My first win on Immortal... Just not any fun.

Yay me, I did it with my ole boy Ramses II. I took out the romans and the Inca early with war chariots, vassaled Louis and Bismarck, destroyed Ghandi when he attempted a cultural victory, and nuked the hell out of Charlemagne and voted myself to a diplomatic victory (had 60% of the population) at the end of the 1800's.

I did have to reload once to win though, during the middle ages Charlemagne beat me to vassalizing Louis, on the reload I gifted education to charles to stop the war and 2 turns later Louis became my vassal. I still had to have a nasty war with Charlemagne though as he was more powerful than me until the modern era, but drafted infantry and a mean SoD ate up 2 of his cities while he burned his much larger SoD on taking one city and failing to take Cuzco. He gave me the city he captured from me for peace.

I can say I'm glad I won, as it was my third try on immortal but the problem is the game just doesn't seem fun on those levels because all you do is war. I didn't rex (I built 1 extra city in the BC era, the rest were captured), I just produced war chariots and went to war, then recouped and went to war, then recouped and went to war, you get the idea. I want peace, I want a friend that I don't backstab. Anyone else have this problem and decide to play the easier difficulties again? I'm thinking I may do RPC like madscientist since I always read his games and they are always a lot of fun and it seems you can actually do what you want, not what you have to. So is monarch the right place for this, or could you get by without war on Emperor. I've won at least 10 emperor games but I don't think I've ever done it without war.

I'm a generally peaceful builder, and many of my games Emperor/Immortal were played without war. Very feasible if you go for cultural wins, let the enemy worry about razing your legendary cities rather than vice versa . I think whether a game can be peaceful or not is largely down to who and where your neighbors are. At the higher levels you can no longer force the pace regardless of the situation, and sometimes war makes perfect sense.

The Rook said:

I'm a generally peaceful builder, and many of my games Emperor/Immortal were played without war. Very feasible if you go for cultural wins, let the enemy worry about razing your legendary cities rather than vice versa . I think whether a game can be peaceful or not is largely down to who and where your neighbors are. At the higher levels you can no longer force the pace regardless of the situation, and sometimes war makes perfect sense.

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Wow... What type of settings are you on that you can get a big enough empire not to get eaten alive without at least one war? I find that the CPU REXes so much faster than I possibly can on Immortal (and Emperor is a stretch) that I can't get enough cities to A) tech like I need to B) survive against my massive opponents, and C) build enough temples to get all those happy cultural cathedrals for a cultural victory. Maybe I just suck, but the numbers just don't seem to be there to keep my expansion going, as far as I can tell.

AfterShafter said:

Wow... What type of settings are you on that you can get a big enough empire not to get eaten alive without at least one war? I find that the CPU REXes so much faster than I possibly can on Immortal (and Emperor is a stretch) that I can't get enough cities to A) tech like I need to B) survive against my massive opponents, and C) build enough temples to get all those happy cultural cathedrals for a cultural victory. Maybe I just suck, but the numbers just don't seem to be there to keep my expansion going, as far as I can tell.

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I play standard, normal, continents. I also generally gravitate to using good rexers/builders (Pacal and HC for example). It is not uncommon to be able to block of the AI with some aggressive early rexing and backfill the remaining space at leisure. 6 cities is certainly winnable (through culture), and often practically attainable without war at Immortal level. Normally I find that three good commerce cities are enough to keep pace tech wise, of course much of this depends on who your AI opponents are. I think diplomacy is most critical to maintain the peace, and really it hardly matters whether I have 6 or 12 cities for this purpose, as I would never be powerful enough to deter the warmongers from declaring. Of course if Shaka is your immediate neighbor then this will be difficult, but I never claimed that it is "always" possible to win without war at Emperor/Immortal level.

brades said:

I can say I'm glad I won, as it was my third try on immortal but the problem is the game just doesn't seem fun on those levels because all you do is war.

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brades,

First let me congratulate you on your first Immortal win! Good job! It looks like you really had to work and truly earned it.

Though I think I will have to agree with you that the higher levels are just not as fun anymore. I've beat the game on Deity, and anything Emperor and above just feels like work in that if one thing goes wrong (lose out founding a religion, don't complete wonder X first, etc) it feels like the entire game is lost. I believe you experienced this with your vassalage when you reloaded.

While I have beat Emperor without a war, that usually isn't the case. However, I can't say that I've ever beat a Deity game without a war. (And I've never actually won an Immortal game.) Usually I'm on the early offensive, and then I try to block the AI onto some corner of an island and with closed boarders I'll try to grab as much of the good land as possible. This doesn't always work, and if I have to build more than three cities to block in the enemy, typically I'll end up bankrupting my economy.

