Antarctic Late Summer Update -- Now too "easy" on Diety?

[ElimAgate]

Its no walk in the park, but before the latest update, I was winning maybe 1 in 10 games on Diety on any given Civ (playing all the Gathering storm civs only like Kupe, Mansa Musa, Dido etc). Since the update, I've won 100% of the games I've played, even a really, really poorly executed game as Dido (Domination).

I typically play Diety, continents, Huge map.

Now, don't get me wrong, it is fun to win and all, but part of me wonders if something happened with the AI that shouldn't have. Around turn 325 or so, I had nothing but battleships and almost all cities had cities with a defense of ~80, making my damage pitiful. Yet, I somehow had enough turns to switch gears, research aerodomes, build/buy some bombers and land units, then sail across the world and somehow managed to overpower every other civ (despite the fact several of them already had GDR's to defend).

In terms of AI behavior, I've noticed some things that seem of concern
-Although AI no longer offer repeat trades for, say, 10 gpt for 1 iron, they're easily duped into offering all their gold reserves for a modest amount of diplomatic favor (say, 20). If you do this early on, you can seemingly bankrupt/hamstring them the rest of the game while getting a huge boost yourself
-In one game, poor india didn't research cartography or something, becuase he surrounded a city in the antarctic with apostles literally as far as the eye could see -- every hex all the way to the fog was apostles, surrounding a city they already converted.
-AI doesn't seem to build anti-air. They build fighters sometimes, but not AA, making air raids super effective.

Curious to hear other experiences and opinions for the diety players out there.

Cheers,

Elim

 

[BenitoChavez]

Pre-GS the deity AI was extremely aggressive towards the player in the early game and heavy expansionist. The challenge was to survive the early game and if you could do that, you were probably going to win. Post-GS I noticed the AI was a lot less aggressive towards human players. I didn't see anything in the notes about it, that's just my anecdotal observation. Post-patch with the wall changes to city-states the AI also can't expand nearly as quickly. These two changes make deity much much easier. It really is a sandbox game more than it ever was before.

 

[Starwars]

I feel like my own personal experiences has been a bit more random overall. There are games where I've won *extremely* easy, moreso than before. And some games where I've found the AI to be even more aggressive than it used to be in the early game. I lost a recent game to the Inca because they were going freaking crazy with their settling early on, really forward settling a lot, really pushing against me. And when they declared war I couldn't hold them back.
I think that's the one thing I've noticed since GS. It feels like the AI is settling more cities, but I can't tell if it's due to the map changes so that the land gets filled up more quickly. Not sure.

But once you get out of the early phase, the game is easier than ever.

And yeah, even the early phase can really go either way. In my current game everyone is really friendly despite me starting pretty close to two other civs. And I'm blasting ahead in science, noone is even close. Elanor is leading the culture race but it's going to be absolutely no competition whatsoever in this game. I'm actually not sure what they AIs are really doing because they've got large empires going on.

 

[kb27787]

Easier due to the amount of early gold you can get due to selling horses and favor.

Otherwise I do not notice anything different except AI will now focus on their culture output a lot better now.

 

[ElimAgate]

Well, one thing I noticed in reviewing a recent game was around 225 the space race stuff had started, but by 350 5 of the 10-ish AI had only 2 stages complete and virtually no progress towards the third step (despite me not harassing them). I wonder if they're getting hung up fighting each other?

I get the sense that they develop rapidly until industrial/modern, but then seem to stall and become quite confused/useless as to how to win.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Well, one thing I noticed in reviewing a recent game was around 225 the space race stuff had started, but by 350 5 of the 10-ish AI had only 2 stages complete and virtually no progress towards the third step (despite me not harassing them). I wonder if they're getting hung up fighting each other?

I get the sense that they develop rapidly until industrial/modern, but then seem to stall and become quite confused/useless as to how to win.

I've got an old thread from R&F days where I tested the AI's ability to win the game on Deity ("AI Deity Level Tests" or something). Based on those test games, it was normal in R&F for the winning AI to start the space race between T225 to T275 but not finish it until T300 to T350. About 80 turns from start to finish, with no player intervention to slow them down, was about average in R&F for the best performing AI civ in each game (standard number of civs, standard size maps, continents). The average civ would have been about 25 or 50 turns slower.

Your results seem similar, so nothing new here as of GS, I don't think. I don't believe there's any interest on the part of the dev team to increase the speed at which the AI wins the game. That's not really the type of game Civ 6 is intended to be, I think.

