AI discussion thread for casual/poor players

I second that, thanks for volunteering

I wanted to say diplomacy is too hit and miss atm. Another game I was friendly with half the civs even though I did some early conquering and eliminated a civ. Monty had friendship with me most of the game, even as I converted his cities to win the game.
It's very disheartening to see three -6 Unknown Reason from a civ halfway around the world (so -18/turn)

 

This is an extreme case, but point well taken.
Most will not just "Give up" for failure alone, it usually takes much much more, Especially for Civ players in general-- Were a tough lot...

 

Yes, but extreme cases make the best stories.

It's not atypical to see a player dump 1k hours into a game and hit a level of improvement that stops after less than 1/10th the time. Even in a less choice-complex environment like FTL you have players who play hundreds of hours and have never beaten hard, while others were able to win 70% or more of games started on hard in less than 100 hours. There is some talent differential there, but most of the differential is in learning process.

Giving up is another matter entirely, few civ players do that indeed.

 

I usually beat deity once just to say I did, but I hate playing the older civs at that level. It is just so boring and there is no room to do much interesting. Just axeman rushes or crusader rushes and garbage like that. You also need to keep in mind that for many games like 30% of the owners (or more) never play more than a couple hours. I have found Emperor a nice level where you are free to do silly things if you want or try out of the box strategies, but on Civ 6 I have a hard time seeing how you could lose at any level.

I won extremely easily my firs game on king, and my two emperor games were absolute walks in the park. I cannot imagine deity is much tougher. Once you get a half dozen or a dozen units you are unbeatable.

Yeah or I played a hundred hours of FTL, and only won a handful of times, but I never paused. Once I started pausing I won all the time, but it feels pretty cheap.

 

What makes you conclude that pausing is cheap, but crew TP, hacking, or using good weapons consistently is not cheap? The rationale for not liking built-in mechanics is always fascinating, like some players arbitrarily reject some mechanics for reasons that usually aren't consistent with other things they do.

 

And Deity is not like a final goal or something. You can go further than that in "mastering" the game or proving you're good.
There's almost always a next step and you're always the noob of someone else.

It's perfectly fine to stop wherever you want especially if getting further ahead feels more like a chore than a hobby.

 

The higher the difficulty you play on, the better it is to do an early-rush blitzkrieg of the AI's cities rather than build your own stuff. That's a lot of what it means to play on high diff's: ambushing, cheap-shotting, and exploiting the AI and its limitations.

And Civ VI doesn't make it easy to avoid this. Other civ's simply start way too close to make the early game anything but crowded and hostile. Which for someone not interested in scorched-earth warmongering can be very frustrating, because you can find yourself stuck at three or four cities because those neighbors you didn't annihilate when you had a chance will get settlers out faster. Personally, I don't mine war per se, but ancient-era war is just boring. I'd rather war occur when civ's have enough infrastructure to have multiple fronts, to feel like a military campaign rather than just zerging a capital with a mass of archers.

So, my suggestion is to go into Advanced Setup and lower the number of AI opponents. And on bigger maps, you gotta *really" lower it. I think I knocked off four AI's on a huge map, and still had Sumeria right on top of me. Then crank up the difficulty, and maybe by the time war's start it won't be masses of archers peppering hapless warriors.

 

Speaking as a psychologist, I'd have to disagree. There are all kinds of reasons why people play games, and for those who have an obsession with a game, they may play it a lot, but get very little "fun" out of it. There have been some psychological studies of the reasons for playing video games, though it is not an area of the literature that I am at all familiar with. However, I just plucked this from a very quick web search. It gives some idea of what may be going on:

http://www.teachthought.com/uncategorized/why-people-play-video-games/

 

I consider myself a casual player, not a poor player. As for skill level I consider myself average.

I could play a higher level, but I don't like my games to be frustrating. I want just enough challenge that I can't just play the game randomly clicking buttons, but not where I have to reload constantly. I'm actually playing Witcher 3 again, and that game is almost too challenging. I'm constantly looking at the loading screen after dying all the time. That's just not fun for me. But I won't lower the difficulty level, I have to have some measure of pride.