What I've been doing, instead, is playing odd games. I really like the Earth 34 Civs map. Last weekend I experimented with culture in an all peace game, once with a marathon speed and once with a quick speed. I started as Louis, in cramped Europe. I had the English to my northwest, the dutch to my north, the germans to my east, the holy romans to my southeast, the romans to my south, the celts to my south and the spanis to my southwest. Ever seen a legendary culture city capture three other capital cities?

Though I did find a bug, if you want to call it that. The percentage of chance for revolt stays the same regardless of game speed. This is important because if there is a 5% chance of revolt, then that's a one in 20 chance of revolting. Twenty turns on Marathon is a lot shorter time-frame than 20 turns on Quick, thus giving me access to another city many years earlier on Marathon. It seems that Marathon favors the culture expansion. I never did finish the marathon game, but the quick game ended in the late 20th century. I imagine having the two other legendary culture cities a few hundred years earlier would have let me finish at least a century earlier.

The current game I'm playing is an always war game; this time with Ramses. It's amusing running into a civ, and having no dialogue, just the trumpets of war. Though I did find another bug; the random event which triggers peace (the great mediator) happens from time to time. You can say yes, you both go to peace, and it instantly re-declares war automatically, complete with the trumpets of war, too!

If you couldn't tell, my advice to you is to relax and have some fun. If you enjoy the RPC games, go play them. If you enjoy a 34 civilization 6000 year war, try that. But just because you CAN beat an immortal game, doesn't mean you NEED to play on that difficulty.

Heh, fair enough Rook. I guess my settings aren't very friendly for this. I play on huge/marathon/Big and small, and the CPU's have tons of room to expand, and any area where I could conceivably backfill usually has someone in it. Six cities is rough when CPU's are getting 30+ and are hungry for blood, and start pulling in thousands of tech per turn.

brades said:

<snip>
I can say I'm glad I won, as it was my third try on immortal but the problem is the game just doesn't seem fun on those levels because all you do is war.
<snip>
I want peace, I want a friend that I don't backstab.
<snip>

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If you want a nice peaceful game go into the customised game and select the following as your only opponents:
- Elizabeth
- Hatshepsut
- Ghandi

You can habve a nice peaceful game with no war.

BTW I just had a couple of OCC deity games with these three. (I am a noble & monarch player so I lost). There was never any chance of war. In one game I built a grand total of one warrior. I was never in any danger. umh, Lizzy and Ghandhi were building spaceships while my two warriors defended my capital. (I was still researching the tech to build factories, can't remember what its called).

Yes, Immortal and Deity are less fun than in previous games in the series. Yes, you are also right about your neighbors at these levels, because if you have the wrong neighbours they will rush you BC. This makes a culture win completely impossible, because with such neighbours you have to go to war, and that allows other civs to build those crucial early wonders.

When starting an Immortal / Deity game on normal sized continents, it is vitally important for you to find out who your neighbours are fast. If they are not military nuts, and most civs aren't, then PROVIDING you use the diplomatic screen to your advantage, you can go for a culture win. However, if there is just one military nut in the bunch, you have to neutralise him fast. The best way is to simply warrior rush his capital city in the first few turns to prevent him expanding / linking up resources. I had to do this with 2 military nuts at once in one Immortal game, and build a few wonders whilst I teched to archery, to reinforce my camped warriors, and then axe to reinforce the camped archers, and finally to cats to take the 2 cities.

Providing you do have safe neighbours, then all you need to do is found 3 or 4 cities yourself if you are going for a culture win. The extra cities you need will either flip, or can be built on useless land later in the game. You will have to build quite a few early wonders in those cities, so war is the last thing you want to do in the early part of the game, hence the warrior rush. Needless to say the military nuts on other continents will come for you big time later in the game, but by then you should have enough power to fight a purely defencive war. If I do have to go to war proper in the early part of the game, then I immediately forget any chance of a culture win and just go for a Dom win.

I must admit I have abandoned quite a few games simply because I get tired of fighting all the time, and the military nuts are just a complete pain in the ass at these levels. Yes you can deal with them, but like you found, it means constant warfare, and not much else.

I think the game is unbalanced beyond Emperor on normal sized continents, because you lack the flexibility to choose your own destiny, and instead your destiny is dictated by who your neighbours are. Yes, it is very satisfying to get the eventual win, but the journey there isn't much fun.

When I get fed up with the predictability of the higher levels, I go play another game or a quick game of Emperor. I still find BTS enormous fun, but I do get tired of the unbalanced nature of the higher levels and certain map types. The best thing I want from Civ 5 is better AI, because most of the balance problems we have to put up with at the moment, would instantly disappear with a more intelligent enemy, who didn't have a one track mind, or an insane amount of perks. Better AI will doubtless create loads of different and new problems, (LOL), but onwards and upwards.

