I posted to start a discussion. There's a difference, there. I wouldn't have posted if I didn't want a discussion.
But I wasn't asking you for your opinions of Apollo. As you've said, as everyone's said, that's pretty clear at this stage. What can realistically fix this?
Can fix what ?
You're aware that this whole thing started out of a comment I did about
1.0 right (that I'd expect Madjinn to have warned them the game was too easy) ? Something that has been acknowledged and somewhat fixed. Which is the number 1 reason why I did not understand what exactly you're trying to make a discussion about and which looked like arguing just for the sake of it.
So are we talking about Apollo then or Apollo now ?
Like my questions to Ryika about difficulty levels - does BE have too few? There were complaints about the jump from Soyuz to Apollo both in terms of it being too small and it possibly being too large (post-patch), but I only vaguely read those threads. Would it be better with Soyuz > Apollo > XYZ? Or the other way around for aesthetic flavour, whatever XYZ ends up being (Armstrong, as a dumb example).
Well we'll agree that who cares about names. I'm always in favor of more potentially beatable difficulties. Even if there's just 10 guys beating the last one consistently. Something like Civ4 is reasonable difficulty progression for example, I think Civ5 is too easy since BNW and CivBE is maybe around the same, I don't play CivBE anymore so it's hard to judge exactly.
We'd probably agree that having 20 difficulties would be ridiculous. 8 in classic civ works well imo to give enough variety. But I'll maintain that extremes... should be extreme. Then you try to give more or less a good progression from one to the other, doesn't really matter if it's 6 or 8. If you're afraid of big jumps then put more rather than less.
If we take CiV as an example, the progression is just weird. For example levels 1 2 3 are ridiculously easy while there are huge gaps going from 6 to 7 and 7 to 8. So if it were up to me the 8 levels would become something like 2, 4, 6, 6.5, 7, 7.5, 8, 8.5. Shrinking the firsts, expanding the lasts. Newbie level should be the first one. Not the first three. My anecdotal example is my gf that had never played a TBS in her life and could get through level 2 on her first try and then it's been a while she keeps playing at 4 because that's where the challenge is at for her. Level 1 never saw a play and 3 felt redundant from her perspective. From mine level 4 5 6 were all the same and I felt 5 redundant while I broke my teeth on 7 and 8 the first times (well it was harder in GK days though). Nowadays Deity is on the too easy side since BNW changes that made the AI more passive and a worse techer.
An entire reworking of the AI to prevent handing out scaling bonuses isn't realistically going to happen. AI development is expensive, not just in terms of sheer research cost, but also computationally expensive even in a turn-based game where the AI players each perform a large amount of processing per turns (working out pathfinding, etc. has historically been the cause of significant performance issues in Civ - wasn't it Workers in CiV that hammered end-of-turn delays?). You're fantastic at the game, what would you think would suit the AI that isn't also infeasible from a developer / manpower perspective?
And I'll agree that an entire overhaul will never happen. However some tweaks are possible. Better aggression, assessing easy preys, more able to stop running aways and imminent victories...
But to me the AI would also benefit a lot from better balance. An AI isn't able to know what is crap or not.
Both of these apply to Civ5 also by the way.
Balancing can be done with help from players at least. But it's a big job (until a point) that requires both a frame for players to test tweaks and a constant dialog. But I feel CivBE is too low budget for that kind of stuff anyway.
All this requires work for sure. Will the devs do it ¯\_(ツ
_/¯ (or get the money to do it). But meanwhile (some) people will keep saying the AI and balance is crap.