Pfeffersack
Deity
Purpose of this game was to see how dangerous native life is on the lower levels, esepcially on the seas. I choosed the worst possible setup for this - Miriam, played as a Terraformer, on a Planet with High Sealevel.
I had a nice starting position - a bit dry (but that's why we have EB early and condensers later, right?), but with some ressources...and some fungus patches. Yes, they can make a Terraformers live easier in the beginning - you can sneak in some early farms and mines and stay in postive planet attitude long enough to prepare yourself for the inevitable. Here is the development of my attitude in this game:
- until ~2150 Planet Attitude above +1
- 2168: the first time negative Planet Attitude
- 2182: the first time below -1 PA and just in that turn last fungus around capital cleaned (no fungal blooms until that, even none prevented by culture)
- shorty after 2200: PA at -2
- 2208: first native life on sea sighted
- 2232: PA at -3
- 2267: PA at -4
It looked like I could consolidate my Empire after having dealt with the initiatally nearby fungus - the (for an Emperor) "usual" AI attack didn't happen...instead the AI offered my favorable tech trades (not 1:1, the always put money on top on Chieftain as well) and two of them offered becoming vassals soon (Lal 2222 and Zhakarov 2230). Nonetheless, I expected the AIs to perform even worse on such a level - they expanded oversea, they were at least able to repel native life attacks on land,
Deidre managed to capture some IoDs with her slightly green attitude of +1 and Santiago delighted me with building the first AI seabase in my games ever
Native life is a different beast - and here we have to distinguish as well between "wandering" creatures and those who are results of fungal blooms.
The former does not feel in any way less threatening then on Emperor. Surely, the density of "wandering" native life is lower, but that is compensated by the fact that the AI expands less (just compare the two minimaps - compare the settled areas and the number of red dots) - so you end up with nearly the same absolute number of creatures, just with the difference that they tend to go for you more often (because you are likely to be one of the biggest factions).
However, that is the situation on sea - wandering native life on land is close to non-existent, again both on Chieftain and Emperor (difficulty makes no real difference for the reasons explained above). I think there are two reasons, why you never have a lot of chance to explore the wilderness on land and capture many mindworms - land is settled by everyone with preference over water and becomes "civilized" soon and more over 5 out of 7 civilizations start close to each other, often on an island which is very tight for them. That also leads Yang and Santiago often dominating in games without SLP.
For fungal blooms, it doesn't make much difference either - you have your do's and dont's as usual:
- Do build enough (Aqua)formers
- Do use them in teams (=ideally cleaning out fungus in one, but at least two turns) and run 2+ such teams both on sea and land
- Do escort them sufficiently (if you want to be save: 1 ship/unit per former)
- Do focus on settling highlands
- Do watch your neighbours, if there is fungus on their side near the border
- Do watch your culture and make sure that border expansions don't bring you in trouble (because bringing you close to fungus)
- Do guard threatened bases sufficiently, exspecially with some mobile units (Choppers, Rovers) as well
- Do bunker your land and bases
- Don't expand with bases into fungal areas without first cleaning the fungus
- Don't get cought on defense on land and don't get cought on defense and a fungus tile even more
So Chieftain is surely not unplayable, if you follow those rules - but it is also in no way more foregiving, if you fail. And to fail, it can be enough:
- to be too slow with cleaning out fungus near a base, which expands its borders
- not to attack Deidre, who doesn't care about the single fungus tile in her territory, which will sooner or later cross your border...
- to get cought in the trap of too quickly expanding into dangerous areas (you simply cannot run into that problem on Emperor...you are lucky, if you can expand enough at all and nearly always the AI has done the pioneer work for you)
If you make a mistake (and I did by overexpanding, not building a second team of aquformers fast enough and letting Deidre do her strange mixture of terraforming and green politics...), the fungal blooms come as bad and often as on Emperor (at least I didn't notice any difference in frequency or number of spawned creatures). Culture can be especially a trap - someone might think it is a good way to block fungal blooms, but he or she might overlook the dangers. Protection against fungal blooms is nice, but you might either get in trouble before acquirng it or if you have used up your "blocks" (which can happen quite soon)
I think this might cause the frustration for players on low levels - there is not much tolerance for any mistakes concerning planet managment and the weak AIs put the main burden of dealing with the Planet to the human player, which makes it feel like playing Emperor.
So what can be done?
1. I would suggest to increase the values for <iUnownedWaterTilesPerBarbarianUnit>?</iUnownedWaterTilesPerBarbarianUnit>
for the four lowest levels (by 100/75/50/25% to keep a steady increase)
Settler 375 ---> 750
Chieftain 300 ---> 525
Warlord 275 ---> 413
noble 250 ---> 313
2. Eventually a decrease for <iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianUnit>?</iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianUnit> on the mid to high levels to make the wandering native life more dangerous and to balance Yang and santiago better. However, I need to run a test find working values.
3. I noticed in handicap.xml a few more lines:
Code:
<UnownedTilesPerSpawns>
<UnownedTilesPerSpawn>
<DomainType>DOMAIN_LAND</DomainType>
<iNumTiles>150</iNumTiles>
</UnownedTilesPerSpawn>
<UnownedTilesPerSpawn>
<DomainType>DOMAIN_SEA</DomainType>
<iNumTiles>3000</iNumTiles>
</UnownedTilesPerSpawn>
<UnownedTilesPerSpawn>
<DomainType>DOMAIN_AIR</DomainType>
<iNumTiles>3000</iNumTiles>
</UnownedTilesPerSpawn>
<UnownedTilesPerSpawn>
<DomainType>DOMAIN_IMMOBILE</DomainType>
<iNumTiles>150</iNumTiles>
</UnownedTilesPerSpawn>What do they regulate? Are they connected to fungal blooms/the hereby spawned creatures in any way?
