My fear: Changes that may look intersting but will get ruined by the AI

What do I mean with that title ? That many of the possible cool additions will be able to hurt the human player but not the AI which plays by different rules anyway.

Happines penalty because of a neighbor with strong tourism and a different ideology ? Doesn't mean a thing. AI civs play with virtually unlimited happines.
World Congress can globally increase unit maintenance to encourage demobilization ? AI players have massive discounts (and let's not even get started on Germany).

I also predict some major annoyances.

1.) Trade routes will get pillaged all the time.
If you ever tried to spread a religion past the classical era you will have noticed the ridiculous amount of units restricting the movement of your missionaries and prophets. Now trade units seem to be in a different category and won't have problems with stacking, but how are you going to protect them from a third party that has open borders with your trade partner or barbarians that the AI is too incompetent to exterminate ? Your trade partner's military won't only fail to protect your trade routes, it will also prevent you from doing it by blocking the way for your untis.

2.) Trade routes will be broken by ICS.
Somebody -probably Rome or Russia- will keep spamming cities near you and you won't be able to have more than one or two land trade routes that don't go through a hostile civs territory.

3.) Culture victories will be too easy.
The only reason AI civs are now able to sometimes keep up with your policies is becasue, they yet again, get a huge polica cost discount. They generate very little culture on their own through focused building strategies or the use of specialists. This means that unless the AI or the culture mechanics are changed, AI players will retain their pitiful culture production and once you have made contact with every civ it will be depressingly easy for any semi-competent player to overwhelm them with tourism.

4.) Archeologists + 1UPT + AI ICS.
Need I elaborate ?

I'd love to be optimistic, but unless the AI gets a major overhaul Brave New World will add at least as much fury as fun to Civ 5. I'm sure others here can think of more issues like the ones I've posted.

This is what worries me, too (and you explain with depressing plausibility exactly how this will affect the game). I'm particularly worried about how difficult it will be to protect international trade routes...

1. I think Trade units will just go through other units. And anyway, there should be unlimited civilian units/hex and they should be able to stop on same hex as other civ unit.

This new trade thing look like trade system from Galactic Civilization but also like Total War trade & Call to Power II. I think they took a little from all those games. And that's good.


2. Don't let them spam cities near you then. I don't let them. When I see they do that, I prepare to destroy the cities and build my own. That's a normal situation I'd say. Use military to defend trade network.


And I think they will change the AI so it can take advantage of the new game mechanics well.

I am indeed worried about your points:
1,2 and 4. Civilian units (perhaps not settlers, but outside of them) need to be able to move under friendly military units/tiles. There really should be an escort button on caravans/ships, otherwise I can't see international trade routes being used to often in multiplayer at least [Because you could simply attack the caravan]

I agree trade routes right now are getting broken left and right because a civ put a city between your roads. I don't really feel so hot about long land trade routes coming soon because barbarians would just attack it. Sure you can send a unit to protect, but it gets really tedious later in the game. I hope they make a feature where you can "attach" a military unit to the trade caravan.

well of course internation trade routes will be dangerous, but also profitable. it is to expected, that you will have to keep an eye on them as well, not just wait for income (just like in the real world). but i also hope that caravans will be able to share a tile with another friendly military unit.

about the cultural victory, i feel that it's now going to be more like SW in a way. you'll have to go more wide, collect GW and then defend them. i think that could be a key against it, with the power of your tourism pushing against. (also OT - what will nuke bomb do to this marvelous paintings, books or sheets of music? )

In order:

#1: I'm guessing that Firaxis will have the foresight to program the AI so that it prioritizes the protection of incoming and outgoing trade routes. If they're going to make a feature that relies entirely on cooperation with the AI, surely they've thought that far ahead?

#2: To a lesser extent, we already have this problem with roads between far-flung cities. The solution should be the same: either block AI settlement with units or border expansion, or declare war and wipe out their newly founded city (or just puppet it). There is also the possibility that trade routes will be dynamic, and existing trade routes will simply change to avoid hostile borders. That won't be possible in every case, such as where there is a narrow chokepoint, but then you'll have to invest extra resources in defending the area from settlement.

