New civs overpowered? Try Greece.

[Gicusan]

Marathon. Prince blush: I know, first run on the expansion). Panagea. Ragging barbs. 5 opponents. Played a rather peaceful game trying not to finish fast.
Religion spread, Papal Primacy + some Patronage culture choice + Greece UA => 0% influence decrease per turn and with Protection - guaranteed Friendship even if no quest/investment. barely spent any money on CS as well (maybe in the first 2 eras to get my Great Profets going with Faith giving CS.
I started the game with 26 CS and ever since the medieval age all are allied with me. Now, in modern era, they are into 300 favour and no spy can change that. I should not have played Prince with Greece even if I had suspected it. Imagine that CS doubled (if not more before universities) my science with proper Patronage culture choice. I would have killed even highest settings with ease.

 

[Shep_Cro]

Hmmmmmmm, I'll give this a try next

 

[Vidszhite]

And people were saying Greece was useless in GnK!

 

[S.K. Ren]

Ha, try Siam. Pledge Protect + Aesthetics + Papal Primacy gives 45 baseline reputation and you get 150% of the friend benefits.

 

[Brichals]

I actually like how vanilla civs have been buffed indirectly. It must have been a big juggling game. The balance team have my complete faith and appreciation. However there must still be some inbalances. Who's the weakest civ now I wonder.

 

[Describer]

I actually like how vanilla civs have been buffed indirectly. It must have been a big juggling game. The balance team have my complete faith and appreciation. However there must still be some inbalances. Who's the weakest civ now I wonder.

Babylon, imho.

 

[Gicusan]

Ha, try Siam. Pledge Protect + Aesthetics + Papal Primacy gives 45 baseline reputation and you get 150% of the friend benefits.

Siam is great and I played it a lot in vanilla. But you will get your CS later and with more expenses. You get the ball rolling faster. With Greece you do not lose influence and if you do at any certain moment they will go up very fast by themselves until a certain point. Only comparable one is Songhai on a big map, marathon speed with ragging barbs. 225 is huge. Get 4-5 horsemen out there with honour and rip every barb apart. Money are no longer a problem. Not to mention culture.

No matter the civ. or victory you chose, I found that using CS is the easiest way to get on top of things. I rarely need to build any units until late game. They indirectly tech for me. They will fight your enemies. Gifts and happiness with Patronage...

 

[dyllyn]

IMHO the problem here is raging barbs. Raging barbs on any difficulty probably skew the game heavily in favor of the player, because the AI remains awful at protecting workers and settlers. I recommend you try another game without raging barbs and see if you have the same success

 

[Gicusan]

With Grece - no problem, I did not spend too much money anyway. With Songhai, I dont have to try it - I know it will be all diffrent But why would anyone play Songhai on a map without barbs?

 

[Infiltrator]

Everything is OP on prince.

 

[Gicusan]

Everything is OP on prince.

Thanks my friend. Such a nice place for you to show off a little. I beat Diety in civ 4 at least half the times and highest difficulties in civ V vanilla (even if that game was not exactly my favourite) almost every time. Civ 5 is too easy of a game once you got the hang of it, no matter the difficulty. I wanted to test everything culture, wonders and religion at ease so I played a Prince once this year. Sorry.

What I said about Greece and CS is difficulty wise irrelevant. Still 0% decrease on loyalty with CS you have on Immortal.

 

[Putmalk]

Thanks my friend. Such a nice place for you to show off a little. I beat Diety in civ 4 at least half the times and highest difficulties in civ V vanilla (even if that game was not exactly my favourite) almost every time. Civ 5 is too easy of a game once you got the hang of it, no matter the difficulty. I wanted to test everything culture, wonders and religion at ease so I played a Prince once this year. Sorry.

What I said about Greece and CS is difficulty wise irrelevant. Still 0% decrease on loyalty with CS you have on Immortal.

Technically he's right. You can't call a strategy overpowered when you play against AI with no advantages (strictly because an AI can never beat a human, because it can't think like we do, especially when there are so many variables). What may be overpowered on Prince may be entirely useless on higher difficulties (removing any overpoweredness from the equation).

(technically you're also showing off, nobody cares if you've won Deity or not).

But yes, instant friendship, IMO, is a bit of an exploit, if you ask me. But yes, I can imagine it being a very good strategy at high levels (just imagine it combined with Siam or Austria!)

 

[machival]

You can't call a strategy overpowered when you play against AI with no advantages (strictly because an AI can never beat a human, because it can't think like we do, especially when there are so many variables). What may be overpowered on Prince may be entirely useless on higher difficulties (removing any overpoweredness from the equation).

AI cannot "think". AIs calculate and do as programmed. Calculation is something they could do easily, by virtue of the technologically advanced processors or our time. Programming is the culprit. Somebody is not doing his job right.
There exists AI capable of far outpowering human thought.

If something is Overpowered on Prince then it is overpowered end of story. Prince is the normal difficulty. Playing Deity is like playing Chess vs a computer so stupid that you must play without your queen and your rooks. But if the computer is so stupid that he selfmates, he will do so regardless if it's Settler, Prince, or Deity. The increase in difficulty is only an illusion.

 

[duxup]

IMHO the problem here is raging barbs. Raging barbs on any difficulty probably skew the game heavily in favor of the player, because the AI remains awful at protecting workers and settlers. I recommend you try another game without raging barbs and see if you have the same success

Depends. I don't doubt it can skew things.

Heck I like raging barbarians and take Honor to farm them for culture

Having said that I've often also been absolutely mobbed by barbarians barely able to venture out of my cities and in contact with nobody for a while abandoning my start plans for military units to beat back the hordes. It certainly can nerf the human too.

