Do you find difficulty levels harder to play in G&K?

[marioflag]

I' would like to know if the expansion has made difficulty levels more harder for the human player to win. I'm particularly interested to know if AI is better at researching techs, building military units and developing cities.

For my first game as an Emperor player would you advise me to keep playing on Emperor or decrease difficulty level to King?

 

[smallfish]

The dominant runaways on Emperor complete Manhattan/Apollo at turns you'd normally expect from Immortal on Vanilla (Turn 250+/300ish).

Other than that, still remains to be seen.

 

[CGPanama]

I usually play King, but when there is a major change (usually balance patches, Scenarios, Mods) I would play down to Prince until I learned the new things. With G&K I left it at King and noticed that it felt like I was playing about the same difficulty in the first 100 turns of my first game.

 

[Alrin Kharr]

There are enough changes and new things to figure out that it probably wouldn't be an awful idea to go a level below what you usually play, at least on your first game.

 

[Zhahz]

still remains to be seen.

^this. It's been ~14 hours and some people have probably slept some.

There are a LOT of changes, tweaks, differences, and new stuff

 

[rtfischbeck]

While the early game is paced slower, A.I aggression seems up on Deity. Might just be variance but in 5 games ive been DoW'd in the first 25 turn every time. Additionally, the AI doesn't just throw 5 warriors away and retreat. You can generally expect 3-5 spearmen/warriors with 2-3 archers/cat's in a half decent formation. That said, 2 archers and the starting warrior is still usually enough to hold.

Late game tech pace seems about the same. I lost my last culture try to Sejong launching on turn 277, when I was 6 turns away from utopia. Finally, while the AI is slow to get RA's online--to the point that you can usually grab a tech lead in the Renaissance--once you get to late industrial the lack of long GS bulb chains make it much more of a struggle.

All in all, seems a bit tougher but then again I don't have anything close to a refined approach right now.