Ideally I'd like to play Prince level, but right now the AI isn't very competitive at Prince level after the Classical age. You can argue they aren't competitive before that either, especially post patch with less units. But they usually get their districts up before me, while I'm concentrating on expanding (either peacefully or through warfare). It's after the expansion phase the AI just can't compete. I'd like a little challenge when they declare war on me, currently they are just inept at any kind of combat.

I play this game not for the challenge, but to build up a great empire. I just want a little bit of interference from the AI, but currently warfare is shoddy in this game. I'd like to see them push back against my great empire a little more.

 

This is pretty much how I feel. I will never be a deity player. I don't have the patience, time or perhaps the ability to play the game at the highest levels. I play games to enjoy myself, it's a form of entertainment for me. There are some less complex strategy games that I can play at a level higher than "medium". But to me, Civ 6 is a complex game. I bought Civ 1 back in the day, and was no young kid, but to be honest, it overwhelmed me. It was my first real TBS game. I loved Dune 2 and liked a few other RTS's of the time and wanted to try a TBS, but Civ 1, at the time, was too much for me. The original Master of Orion helped me to understand how more complex games work. I have owned all of the Civilization games and with the exception of BE had a wonderful time with all of them. I bought Crusader Kings 2 recently on sale because I really like that period in history but with the thought that I may never be able to learn how to play it well, if at all. But if I enjoy myself, it's of no consequence. So in essence, I'm old, I'm probably not too bright, and I wish Civ 6 put up a bit more of a fight on the medium levels.

 

Possibly. I believe that, at Emperor, the AI civs each get a free Settler at the start. Some of them build another quickly, but many don't. Either way, don't interpret those early 2nd cities to mean that the civs around you are all in "quick expansion mode."

 

Couldn't you use a mod like Player Spawn to off set that? Cheesy yes but if they get freebie things, that mod can be set to give the player an equal amount.

Personally the higher difficulties aren't harder, they simply give the AI more bonuses, when they should develop an algorithm, with DB to aid in the intelligence. (why I joked above ) You could literally code in there the same player moves, then higher difficulty will be harder. Exactly how chess games work, I have no idea why they never thought of doing this to aid the challenges for you awesome players. In theory at least I certainly haven't tested this but it makes sense to me.

I enjoy civ 6 more then any other strategy game to date. I have been playing civ since 1995-96. Began with civ 2, enjoying the game and series. (I ended up buying every single rendition I could get my hands on )I nearly throw up a few times with Civ 5, but civ 6 omg it is practically a dream civ game to me. Am I a good player, hell no I play on Prince usually, but lately to learn the mechanics of districts and the other new things in civ 6 I have been playing Warlord. The bigger the map the better and the slower the game the better. I am a Mod whore as well, I am running around 20-25 mods, never liked vanilla civ for some reason. Civ 6 was fun though but Mods are the best way to go when working correctly.

Currently I am enjoying the game and on pins and needles waiting on the SDK. I will be helping to bring The Balancer Mod back to the scene, that has been in hiatus since civ 3, making its debut soon. (was I supposed to release the cat out of the bag? )

 

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Well as far as scouts go they are good they helped me take a city also useful for guerilla style wars.

 

Good luck with CK2 After 25 years of Civ I bought Crusader Kings 2 recently as well; just before Civ VI came out, still trying to get to grips with it. It's different and a nice change from Civ. I think I keep messing up though because I try and approach it from a -warlike- Civ standpoint (attack early and often). Then get crushed, seems a long term game with much more focus on the politics and alliances than warfare....

 

OP here. Just wanted to give an update that I just beat my very first game as Emperor in any Civ game, relying on the 3 archer + 6-8 cities + spam commercial districts / trade routes build someone recommended early on (thank you!)! It was a space race victory with Cleopatra. I totally ignored religion.

