[GS] Antarctic Late Summer Patch Discussion Thread

[Kwami]

so it's a fix that fixes nothing, you can still switch to these policies for 1 turn, upgrade everything, then switch to something else.

Only if you have enough slots for both cards, though. Classical Republic doesn't, which means that anyone using that government type won't have easy upgrades. And, since that's probably the most common tier 1 government, the change isn't nothing.

 

[BenitoChavez]

I don't get it. "fixing" the AI is difficult work. Why is this bad when it's precisely what modders have done, and by your exact words is simple, quick and easy? Surely it's better than no change at all?

It's disappointing it took this long for them to add the walls.The AI conquering city-states has been an issue since vanilla and it's only getting "fixed" 2 expansions later.

It's also disappointing that the AI isn't better. But yeah that is more difficult fix so can't really expect that to happen when Firaxis takes so long to apply the band-aid fix.

 

[Disgustipated]

Finished my Gandhi religious game. In hindsight, I kind of wish I chose another victory method. I feel I'm not taking advantage of his abilities as much as I'd like because I win so fast. Things like stepwells and growing large cities are meaningless since you win so early in the game. And Dharma I didn't get a lot of use out of. It wasn't as quick as my Mansa Musa religious victory, but considering I focused on conquering the Inca and 2 Korean cities (and liberating a city state from Korea) it wasn't bad. And I only had 1 religious city state to help with faith generation. I only had 1 holy site at the start before I switched focus, so they came from behind quick.

Overall I'm happy with the Gandhi changes. I would like to play them into the real late game some time.
edit: just checked, by the end of the game the other religions on my continent had faded, and I had no followers from other religions in my cities, so Dharma was useless at the end. So despite the additional charges on missionaries, religious victory isn't necessarily the best path for Gandhi. You could choose religious beliefs to increase your science or culture as you spread your religion instead.


As for trades, I see 2 extremes. Overly generous trades, and bad trades or outright demands by civs that don't like you. I have civs demanding gold every 5 or 10 turns or so (I wasn't keeping track how many turns elapsed). Religious victory in general pisses everyone off as it is. The trades got worse throughout the game as everyone got more mad at me, and I'm fine with that.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Finished my Gandhi religious game. In hindsight, I kind of wish I chose another victory method. I feel I'm not taking advantage of his abilities as much as I'd like because I win so fast. Things like stepwells and growing large cities are meaningless since you win so early in the game. And Dharma I didn't get a lot of use out of. It wasn't as quick as my Mansa Musa religious victory, but considering I focused on conquering the Inca and 2 Korean cities (and liberating a city state from Korea) it wasn't bad. And I only had 1 religious city state to help with faith generation. I only had 1 holy site at the start before I switched focus, so they came from behind quick.

Overall I'm happy with the Gandhi changes. I would like to play them into the real late game some time.

As for trades, I see 2 extremes. Overly generous trades, and bad trades or outright demands by civs that don't like you. I have civs demanding gold every 5 or 10 turns or so (I wasn't keeping track how many turns elapsed). Religious victory in general pisses everyone off as it is. The trades got worse throughout the game as everyone got more mad at me, and I'm fine with that.

It's probably just anecdotal, but I seem to get these demands the turn after an aid emergency finishes.

 

[Wingednosering]

yup, this time trade really is BROKEN.

Case in point, here I am trading with Teddy; I have 50 iron (max) and he has 8.

I offer him 20 iron, he offers one gold... no good right?

Well I offer him 1 iron, he offers 1 gold and 1 gpt! (ok.. so 1 worth more than 20) I accept
I offer him another iron, he offers the same thing.
Rinse and repeat around 10+ times each iron going for 1 gpt and some few gold.
At a certain point, he offer 2 gpt!
Then 3 gpt for the next unit of iron.
Sometimes he'll just offer 1 flat gold per unit in between... supposedly he's had enough I thought; still, I accept and continue on offering iron unit by unit.

By the time I had got to 20th-30th units, the cost had gone up to 10 gpt per unit iron... would've probably gone further had I not ended up completely emptying his treasury.

Fix it pls Firaxis... this exploit is way, way, WAY too much and does not make sense at all. Early game a few iron mines will net you more gold than Mali.

This actually seems like maybe they forgot to inverse the cost scaling. The patch notes mentioned AIs paying less for strategics they already had a stockpile of. Looks like maybe they pay more for things they already have instead of less (simple 1-interp mistake).

 

[Ozymandias9891]

So I played a bit of the patch yesterday, and generally I'm satisfied. There's one thing I wish they would fix, however, and it's something that's been around since the vanilla version of the game, if I remember correctly.

In the early game, when you've met a civ and you start to get news on them, it'll sometimes say that they've received delegates from other civs - but they're civs you haven't met yet. I feel like that kind of spoils the surprise of who else is out there. Rather than saying "Civ X has received a foreign delegation. It appears to have come from Civ Y" I wish it could be something like "Civ X has received a foreign delegation. It appears to have come from an unknown Civ" - until such a time that we meet Civ Y.

Another thing I hope they fix is the World Congress so that it convenes only once all other civilizations have been discovered by one civilization - kind of like how it was in Civ V. I find it ridiculous that I'm having to vote for world resolutions that have an effect on people I don't even know yet, and vice versa.

 

[Gorbles]

It's disappointing it took this long for them to add the walls.The AI conquering city-states has been an issue since vanilla and it's only getting "fixed" 2 expansions later.

