Did the game get easier?

Djinn8

Chieftain
Joined
Dec 22, 2008
Messages
65
I last played around the release of BNW. I used to win pretty consistantly on Emperor, but struggled with Immortal.

Today I reinstalled ciV and started a game on Emperor. It felt really easy. The AI didn't spam cities all over the place, the big expander of the game was Greece who built a 3 citys and conqured another 3. After the classical period, no civs built any more cities, sticking to the two or three that they had initially till the end of the game. The pangea map I was playing on was really empty. The tech progression and troop numbers of the AI felt like I was playing on King difficulty.

I started a new game up, this time on Immortal. Again the AI stuck to building just three cities (America built 4) and I rolled over 3 of the civs without pause with just 3 Comp Bows and 2 Spearmen. The game was in the bag before reaching Medieval.

This isn't how I remember it being at all. Did something change in the last year or so?
 
maybe you forgot to change the difficulty setting?

Its either that or one of those once in a blue moon games. An Outlier.
 
I too stopped playing about a year after BNW and recently returned 1.5 years later.

Despite the long gap in playing and not really playing optimally it feels extremely easy to beat immortal. I only played one emperor game before I switched back to immortal (what I'd been playing when I left) because I won by so much. And yes, immortal feels easier to me as well. Not sure why...however on my games they don't stay small like that. Maybe you rolled some interesting flavors? I usually have tons of wars, expansionist AI, etc.
 
Maybe for both of you, during your abstinence period your brains continued to work on improved strategies while you were sleeping. But seriously as Callonia indicated you can't really tell much from a few games: random means sometimes you flip a coin 20 times and it comes up heads each time. Maybe you had different settings before that you don't remember.
 
At times, the game seems so easy I check my settings to ensure that I have the right level. I normally come back to earth with a crash the next game......
 
The trade routes added in BNW are much easier for the human to exploit than the AI.
In addition the need for late game happiness structures by the humans was effectively removed with ideologies.
In addition the G&K fall patch that had given the AI the ability to cash buy units was removed with BNW
So it is indeed significantly easier in BNW.
There are however a couple of features that slow down victory of the human in BNW:

1. The requirement of a DOF to get gold instead of GPT. The key example is luxuries. With G&K you can get 240 gold from any AI upfront with a luxury. With BNW, unless you have a GPT you are only going to get 7 gpt. This has in many circumstances changed the standard path of found capital - found additional city - build NC - found two additional cities to found capital - found two cities (for the first of these a hammer city, for the second a gold city) - build NC- build one additional city.

2. Victory using full Tradition slightly slowed by the patch that made the least useful Tradition policy a requirement to reach the most useful ones. (Same change pretty much eliminating the half Tradition + half anything else)
 
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