I'm starting to understand A LITTLE BIT the complaints of those (pro/Deity players) who say the AI is brain dead --- though in my game, one civ who declared war on me in info era actually had all updated units. But there were maybe 3 key moments in my game where I could have very easily lost but didn't.

1) Rome declared war on me very early on and actually SEEMED to have enough units to steamroll my 3-archer defense but because they were moving their units so incompetently and wouldn't attack my archers, I easily sent them scurrying.

2) The second and only other time that a Civ actually declared war on me (notwithstanding my -90 warmongering penalty for wiping Rome off the map) was in the Info Era, by neighboring Brazil, when I was in the middle of my space victory. I thought he was declaring war b/c i was close to victory, though he technically declared Holy War. All of his units were upgraded, as I said above, and he quickly surrounded/seiged one of my key cities with overwhelming force (multiple tanks, helicopters, inf units, one artillery) . Yet after surrounding my city, the units just sat there, and didn't attack. The aritillery never fired a single shot at my city (maybe b/c I was trying to kill it with a mech inf). Brazil could have very easily taken that city, and maybe many more including my capital, b/c I spent the entire game not building many military units at all.

3) Victoria on the way other side of the map was 50% through space race victory before I even started. She was way too far away for me to invade her so I actually thought I would lose the space race to her. However, she got stuck at 50%. When I started sending missionaries to spy on her I noticed her country blanketed by hyper-advanced barbarian units (mech infs, etc.) that I think were the result of rebellions due to lack of amenities. So she never got past 50%.

So based on this stuff I can start to see what people mean about not-good AI. However, overall I still did have a fun and challenging game, and it was fun to be Cleopatry b/c my trade routes were making so much money (though I never reached the level where I could just insta-buy an army, like people say on these forms), and building the spaceports on the river greatly reduced the build time.

 

That might be true in your case, but I've seen people say this then go on to play 1000 or more hours in the game while still "not having the time" to become good at said game.

Whatever the reason is, it isn't a matter of having enough time for most players.

As for civ 6, right now at least deity is very forgiving. Like, if you expand to a decent size and make districts you can get 300-500+ science, while the AI doesn't manage 100, and force favorable engagements against its units. You don't need to carefully plan the next 10 turns, or play an astute diplo game in order to manage your resources into economy just to keep up. You don't need to favor a given unit class, even if ranged + mounted are still the alpha choices. You can play a canned strategy and, should you follow it, you'll win. That's why deity players from civs past consider it easier, it's far more forgiving of mistakes.

However, to get there you still have to consistently adjust your play towards improvement. If a player doesn't do that, said player will quickly stop improving at all. It's not a matter of patience, time, or (usually) ability (some games require fast reflexes or dexterity at high/professional levels, but civ isn't an example of that), it's a matter of practicing a learned technique...the technique of learning/mastery.

 

Those are some good points. In hindsight I should have said I don't have the desire or drive to be able to play Civ 6 at the highest levels. Some want to master a game and be able to beat it at the highest level of difficulty. I spent hundreds of hours with Civ 5, but I never mastered it, I didn't want to. I play games it to enjoy myself, try different things, see how the AI reacts. I don't always play to win and don't like to follow a canned strategy. That's why I have posted in this thread, deity players should perhaps look elsewhere. I like what @mbbcam said, not everyone plays the game just to have fun, some play it to be the best, I don't. If I applied myself and studied the all the mechanics more closely, maybe I could become a Civ 6 deity player, but I don't want to do that.

 

Yeah.. I know CK2 is going to have very steep learning curve for me. I'm not a warlike kind of guy but all of the politics, family tree and religion stuff drew me in. Hopefully I can wrap my brain around at least enough of it to make it enjoyable.

 

Time can also relate to time spent doing research on how to become good. If you find a difficulty level that is enjoyable no one should feel compelled to move to the next (or highest level).
I'm one of those people with around 2k hours on Civ V but never beat the game above Emperor and didn't feel unhappy about that fact.