The A.I and taking cities (general feedback)

First time ever trying this mod out and I'm having a blast so far.

I made a mistake by picking a large map with 17 civs + Barbarian civs active all on the old world. So its safe to assume that by classical era everyone was crowded

See I was under the impression that larger civs would start gobbling up smaller civs with relative ease. There has been tons of wars (loving the culture effects wars have, seeing awesome border disputes happening between different civs) but nobody has lost a city, so there are tons of one city civs all over the map. Which I kind of like for the medieval era but I would like to have another larger rival to equal my own empire.

As it stands in 1000 B.C it seems with my 11 cities (no easy feat taking these cities mind you ), I could easily steam roll everyone despite playing on Immortal difficulty with Ruthless A.I on. Also, I made the mistake of turning off Revolutions mod which would have probably slowed my expansion.

Now on defense the A.I is doing extremely well at guarding it's cities. It prioritizes defensive buildings, sets up forts with proper garrisons, and sets up archers on hills/forests. I've even seen the A.I making forts around strategic resources and using culture to claim them, something I NEVER thought the A.I was smart enough to do ! I'm actually pretty surprised at how well they can play defensively, maybe too good for the A.I to attack.

Now my question is this after investing much time into this current campaign, should I start a new campaign with less major civs so that they will have more rooms to grow and actually threaten me and their neighbors with military power?

Or maybe wait until later eras where hopefully the more aggressive civs will have an easier time expanding and taking cities?

Thanks bros.



Cliffs:
A.I is really good at defense, but performs somewhat poorly when attacking other civs and actually taking their cities.



Bonus question: Using Barbariacivs, will there still be a chance for minor civs to grow once I make contact with the new world?

We're very aware that the war strategies (particularly for attack) are lacking. I have seen other AI players quite successful at taking down opponents though since some tweaks were made to get them building more siege weapons. But yeah, overall they have numerous flaws in their approach to going to war right now.

GuitarDemon said:

Bonus question: Using Barbariacivs, will there still be a chance for minor civs to grow once I make contact with the new world?

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Yeah, all the new world stuff can be edited in the BUG options ingame. You can make it so that new world civs totally ignore your development entirely, with barbarian cities becoming civs, conquering people, building wonders, founding religions, so by the time your version of the Santa Maria reaches the new world the Aztecs could have conquered the Caribbean...and be ready for you armed with rifles and cannon and zeppelins (just as an example).

You can edit it out of game in Caveman2Cosmos/UserSettings/Revolution.ini (same file you use for changing the max civs that can form due to revolutions and barbarian cities settling.)

You can make it so they only become civs once you make contact with the barbarian cities, or they can be civs but only minor ones until you reach them, or you can make them be super aggressive towards you at expense of their own wars.

Also, I made the mistake of turning off Revolutions mod which would have probably slowed my expansion.

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Not really.

Giving the AI room to expand works better. But if you use Earth maps and have everyone start in the old world you will see just what you've gotten.

Try a Perfect Mongoose map Huge with Start everywhere and about 10-12 AI.

Using BarbCiv allows Barb cities to eventually become minor civs and then regular civs if they survive long enough. Can also crowd the world. Barb World just allows the barbarians to have the same # of cities in the game that matches the # of "players" that start the game.

Aggressive AI just makes the AI into warmongers and stunts their growth. They concentrate too much on Mil production while city and tile production lag.

Rev just makes large AI empires splinter and reduces the challenge of having a strong robust AI empire to deal with in the Mid to late game.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

Rev just makes large AI empires splinter and reduces the challenge of having a strong robust AI empire to deal with in the Mid to late game.

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Mid to late game AIs do tend to suffer hugely from revolutions. Makes it hard to end up with a solid enemy to fight and slowly wreak in a war of attrition and trenches and mud and nuclear warfare. I spend all this time building F22 Raptors and stationing them in bunkers only to never have them fight off inferior F35s. I sunk a few galleons in a port once, bleagh, Raptors aren't meant to carry Harpoons!