#3: I think it's far too early to say whether cultural victory will be too easy or not. There hasn't even been an open beta, and all we have is the bare framework of how the new "tourism vs. culture" system works.

#4: It has already been announced in one of the interviews that dig sites won't appear at the site of every battle, ruin find, or barb camp from previous eras. From what I understand, archaeology sites will be somewhat rare and evenly distributed around the map.

Gucumatz said:

I am indeed worried about your points:
1,2 and 4. Civilian units (perhaps not settlers, but outside of them) need to be able to move under friendly military units/tiles. There really should be an escort button on caravans/ships, otherwise I can't see international trade routes being used to often in multiplayer at least [Because you could simply attack the caravan]

Click to expand...

Keep in mind that Caravans have a different symbol, which suggests they're not a pure civilian unit.

Louis XXIV said:

Keep in mind that Caravans have a different symbol, which suggests they're not a pure civilian unit.

Click to expand...

Yes, Trade units appear to be a separate unit type and should stack separately, which will be critical considering that their movement is not under your control. Hopefully foreign military units won't block them, because that could indeed break the system.

As for Archaeologists, we don't know enough about how the system will work to even speculate.

Game is less ridiculous and ICS-ish on Prince, so the systems there will still probably work as intended. As for difficulty, I just mod Prince to help the AI without having them break the game. Passive combat bonus on all their military instead of unlimited happiness, additional culture to help them with policies and border growth instead of ICS, etc.

GoodSarmatian said:

Happines penalty because of a neighbor with strong tourism and a different ideology ? Doesn't mean a thing. AI civs play with virtually unlimited happines.
World Congress can globally increase unit maintenance to encourage demobilization ? AI players have massive discounts (and let's not even get started on Germany).

Click to expand...

This worries me as well. You can't make so many new features impact happiness and then leave the overwhelming happiness modifiers the AI get. They will be meaningless except as tools to punish the player.

However, if you normalize the AI's happiness, you run into the problem of its limitations. Can you lower it to something reasonable without turning the AI into a joke?

There are a lot of ways a semi-clever player could plunge a normalized AI into unhappiness. Will they now have better means of adjusting such as buying up luxuries for 30 turns from other AI? Will they offer the player good deals on luxuries if it's an emergency?

My worries :

1 diplomacy
I'm more conereced about diplomacy breaking down which causes you to not get any trade routes and everyone will stop trading with you because of a certain resolution in the new UN . Yes you declared war a few times because it was necesairy see my second point which causes the world to hate you and ban you for trades haha lol to you human player

2 Trade routes
Because trade units are automated how are you supposed to keep a unit on it ? Because when you finished moving you're unit you're civilian will automaticly move farther away so the only thing that stops barbarians are zone of control


3 Forcing to go to war because of certain pressures.
I thinx ideology will have the same probelm religion in gods and king for example : if you spam next to a Ai who has a flavor for it you're doomed . I don't have to say how many games I stopped playing because the maya's had +90 pressure and where sending constantly missionaries. So basicly you are forced to war. Or else the AI will convert you're cities there goes you're strategy

Same goes for the new culture victory it will force the player to be agressive even more because if a enemy AI is spamming great works it will get a lot of tourisme and influence neer you and there is only one way to go. capture those great works war


TO be honest the only thing I am looking forward to is the new civs.

Hmmm.... maybe, make the AI smarter.

I know, I know... KILL THE HERETIC!

AI is probably the most rotten piece of the game, beyond repair. I spit on the deity difficulty, because it gives shameless bonuses, I wish the AI was smarter. I would understand if those were small, not as obvious bonuses, but infinite happiness and five times more gold per turn at all times is not nearly acceptable. It is almost as if the game was saying 'the AI sucks so we shall give it infinite amount of everything'.

