Mac Users Play ModAcken - Challenge #1

[Acken]

*snip*

From a "peaceful" game perspective the game was harder than what I usually deal with at deity. I had some scary attacks, a lot of wonders I couldn't get because Gandhi was at my science level.

It's possible domination is easier due to weaker cities though.

But you also have to remember this is the mac version with a ton of missing features and AI changes. No move and shoot, no minimum army boost, no nerf to range vs cities attack, slow upgrade of units etc... The list goes on.

 

[consentient]

There we go, the mod's creator says that peaceful DemiGod > Deity, for the Mac version at least.

 

[Grendeldef]

Haa, haven't tried a peaceful game yet so I can't comment based on experience but if hiding in the corner with space traveling archers I'm not going to miss that aspect of the game.

Just played 100 turns of that Hiawatha game you posted & I can safely say that peaceful game was not in the menu but more about that in the other thread.

 

[kirbdog]

If I were a mod creator working on a 'balance' and 'AI' mod, the highest form of compliment really would be to say that modded difficulty N - 1 is harder than unmodded N. It goes some way towards validating the ideas that cheap/easy ("cheesy") strategies--typically exploiting some imbalance in game design that the AI doesn't know is there--and incompetent AI had been addressed, somewhat and to some degree.

 

[beetle]

what do you think determines whether or not a given AI decides to do as Ahmad did in my game, or just sit tight and play it cool. Pure RNG, or more like a chaos-theory series of events

Since I am worse at civ than you, I replay more maps. Most of the time the AI relative position unfolds the same, but often enough things vary widely. My first time through this map, Boudicca ate most of it. The second time she never had more than two cities and was the next to go after Venice (who, in all games, is doomed by his initial spawn location). You see this with the DCLs -- different players may experience different runaways, but there are more similarities than differences.

So I think Ahmad in your game just got lucky against Ethiopia -- and things spiraled from there.

 

[beetle]

A wild guess - you just copied the file to MODS -folder without unzipping it?

No, I did not copy the file -- because I did not manually download it. It loaded from within Civ using some odd steam overlay. But yes, I am familiar with how OS X files are often bundles. It is pretty slick really.

 

[beetle]

I finally squeezed a mostly peaceful SV out of this map. Went Piety to try that. I may try one suited to Liberty.

Second screen shot is just something that amused me, a largish island full of barb settlers. Frigates showed up the next turn, so my scout cleaned up!

 

[Phukit]

this makes me long for the feature in civ 4 that allowed barbs to eventually build cities if left unchecked for too long.

Imagine discovering a sprawling civ of barbs teching like crazy lol

 

[consentient]

I think that barbs should be able to capture cities. I can't think of any reason why they shouldn't. I think that the build queue should empty, and the city not grow, but there should be a moderate amount of income which helps the barbs with upgrades.