It's partially due (I've found) to them switching civics every opportunity, and suffering ages of anarchy, slowly gaining revolutionary sentiment. They don't even switch wisely! I had a guy go from Monarchy to Anarchism! He intentionally suffered an entire stoppage of his civilisation for several turns, just to switch to a civic that caused all his cities 60 additional unhappiness and a huge load of maintenance!

Thunderbrd said:

to get them building more siege weapons.

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I think this right here might be a solution. They have large stacks and have had huge border wars in my campaign so far, but when it comes to seiging and conquering cities is were they perform weakly.

IronClaymore said:

You can make it so they only become civs once you make contact with the barbarian cities, or they can be civs but only minor ones until you reach them, or you can make them be super aggressive towards you at expense of their own wars.

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I just realized I omitted saying that I have barbarian world turned on as well as barbarian civs.

So my question is, will there be any minor civs in the new world with the barbarianworld turned on?

Most of the barbarian cities in the old world have turned into minor civs have developed into full civs at this point, like I said I thought most of them would have gotten crushed early on lol

JosEPh_II said:

Not really.
Rev just makes large AI empires splinter and reduces the challenge of having a strong robust AI empire to deal with in the Mid to late game.

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Interesting, so Revs is more of a hindrance to the A.I than the human player even on harder difficulties?

Shame, I really loved the idea of having to fight civil wars but not at the expense of A.I performance.



Either way I'm going to continue this campaign and see how the a.i performs in the later eras with proper siege equipment, maybe they will have an easier time then. I mean I don't want them to take cities easily but I've gotten 3 larger civs to declare war on a small 1 city civ and they haven't managed to put his city under any real pressure.

GuitarDemon said:

So my question is, will there be any minor civs in the new world with the barbarianworld turned on?

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The factors that cause barbarians to become a civ can be seen in the BUG options screen.

One of those variables is the number of civs that have seen the city.

This means that when you get caravels out exploring the new world will probably contain lots of barbarians but once many civs get out there exploring some will change to minor civs. Therefor by the time you can get troops over there there may be some minor and perhaps not so minor civs to meet. Of course it is also possible that those civs will be wiped out by the barbarians too.

One problem with the AI that I remember from my last game is the general unit production strategy. I remember huge stacks of healers, javelineers and whatnot when there was better options for offensive units available..

Dancing Hoskuld said:

This means that when you get caravels out exploring the new world will probably contain lots of barbarians but once many civs get out there exploring some will change to minor civs. Therefor by the time you can get troops over there there may be some minor and perhaps not so minor civs to meet. Of course it is also possible that those civs will be wiped out by the barbarians too.

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Man that sounds awesome. Can't wait to get to that part of the campaign.

chmoosi said:

One problem with the AI that I remember from my last game is the general unit production strategy. I remember huge stacks of healers, javelineers and whatnot when there was better options for offensive units available..

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I just now noticed the "A.I and the Art of War" sticky, so the modders are very aware of this issue.

I think the A.I needs to build more siege equipment + the stronger offensive units available. Then choose a target city and attack with the intention of either taking the target city, unconditional surrender, vassalization or complete annhilation of another civ.



I think I'll start a new campaign on Deity, less civs so they have more room to expand, and nightmare mode on and see how the a.i plays under those conditions. Hopefully I won't get my butt kicked too much

Getting into the medieval era in my campaign and the A.I is having a much better time taking cities now.

Their unit selection is still somewhat poor. One stack with 76 longbowmen , would have been better to split those between other units. A couple of pike men in there could have saved them from getting slaughtered.

Also at the rate I'm going tech wise, I'll be hitting the renaissance era before 1 a.d.

Is this normal? Playing on immortal right now, usually a monarch player on vanilla so not sure how I have such a huge tech lead.

What setting do you guys play on to slow the tech down?

I'm playing on marathon speed so that may be the cause.

Getting the date to match the tech across all game speeds, map sizes and difficulty levels is next to impossible. The date is mostly a guide except when it comes to animal spawns where is integral.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Getting the date to match the tech across all game speeds, map sizes and difficulty levels is next to impossible. The date is mostly a guide except when it comes to animal spawns where is integral.