Regards - Mr P

I do abandon a few games when i know i'm winning. Top on score with a tech lead and the army starting to roll everyone. The sheer amount of units the AI fields on immortal that forces you to field loads slows the game down too much to my liking . Don't even get me started on how many units deity AIs field .
Im quite happy playing an low unit interesting technical start or blitz . I play countless starts on deity cause the long grind to steal a win is relentless

"I did have to reload once to win though, during the middle ages"

lol

In essence- i won on immortal because i cheated.

"I can say I'm glad I won"

lol

So what if you had to reload? Big deal. Yesterday, I went into WorldBuilder and deleted Gilgamesh's units and declared peace since it interfered with my space victory (and because of the minor fact that I was so engrossed in research I just had a warrior per city haha.)

I did get the space victory but I didn't deserve it, you deserve yours and congrats on it.

About war.. well, the only deity and immortal games I've played were for fun, just to see how bad I was going to get creamed so it was no surprise that they declared war.

But I have been noticing an annoying change in AIs at Noble (yeah, that terribly difficult level ) that I've been playing for quite some time.. these guys started to constantly declare war on me. They used to love me (well, at least bear with me) at the first 3 levels but now they just love hating me. Especially Shaka's funny, when I meet him he's annoyed with me. You just can't beat that.

Since I suck at military warfare and am obsessed with culture and research, these wars usually result in me starting a new game, since I'm already stuck with a few cities and the others have gazillions, because I put off settlers to get the Oracle and Stonehenge, oooh and that library of course.

Reloading/world buildering are in essence cheating so I wouldn't really pat myself on the back for winning a game in which I did either of those two things.

JFleme said:

Reloading/world buildering are in essence cheating so I wouldn't really pat myself on the back for winning a game in which I did either of those two things.

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I would argue in favor of reloading misclicks, and definitely in situations like a worker moving into range of a barb you already see and starting an improvement before you can click on it at the start of a turn. Basically I'm not willing to put up with artificial difficulty associated with being screwed by the interface.

Then again, I probably reload < 10% of my games. Sometimes I actually do put up with being screwed by the interface just because I'm lazy.

Too lazy to cheat .

I don't quite get the comments about not being able to expand adequately compared to the AIs... from my experience you can out-expand them on an average Deity start. The question is more whether it's worth it. Teching enough that you can keep parity by trading or amassing enough of an army that you can join dogpiles could be more important. As may securing a few high-impact wonders (won't help me as much as more cities from my experience, but a far-away AI building/conquering all the good ones can result in massive headaches later).

Total wonderspam is the only type of game that I feel is often not feasible.

I reload misclicks sometimes like when I am sure I sent the axeman with the settler but for some reason I didnt and the axeman stayed in the capital while a barbarian ate my settler

Weird misclick, where you don't realize that your axeman would never be able to keep up with that settler.

Anyway... what do I care.

I pretty much stay at Noble level forever, as it seems, as all those handicaps for the AI only serves to ruin my fun. I'm not the type player who will chase a specific Tech for another free Tech every single time, or who has to build a certain Wonder in order to get a that will enable me to bulb a Tech that will to catapult me towards some other Tech. That can be fun to do as an experiment once or twice, but then it just gets repetitive and ends with me restarting all the time because I failed with the plan at a specific juncture.

On Noble level I can pretty much set my own goals, whether its World Domination in the Modern Age or peaceful colonization or anything in between. I don't have to be the Tech leader every single time to enjoy the game. Achieving victory conditions, getting ever higher scores and beating the AI at ever increasing levels of difficulty simply doesn't have that much of an appeal to me.

Then again, I might just be a piss-poor Civ player, but I know how I like to play from playing this series from its original conception. The fun isn't following some guide that lets me win at Immortal level, or something like that, but to try and make my own strategies, try them out and keep polishing them until I get them right (or discard them altogether). To each their own, I guess...

I agree about the lack of fun. The focus and goal chasing that immortal requires really takes away from all the options civ has, that being said I'm sticking with it until i get a few Deity wins just for the old ego's sake. I expect after that point I will go back to playing emperor for random games and monarch for when I want to try something strange.

Cusanus said:

Weird misclick, where you don't realize that your axeman would never be able to keep up with that settler.

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Um, if you group them together, they'll travel at the speed of the slowest unit (ie, axeman).

Cusanus,

When you stack units together they stay together and move at the speed of the slowest unit. He misclicked his shift-click to group them. It's a perfectly normal misclick.