1.9.7 Feedback

[Fluffy_Rabbit]

@Ahriman, I note your comments re city placement though I really do not agree. I can see the AI has difficulty with it since the mod is so different from vanilla. I am not an immortal player, however I have many Dune wins at that level and the main reason is my good city placement (generally min distance with back-filling) v AI poor placement, which in long term leads to a big advantage to human. I have even seen AI cities which are one square too far from a groundwater which is not used by any AI city, which then AI then builds a fort to give groundwater as a strategic resource - which is pointless since groundwater is never traded anyway though it appears in the diplomatic screen.

Also the polar region easily supports cities no more than three tiles apart (talking about the map where the polar region is central). My experience is that maximum overlap works very well, a little like vanilla civ though to a greater extent.

Where human has gone Paradise and/or has some polar water, cities tend to have way more food than they can possibly use, though in recent games I have tended to ignore the polar region and concentrated on a compact defensible structure as large as my REX/econ/military permits.

Sometimes I even wish I could place cities 2 tiles apart ...

I also agree with the other poster who has been attacked by BG Kwisatz units - they should definitely be 'defend only' units. I would say the rocket launcher/missile trooper/mongoose line also, since only properly promoted mongoose troops are good attackers and then only against the right units. Generally though the AI is pretty good at warfare.

I am not too bothered about spies not entering AI cities when at war, I did not really think it was necessarily a bug anyway. Best way to use spies is to spread them around when at peace, fortify, wait for promotions and opportunities.

Anyway, still playing it and still loving it, thank you

[ChrisAdams3997]

Well, while I'm glad that it works for you, I can say that the game is not designed around the intent that cities should be crowded together (though I see no reason to try to necessarily remove it as a valid strategy either, good games allow multiple paths to success while still allowing failure as well). It's my belief that a very small number of players use this strategy and I for one prefer to follow a more typical city placement strategy if for nothing else than the immersion value over the possible min/max viewpoint that it's less efficient.

On that note, most players would likely find it very gamey if the AI indeed crowded cities as close together as it could and it would make invasions a massive pain in the a... well, you know.

Since I'm here, if you don't know, I'm the guy that basically rewrote and optimized the AI's economic and growth priorities (most of the placement code is from davidallen, though I made some small updates mostly around flavor for spice or terraforming minded AIs). I know it's not perfect, no AI is, but it beats the hell out of the vanilla BTS or even BBtsAI at pacing with a good human player in terms of city growth and research pace. Even with the lessened cheats I gave it in the handicaps. It's been rewritten from the ground up to deal with the differences in terrain, importance of desert(e.i. 'ocean'), etc, such that it's barely recognizable from the original code. I wouldn't complain too much if I were you, no other total conversion mod I know of has done half as good at adapting the AI to such sweeping changes, nonetheless beat vanilla performance .

Ok, done with my rant,