are now on the field.
I am going to march on the Aztecs and finish them off, then France (who I liberated, but they quickly turned against me), an then I will go for Kyoto.

I have a few units of Greek Companion Cavalry now which were instrumental in defeating the Japanese Samurai + Trebuchet. My army is somewhat weaker, overall, than before; I figure I will have to win this before they get Riflemen and Artillary.

[Don]

I think peace treaty does not force you to have peace with the allies. You'd have to add that to the conditions under 'other players' tab. I know some people were talking about how you can just snipe their allied city states after you sign a peace treaty with a computer and the computer cannot do anything about it. The computer will *usually* sign peace treaty with the city states which always accepts them (unless at permanent war) but they don't have to offer the peace treaty.

[Julius Seeker]

I attempted it, but Venice is greyed out with the note that they are eternally at war with Japan.

[Julius Seeker]

Perhaps it would have been more difficult had the rival civs not all been on my continent, but Deity/Immortal is fairly easy staying small, but highly aggressive.