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But which combination of speed, size and difficulty do you think might be closest to correct in this regard? For example, does Nightmare mode help?

Renaissance in BCs is more than just a smidge and a tweak off... (although I will say that I expect GD will find the Renaissance is very long and thus catches one up by 500 years or so)

Not snail I am in mid to late classical era and the date is 4100 BC.

There ARE some things we can do to calibrate to the dating that don't involve just rewriting the whole game speeds data. But it's not something that should be done often. We CAN increase both the tech and construct values - as long as we keep the same ratio between them perhaps it would work.

Yudishtira said:

But which combination of speed, size and difficulty do you think might be closest to correct in this regard? For example, does Nightmare mode help?

Renaissance in BCs is more than just a smidge and a tweak off... (although I will say that I expect GD will find the Renaissance is very long and thus catches one up by 500 years or so)

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Deity difficulty with slower speeds and larger maps, but changing the starting conditions so that you are the only civ in the game (mastery victory condition). So there's several hundred, or easily over a thousand turns of you being the only civilisation, and every turn not bringing much change.

And then the barbarians suddenly spring out of nowhere into minor civs and steal the Sedentary Lifestyle free tech and put it into Agriculture, almost right after you get Chiefdom. You can change the difficulty using BUG options after that point if you want.

After that there's the long slow crawl of years from 10000 BC to 1 AD, but there are a lot more techs in general now, so it takes more turns than it used to.

A silly thing I'm trying right now is I increased all the tech costs by x3, but increased the various research build processes by x2....on eternity speed (yes I'm a masochist). I'm still getting a tech every 10 turns, or 50 years, but the years might just get into AD before I build a spaceship.

GuitarDemon said:

I just realized I omitted saying that I have barbarian world turned on as well as barbarian civs.

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I use to play this way too, until I realized that it stunted the AI's grown into almost non-existence. I even had one map where I won without ever attacking anyone. The barbarians took out all the AI npcs...

It also spawns lots of civilisations, particularly on C2C, where you have a much more protracted start.

Starting a new campaign soon. Couple questions.

Question 1: Does picking "culturally linked starts" also affect what civilization a barbarian civ turns into?

I believe it seems that way but I have no way of knowing which civs were barbarian before in my last game because they've all developed into full civs now. I hope so, I thought it was a neat feature.

Question 2: Do certain civs favor founding certain religions?

I saw assyrians and babylonians found and favor the mesopotamian religion. Thought that was pretty cool

Question 3: Where do I go to toggle on the ability to see what religion each civs has on the score display (bottom right list of all the civs)?

That would be helpful to quickly see what all the civs have chosen.

Question 4: How well do old world civs colonize the new world?

I know this mod wasn't made around this setting but I've quickly grown to love it. I'm just concerned that, while I will have an easy time planning and organizing colonizing the new world, the A.I will avoid or not have the potential to do the same. For this reason, I plan to make the old world extremely weak and vulnerable by having barbarian civs spawn only after 3 eras but even then I have a feeling the A.I will still avoid the new world because of the barbarians.





Note on tech rate: In vanilla civ4, how fast I founded techs depended on the difficulty level I choose. So on harder difficulties I had to found techs much earlier to stay on par with civs. This is why I think choosing a harder difficulty level will probably only bring the same results.

I mean I don't expect to enter each era at appropriate times, like Dancing Hoskuld mentioned, this would be impossible. But I do hope to get it a little closer my next game.

Any input on how to do this is much appreciated.



Also, now that I've familiarized myself with this forum better I will start giving my feedback in the appropriate threads.

Thanks bros



edit: Want to point out that I'm not sure if other people were having the same problems as I did or it was because of the settings I chose. . The idea of tribal warfare was too alluring, so I wanted to make sure I had some early neighboring tribes to fight against. Which I did and it was awesome but as a consequence I hampered the growth of other civs in the old world.

1. No

2. Yes

3. Don't know, I have always had it on and never changed it.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

1. No

2. Yes

3. Don't know, I have always had it on and never changed it.

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Thanks man. Added one last question.

On point 3, I believe I may have turned it off by accident messing around with the BUG settings but for can't for the life of me find it.