It's also disappointing that the AI isn't better. But yeah that is more difficult fix so can't really expect that to happen when Firaxis takes so long to apply the band-aid fix.

If anything, it taking this long to apply this fix demonstrates how long it could take to "fix" the AI in that regard. Everything scales with regards to priority, as well as time taken to "fix".

Be disappointed if you want, but I just don't understand why the inclusion of this change is negative compared to not having it at all, which was the previous state of affairs. It's only negative compared to some idealistic state whereby the entire AI expects as all of us want it to, across all the systems of the game. I'm not being condescending, that is the aim. But! AI is hard!

Firaxis are by far from the only company with this problem, regardless of how much people like to big up some of their mistakes. Fans of other companies do it just as easily, for those companies.

 

[DWilson]

Yeah, I'm inclined to say Firaxis did a far better job than they have in a while of responding directly to our concerns here, and that the amount of pushback they're getting regardless is rather surprising.

I suppose some are never pleased.

 

[Minou]

You are aware the patch fixed a load of other things, right? I think focusing on the visible bugs leftover (or introduced as a consequence) is a rather loaded way of looking at it, especially when you use this view as a jumping point to incredulously ask if Firaxis did any testing.

Well if this was a free game I’d praise them for improving it but after shelling out over $150 for the game and expansions it would be nice to have a playable version. I’d say a single test game should have revealed the trade issue.

Listen, real improvement like the map search are GREAT but none of the eye candy matters if the game is broken.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

For some reason I feel the need to go searching for comic book guy gifs

 

[Aristos]

And the saddest part in this is that the trade deal length still does not scale to the game speed

This may well be the explanation you are looking for. I can see them coding the valuation of a trade in lump sum terms, and then translating that value into an annuity (per turn values). If that is indeed the case, and they coded scaled lump sum valuations, you would have higher lump sums in slower speeds (correct coding). If you couple that with the fact that deal length does NOT scale with speed (incorrect coding), then you would see higher GPTs for the same deal items at slower speeds.

Pure speculation though, until we have the dll source. I can see such coding mismatch possible, though.

 

[schondette]

I would prefer it if even King and Emperor city states had walls. AI civs can get pretty aggressive on those difficulties as well.

This so hard.

 

[criZp]

then just tweak the files? takes a few seconds.

 

[Stringer1313]

Yeah I am getting TONS of gold/turn for giving up very little (15-20 strategic resource or diplo favor). Someone offered me 10 gold / turn for 6 diplo favor in early game. WTH?

 

[Infixo]

Re: walls
Giving walls to CSs on selected difficulties is wrong on so many levels.

First, it breaks the basic rules of the game. Somebody gets a building before having a tech for it. So very wrong.

Second, it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, only patches the effects in an unelegant way.

Third, it breaks the normal decision tree in regards to what to do with a city state. There are cases where AI should conquer CS and this would be absolutely right way to go. Now this is artificially changed.

Fourth, it shows that devs cannot program the AI to properly assess the value of „conquering CS” vs. „being its neighbor”. There would be no need for any artificial fixes if AI would make a good decision about that.

 

[Jaybe]

Yeah I am getting TONS of gold/turn for giving up very little (15-20 strategic resource or diplo favor). Someone offered me 10 gold / turn for 6 diplo favor in early game. WTH?

Ya know, if you think an AI offer is too out of line, you could always refuse it (unless you really need the gold, of course).

 

[BenitoChavez]

If anything, it taking this long to apply this fix demonstrates how long it could take to "fix" the AI in that regard. Everything scales with regards to priority, as well as time taken to "fix".

Be disappointed if you want, but I just don't understand why the inclusion of this change is negative compared to not having it at all, which was the previous state of affairs. It's only negative compared to some idealistic state whereby the entire AI expects as all of us want it to, across all the systems of the game. I'm not being condescending, that is the aim. But! AI is hard!

Firaxis are by far from the only company with this problem, regardless of how much people like to big up some of their mistakes. Fans of other companies do it just as easily, for those companies.

Yeah, I'm inclined to say Firaxis did a far better job than they have in a while of responding directly to our concerns here, and that the amount of pushback they're getting regardless is rather surprising.

I suppose some are never pleased.

The wall change, and a large majority of the changes in the patch were very good and I think most players including myself are happy about that. I'm just saying that bugs fixes and balance changes more than once an expansion would be nice. Especially for issues that have been around for a long time that have known solutions that a single modder was able to implement. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

One would expect that large companies with teams of coders, designers, and testers would be able fix things more often than a single dude making a mod in his free time. Yeah I know, risk adverse for profit companies are risk adverse and for profit.

 

[BenitoChavez]

Ya know, if you think an AI offer is too out of line, you could always refuse it (unless you really need the gold, of course).

I'm going to refer you to your signature

Gameplay may trump realism, but gameplay WITH realism trumps gameplay without!

Is it realistic for the AI to give trade deals that unfairly favor the player?

 

[V. Soma]

Is the AI suddenly bad at science all of a sudden with this patch? I started two games yesterday and in one, nobody was making GS points until turn 100 or so, and in the other, a team MP game (our team vs AI teams), it's turn 130 or so and we're holding even with the other AIs at a lousy combined 70 science/turn.

It may be AI now don't build campuses?

 

[criZp]

Ya know, if you think an AI offer is too out of line, you could always refuse it (unless you really need the gold, of course).

you could also give the AI all your cities, but making bad desicions on purpose isn't a fun way to play a strategy game