LotR28 - Random Rollicking for Returning Refugees

ThERat, I don't know if you'll quite finish in 10 turns. If it's going to be 12 or so, just finish it up please. At that point, the game is 100% won, instead of just 99.9999% won like it is now, so just get it done, please.

Arathorn
 
Most exciting turns...the AI decided to stop us from winning by space, declaring war and sending over waves of units....not

Instead I tried to maximize production in Rome by cash rushing a hydro plant and another 15% production boost (forget the name) to give us 127spt shortening the last part and finishing it at the end of turn 295.

Just a last check on the demographics


Well, once the part got into our capital, the game is over


Thanks to the team for this game. It taught me a few new things about science builds, but from mid game on it was pretty straight forward and a little anti climatic.
 
Great! Thanks everyone :)

Also, more Civ5 stupidity. I noticed in the game behind the victory screen there is actually an animated spaceship launch going on, but we don't get to see it because of the oh-so-exciting victory screen :wallbash:
 
Lurker Comment:

Enjoyed the read! It definitely does seem as though the beginning of the game is much more interesting and challenging though. Even in my own game I'm playing right now, it feels over way before you get to the end of the game. Maybe it was this way on Civ4 or maybe I don't play on a hard enough level :)
 
Thanks for the game, all.

Not terribly exciting, especially the last 100ish turns. Twas fun for a while, though.

I'm convinced Academies are almost entirely worthless, but I'm glad we used them this game, to see.

The space victory is awfully protracted. And we didn't even come close to finishing the tech tree. Granted, it was only 1852 AD, but it felt like it took too long.

The fact that the AI civs just let us launch is also quite disheartening. If they're going for the win (which I think is the proper way to program them), they should try to stop someone else who is obviously close to winning. I mean, given our position, I'm sure they would've failed miserably at invading, but it would have been nice to at least see the effort.

Again, thanks all!

Arathorn
 
Lurker Comment:

Enjoyed the read! It definitely does seem as though the beginning of the game is much more interesting and challenging though. Even in my own game I'm playing right now, it feels over way before you get to the end of the game. Maybe it was this way on Civ4 or maybe I don't play on a hard enough level :)

I've played Civ3, Civ4 and now Civ5, and in my experience this has always been the case. I always found the early part of the game much more interesting, and usually I would get to a point where the game was effectively won a long time before the actual victory.
 
Lurker Comment:

I've played Civ3, Civ4 and now Civ5, and in my experience this has always been the case. I always found the early part of the game much more interesting, and usually I would get to a point where the game was effectively won a long time before the actual victory.

Not to derail, but is there a way to lessen this effect? Play on a harder difficulty? Change the game speed? One idea I had (that I don't do much) is force myself to win a certain way or with a variant, so that I can't just roll over everyone.
 
Lurker Comment:

Not to derail, but is there a way to lessen this effect? Play on a harder difficulty? Change the game speed? One idea I had (that I don't do much) is force myself to win a certain way or with a variant, so that I can't just roll over everyone.

I like playing variants. One of my best games of Civ5 so far was playing an always war variant where I ended up with a single city, fighting off Roman GDRs with my heavily promoted artillery, and trying to squeeze out a culture victory before running out of time (and then I lost when Siam unexpectedly pulled together enough city-state allies to win the UN vote).

I never liked playing at higher difficulty levels because that always seemed to involve too much game-mechanic analysis, and lost the role-playing aspects which I enjoy.
 
Lurker Comment:



Not to derail, but is there a way to lessen this effect? Play on a harder difficulty? Change the game speed? One idea I had (that I don't do much) is force myself to win a certain way or with a variant, so that I can't just roll over everyone.

Well, we forced ourselves to win this one a certain way and it still had that effect.

Typically, as players we work on exponential build-up, so that once we catch the AI, we leap ahead and win. It's that period of equality that is most interesting -- or being slightly behind.

Harder difficulty levels tend to move that period of time where you're equal to later in the game, so you can experience wars (or whatever) with different units, but you run the risk of getting crushed early before you can get anything going.

Probably the best game I had for consistent struggles was the Progressive Paranoia game I ran back in Civ3 days. Each age brought new restrictions on how we could play, so by the end we were at war with everyone. Definitely artificial restraints on how to play the game, but they seemed to work well. I'm not sure Civ5 can be so constrained....but maybe.

It's a perfectly fine topic and it's now as on-topic here as anything else, so I'm happy to continue discussing it.

Arathorn
 
Well, we forced ourselves to win this one a certain way and it still had that effect.

Typically, as players we work on exponential build-up, so that once we catch the AI, we leap ahead and win. It's that period of equality that is most interesting -- or being slightly behind.

Harder difficulty levels tend to move that period of time where you're equal to later in the game, so you can experience wars (or whatever) with different units, but you run the risk of getting crushed early before you can get anything going.

Probably the best game I had for consistent struggles was the Progressive Paranoia game I ran back in Civ3 days. Each age brought new restrictions on how we could play, so by the end we were at war with everyone. Definitely artificial restraints on how to play the game, but they seemed to work well. I'm not sure Civ5 can be so constrained....but maybe.

It's a perfectly fine topic and it's now as on-topic here as anything else, so I'm happy to continue discussing it.