 

[Putmalk]

AI cannot "think". AIs calculate and do as programmed. Calculation is something they could do easily, by virtue of the technologically advanced processors or our time. Programming is the culprit. Somebody is not doing his job right.
There exists AI capable of far outpowering human thought.

If something is Overpowered on Prince then it is overpowered end of story. Prince is the normal difficulty. Playing Deity is like playing Chess vs a computer so stupid that you must play without your queen and your rooks. But if the computer is so stupid that he selfmates, he will do so regardless if it's Settler, Prince, or Deity. The increase in difficulty is only an illusion.

Congrats on explaining something already knew. I also didn't say the AI could think. But please, keep rambling on about increase in difficulty and playing against chess AI.

Either way, an AI will never exist that can play civilization "correctly" because if one did, Firaxis would never be able to commercially sell it. If people thought turn times were bad now, just imagine 2 hour turn times. That's how long it would take for an AI to calculate every possible move and make the "correct" choice of movement and combat for each unit on the map. And even then, it would be unbeatable, since a human is bound to make a mistake at some point, when the AI would never make a mistake. And nobody wants to play a game where they can't win.

The fact that you believe that "There exists AI capable of far outpowering human thought" is amazing. How could an AI, created by humans to do everything they tell them possibly overpower human thought? No, an AI that outperforms a human is done because it is created to never make a mistake (i.e. chess grandmaster AIs that can consistently see eight turns in the future, which is a ton of calculation) while a human will eventually always make a mistake. This is not feasible in a commercial game because not everyone has a supercomputer and the patience to wait for a computer to calculate an INCREDIBLE amount of different moves (and by INCREDIBLE I mean n^x where n is the number of units and x is the amount of tiles each unit can move). Just imagine that. It will never happen.


Back on topic...if something is overpowered on Prince, that doesn't mean it's overpowered on Deity due to increased production, research, and other advantages granted to the AI.

 

[Lure]

I gave this a try on immortal difficulty. Not working out like I'd hoped. Basically the uber powered enemy nations just steamroll over the CS's one at a time. Yeah almost right away I was friends with them and soon after allies but then you just get to watch your friends butchered one by one

Tried fielding armies to defend them, worked a little bit. Sometimes I was able to put my units next to friendly CS and "block" the rampaging hordes of the mongols from attacking in melee. Eventually they just declared war on me anyways.

Basically I went broke fielding armies so couldn't even spend a dime on gifts. Now it's early Modern Era, i have about 100 G and 20G /turn and all 4 enemy leaders just commenced attacks on the few remaining CS out there. They are also bombing my few remaining other allies with huge gold gifts so I'm losing them that way too. Ugg.

I'm holding my own with 2 of my own cities and have a fair amount of research done. It's possible that I could get a science victory but a couple of the enemy civs are still beating me to new "eras" by 5 or so turns even with a fairly massive amount of research going on in my cities. We'll see.

 

[Infiltrator]

Thanks my friend. Such a nice place for you to show off a little. I beat Diety in civ 4 at least half the times and highest difficulties in civ V vanilla (even if that game was not exactly my favourite) almost every time. Civ 5 is too easy of a game once you got the hang of it, no matter the difficulty. I wanted to test everything culture, wonders and religion at ease so I played a Prince once this year. Sorry.

What I said about Greece and CS is difficulty wise irrelevant. Still 0% decrease on loyalty with CS you have on Immortal.

Thanks my friend, such a nice place for you to actually show off quite a bit.

Like Putmalk already said, prince is no place to discuss battle tactics or game balance. I'm sure that, being an expert that you are, you are familiar that, while the loyalty doesn't take a hit, your economy does (indirectly), and the enemies' gets a hefty bonus.

So while you are able to shower your gold on prince, Deity will make sure you grab every bit of gold you can possibly get in order to barely keep up with the tech and the army the AI gets. But you knew that right? Go play on Immortal at the very least and show us just how OP that really is, compared to literally swallowing up CSs with Maria Theresa.

 

[Ex.plode]

Playing as greece right now, they are actually pretty good with all the city state related beliefs and all.

 

[ampmclock]

Japan, Mongolia, Huns, China, France.

 

[ShahJahanII]

Prince blush: I know, first run on the expansion).

That's showing off as well, IMHO.

I actually like how vanilla civs have been buffed indirectly. It must have been a big juggling game. The balance team have my complete faith and appreciation. However there must still be some inbalances. Who's the weakest civ now I wonder.

Yeah, I've been really worried about the older civs, but they seem okay. Although I am worried about a few of them (I think Babylon should get it's ability back to +100% GS generation).

Japan, Mongolia, Huns, China, France.

Why France? Musketeers being in the swords line?

I gave this a try on immortal difficulty. Not working out like I'd hoped. Basically the uber powered enemy nations just steamroll over the CS's one at a time. Yeah almost right away I was friends with them and soon after allies but then you just get to watch your friends butchered one by one

Tried fielding armies to defend them, worked a little bit. Sometimes I was able to put my units next to friendly CS and "block" the rampaging hordes of the mongols from attacking in melee. Eventually they just declared war on me anyways.

Basically I went broke fielding armies so couldn't even spend a dime on gifts. Now it's early Modern Era, i have about 100 G and 20G /turn and all 4 enemy leaders just commenced attacks on the few remaining CS out there. They are also bombing my few remaining other allies with huge gold gifts so I'm losing them that way too. Ugg.

I'm holding my own with 2 of my own cities and have a fair amount of research done. It's possible that I could get a science victory but a couple of the enemy civs are still beating me to new "eras" by 5 or so turns even with a fairly massive amount of research going on in my cities. We'll see.

Welcome to the forums!