108.6 Beta Comments

[Txurce]

The AI is definitely pillaging more. This is a terrific improvement. It doesn't seem to have hindered their attacking, but it's hard to be sure, given how bad they are at it.

I am now on turn 144 of a game, where I have met only three civs. One is England, traditionally a high pop civ. I am well ahead of all three in pop, even though I just built my third city. This has never happened to me before. (I do have the Hanging Gardens in one.) The AI is also unusually low in gold at this point.

 

[gdwitt]

By turn 145, Suleiman had 30,000 gold which he somehow took from Persia on turn 135 which previously had 30,000.
His bank account was growing even though he still had the largest army by manpower coming at my borders.
Hiawatha had 14000.
Rome had 12000 but was aggressively buying out all of the city-states that I had allied with. I believe he was putting down 1000 gold bribes.
Most of the other civs had in excess of 2000 gold
I extracted all of Mongolia's gold for a peace agreement and two turns later he had 1000 gold with a 3 city empire.

I got about 2500 gold per city for selling Suleiman back his cities that I had just captured at turn 145.
Interesting that when I asked for open borders he would only offer 1000 gold for all the cities.

I felt quite poor. I was pulling in about 600 GPT even with the national treasury at turn 145. My big navy chewed it all up. Leaving me with little to hurry build on.

 

[Thalassicus]

I'm glad to see the changes to the pillage numbers had some effect. I haven't played an all-out war yet to see the results myself, and isolated testing with handfuls of units still tended to ignore enemy improvements.

 

[Txurce]

I'm now well into a second game, and the AI definitely likes to pillage. I would call this change a major success. It may even be to the neglect of city capture - but again, the AI hesitates so much around cities that it's hard to say.

 

[glider1]

Yeah it's a great change. One issue in 1086 I noticed is that the AI dowed me, then deployed all it's units in attack leaving it's capital undefended. Normally it would leave behind an archer in garrison. However this time the archer went into the field, was thinking about pillaging but just sat on a hill doing nothing, leaving the capital free for me to exploit. The other attackers did pillage and it was effective. I'm a little concerned that the AI might be using defenders to try and pillage. Time will tell. The AI is still able to take cities against other AI's so it's interesting.
Cheers

 

[Txurce]

The pillaging was effective enough to make me build more units, and deploy them differently. My usual elite strike force may be good enough to take cities, but it's not big enough to keep my trade routes open.

 

[EsoEs]

I've just about finished a 300 turn immortal game on 108.6. This version feels and plays very nicely! The new pillage mechanic is great and forces the human to wage war differently (or at least me ). I found myself building a lot of roads to key locations around my cities just so I could defend my luxuries/strategics, something I'd never had to do before. Conquest feels really good, I know theres a lot of debate about the AI food nerf, I haven't noticed any real difference in there ability to tech/build units, I was generally outteched by every civ until I hit the mid/late industrial (still behind the score leader and the #3 civ), so that feels about the same as my previous experiences in Immortal.

Bottom line, I love this version, thanks again Thal!