Arathorn

Interestingly enough, in my current Civ5 game (on prince and way too easy, but I was just learning the new mechanics), I declared on multiple civs, even though I didn't need to. Just was hoping it would be more of a challenge. The only reason I'm playing through is that I'm obviously subpar at handling military because I'm still getting used to Civ5. My next game will be harder. I still don't understand how 3-tile artillery work. I thought they could shoot over forest, but I can't attack a city in my game from most of the 3-tile spaces. They are blocked by something.

That changing variant sounds good. I think what happens is min-maxing like in RPGs. You play the early game in a very strict manner in order to maximize your power/goal in the later game. If you're successful, the later game is a breeze. If you're not, it might be slightly harder, but the biggest threat (as you said) is getting beat down early.

It's almost as if starting or ending the game in always war would help.

I'm really anxious to get to my next game and try some different things (I tried ICS in this last game, but screwed it up because I had happiness problems. I had ICS SPs but ended up conquering/razing everything because it was EASIER).

EDIT: Just thought of an interesting mod idea - create semi-random objectives for the player to accomplish. These could be related, such that, in the beginning it would randomly choose a direction - say - space victory. Then moving forward, it would place other goals (maybe that 4 academies are required to enter Industrial Age) and restrictions (no bulbing) such that the player would have to play more balanced. What if you were required, suddenly, to conquer a city that had mountain tiles for observatories? You'd have to fight a war of some kind, but the goal is still space. Actually you could do this without a mod I suppose :)
 
To me anything but AW (even that is a chore after a while) is getting old real fast. Just have a look at how dead the SG forum is.
SG forums have always been very active during the initial phases of civ games, but this game is pretty dead.

Sad really...the whole balance in this game is broken...I think a continent setup magnifies the issues as the AI is totally incapable to cross the sea. So both parties sit there and klick end turn til the game is over :(
 
The fact that the AI civs just let us launch is also quite disheartening. If they're going for the win (which I think is the proper way to program them), they should try to stop someone else who is obviously close to winning. I mean, given our position, I'm sure they would've failed miserably at invading, but it would have been nice to at least see the effort.

Arathorn

Lurker:

I was thinking the same thing. Then I wondered, if that would mean all others declaring. That made me get a picture of the C&C end of games where they sold all structures to free some troops to run at you.

2K Greg has posted some info on the next patch a few things to possible help diplo.
 
To me anything but AW (even that is a chore after a while) is getting old real fast. Just have a look at how dead the SG forum is.
SG forums have always been very active during the initial phases of civ games, but this game is pretty dead.

Sad really...the whole balance in this game is broken...I think a continent setup magnifies the issues as the AI is totally incapable to cross the sea. So both parties sit there and klick end turn til the game is over :(

They are saying that they are tweaking the AI in the next patch to expand to other lands, who knows.
 
I do hope the patch improves a few things, makes AI less erratic and more active.

However, the bulk of issues won't be addressed (not surprisingly so), e.g why are the early buildings more efficient than later ones (which makes ICS so powerful), why is there hardly any incentive to have big cities, why is it so much better to trade post spam and buy stuff than build, why are individual tiles so insignificant in choice of city placement, damn why are roads a penalty... and the list goes on.

A really big patch is needed to address all that.
 
Those are likey to require an expansion to get right. A lot of work and testing would be needed. That is, if they can get those things addressed.
 
So many things would be relatively easy to patch:

- Make later buildings better and earlier buildings worse
- Give all resources +1 of whatever they do when they are improved so land matters a bit
- Double gold cost to buy everything
- Make units spend two MPs to attack instead of one to make hit-and-run less effective but still possible
- Lower the exponent on city growth
- Have maritime city-states give fixed amt of food (like cultural) divided among cities however

Ultimately, though, until they fix the AI on multiple levels (strategic and tactical), the game is going to not be particularly attractive.

Strategic level, the AI needs to get better about its gold -- buying city-states, paying less for luxury resources, and making more gold. It also should be better about its army composition, with more fast units, especially. Finally, the AI should know when it's about to lose and take drastic measures to prevent it. Go down in a blaze of glory like a human would.

Tactically, it's also a disaster. I'm with Jaffa that just zerging might well be better. It retreats when it should attack and attacks when it should retreat. Literally, a 180-degree turn on just that decision might make it twice as good as it is now. This AI would be very difficult to get right, but it's current incarnation is just inacceptably bad, IMO.

Arathorn
 
- Double gold cost to buy everything

Gold cost needs be related to city size and/or infrastructure. It should be prohibitively expensive to buy an atomic bomb in your beach-head town that you just established on your opponent's continent, relatively cheaper back in your capital city.
 
Thanks for the game, all!

Not terribly exciting, especially the last 100ish turns.
One reason for that was because we conquered our whole continent even though we wanted to pursue a space victory. Every Civ game would have been decided by then and the last turns boring, on almost all levels of difficulty. But refraining from conquering these idiot AIs of course is hard... :rolleyes:

The fact that the AI civs just let us launch is also quite disheartening. If they're going for the win (which I think is the proper way to program them), they should try to stop someone else who is obviously close to winning.
Other people have complained about that it's not possible to get true friends in Civ 5. Here, we had one: Alex called us friend during my turns, so if he had attacked us to stop us from launching, I'm sure others would have complained again. :crazyeye: But yeah, I know what you mean. I wonder what would have happened if some other strong AIs would have remained on our landmass (with on-par techs), if some had declared then?
 
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