I'd have a suggestion for them: to add "guard" option to units so you can guard caravans and trade ships. Like, choose a warship, assign it to a certain trade route and that warship will just follow the trade ship, always. Because not only the other civs can block your trade routes... barbarians can do it too. And it can be annoying to keep looking for them...

A "guard"-option will not work with trade-units beeing on a third unit-layer.

The original post is well-thought-out, and this is what I think on this:

* As Louis XXIV and AriochIV are saying, trade units have a different shaped icon, and I'd assume with a fair level of certainty that they will either be able to stack with military units, be able to defend themselves in some limited capacity, or both.

* Adjusting AI culture production according to difficulty level would be a relatively easy thing to do, but, moreover, artist slots are getting removed on some buildings and Great Work slots are being added, correct? Meaning you can't just assign a bunch of artists early on and be set anymore. So Tourism as an abstract concept is hard to understand regarding culture at this point, because the culture dynamics appear as though they may change significantly, even at the level of generating culture. While in G&K culture is easy to produce in greater quantities than the AI, this may not be the case in BNW, which means Tourism wouldn't be as easy as it first sounds.

* The happiness hit for an enemy ideology overwhelming another with Tourism is something I do worry about. As in the point immediately above, I don't think Tourism will be so easy for the player as the original post speculated, but the whole idea of a happiness hit seems silly for Emperor and up for the very reasons the OP listed. On higher difficulties, the AI happiness rarely gets into the negative, and the rare times it does it usually is because that particular AI has a vast empire at a point so early that it's about to become an almost unstoppable runaway anyways, unhappy or not.

* I have some fairly major reservations about what is going to happen to Duel and Tiny games. The length of trade-routes in those games will be small, and those map sizes lend themselves to games where either: an enemy AI is going to completely hem you in from those early land trade routes, or, there simply are no civs to trade with (everyone in the game is at war with you from an early point, or they simply don't like you enough, or whatever).

* Archaeologists seem like they will actually benefit the player far more than the AI at higher difficulties. After all, at the higher levels, the player is generally on the defensive for at least a war or two in the early going. Which means all the battles will be in your own territory, and the excavation sites easily accessible.

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For all this, I am making assumptions and speculating about what we don't know, but I feel that many worries at this point are caused by trying to judge changes independently of each other rather than as a whole; how the World Congress interacts with trade and culture and tourism, and how trade interacts with culture, and how culture impacts tourism, and how each of these that already exist in some form are likely to change in relation to each other are things that all have to be taken into consideration simultaneously.

The only things I worry about are the things that have to interact with systems that are not easily changed. Overhauling the happiness system just to make the Tourism happiness hit mean something is a change I think would be a low-priority, as enough people play at Prince (where AI happiness isn't so abundant) to justify not putting forth much effort there. And I have no idea exactly how they will make trade-routes work on smaller maps. Clearly, they may very well scale the trade-route yields in accords to the map size. But in those situations where you only have 1 to 3 other civs in-game, scaling the trade-route yields may be moot point, for the reasons I mentioned above.

But we know so little for sure that many things could change that we aren't even aware the devs are considering changing.

I don't think '2' is a valid point. Civs will get inbetween your trade routes but that is exactly what happened in history. The Italian states, particularly Venice, made loads of money in the Medieval era by trading with kingdoms far east of them through Constantinople. When the Byantine empire fell and the Ottomans took over, they forced merchants to pay to cross their land so you'll need to buy open borders or like has been mentioned, invade.

Deggial said:

A "guard"-option will not work with trade-units beeing on a third unit-layer.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I can't imagine that they'll have a "guard" option. You'll just need to have a few units in the area to keep barbarians away; if there are actually enemy civ forces in the area, I think you'll want to cancel the route until the way is clear. Which seems perfectly reasonable... wartime countries don't generally have spare divisions to escort trade caravans.

A "Patrol" function (move back and forth between point A and B) would be very nice, though (and incredibly easy to implement...).

(Mods: these audio ads are getting REALLY OLD.)

A "patrol function" should be very easy to add, or even mod, because that's what the caravans and ships will pretty much be doing. They just go back and forth between their point of origin and the designated destination.