 

[ElimAgate]

I've narrowed into a meta with a few more weeks of play. games go like this -

Try to start out with any civ/ go for any victory (i.e. culture, religion etc). Eventually they get pissed off at me for some reason and someone declares war. I defend myself and get put behind in science, so I go grab 1 or two cities from the aggressor. Then everyone else decides to declare war, so I just build bombers and steamroll them.

I think it comes down to the fact that late game modern armors now take oil rather than uranium and the AI puts up virtually zero air defense (as well as unnecessarily declares war).

I just wrapped a game with Ghandi where I was making a point to keep everyone happy, going religious... I was encircled by mountains and city states, so no one could reach me til they had cartography... and yet, without doing anything to them, japan and elanor both decided to declare surprise wars despite not being able to reach me and them having 'friendly' status.

I just don't get it.

 

[Aristos]

How does this discrepancy in opinions happen?

My opinion: the "feelings" crowd (the "casuals") find it hard. The "challenge" crowd (the "veterans") find it a joke. I am a veteran, I find it a joke. That is my opinion, although somewhat backed by observing trends in opinions in this very forum. There might be some casuals that still find it easy, and some veterans that find it hard (how?), but the general trend seems to be what I stated.

It's a joke. A bad one.

 

[Icicle]

Pre-GS the deity AI was extremely aggressive towards the player in the early game and heavy expansionist. The challenge was to survive the early game and if you could do that, you were probably going to win. Post-GS I noticed the AI was a lot less aggressive towards human players. I didn't see anything in the notes about it, that's just my anecdotal observation. Post-patch with the wall changes to city-states the AI also can't expand nearly as quickly. These two changes make deity much much easier. It really is a sandbox game more than it ever was before.

This is what I've seen too, the early game warrior rush just doesn't seem to happen to the degree it used to. After that, it doesn't seem like they've changed much the AI just doesn't seem to know how to win but that's not new.

 

[Midgardsormr]

I'm currently finding the extra complexity in the Space Race makes it all but impossible for the AI to win a SV. It doesn't know how to properly deploy its Rock Bands, so it can't get a CV, either. It's never been any good at RV on any map other than Pangaea, and nobody can consistently get the Diplomatic Victory. And we all know the AI is incompetent at war, so it's not winning any Dom, either.

The computer doesn't seem any less aggressive to me. I'm having a bear of a time fighting my way through Kongolese troops right now. He's building quite a large amount of Cavalry and keeps roping Mansa Musa in to help out. Mali is backward, but it's got so much gold that I'm drowning in Crossbows on one side, and Kongo's holding the line with armies of horse and his UU on the other. Fractal maps can get brutal when the AI decides to actually build troops—it doesn't matter if it uses them poorly if they're packed in so tight that you can't maneuver around them. And they're both a bit ahead of me in naval tech, too—the Privateers were keeping my Caravels and Quads in port until I got Frigates going.

I have always found Deity challenging throughout the game. But the fact that I'm doing as well as I am right now says maybe the challenge rating has dipped a bit. On the other hand, I'm stacking Chandra's Territorial war bonus with Varu, Crusade and Oligarchic Legacy, so I think my play this time around has been superior to typical games.

 

[Basajaun]

I dont know man, but I find that the difficulty slider makes very little difference in the long run, compared to what a good starting position can do. Funny, last week, I did about 4 games, on 3 of those, I had Genghis Khan as a direct neighbor. I always take down my first immediate neighbor, need that land to expand...

2 of those games, I swept him under the rug before T80 (epic speed). The other game, he stopped my rush, I lost almost 80% of my troops and it took me about 20 turns more than usual.

The difficulty was the same for all, the only difference was, that in the first 2 games, he had a quite standard spawn for his civ, some horse in range and a decent amount of bonus resources. The "hard" game was just the capital surrounded by (first 2 rings) 2 horses, 2 cocoa plains hills, and a spices plains hills, with a bunch of city states behind him (6 total, assorted kind), sea on the other side. So he got all the first visitor envoys.

It was my hardest first phase I ever played

 

[Socrates99]

The weird thing is that every other thread the general consensus changes. It seems like 50% of the people in this forum are saying that the AI got fundamentally better, games are much harder on Deity, AI finally is hard to beat in war because they build "carpets" (giant armies) are smarter in battle, take capitals, are more aggressive etc. and everyone in the thread agrees.
Then in the next thread everyone agrees that the AI even got worse than before, the ai is much less aggressive and wars and wins are even easier.
So what is true now? Will i, as someone who focuses on war and stopped playing because he was bored of the ai that was no enemy in warring, finally have fun again?
Or did GS probably not make the AI more challenging in war but the latest patch did? How does this discrepancy in opinions happen?

Map and opponent variations. Some starts are rough, some civs are harder to face. Sometimes it comes down to their random agendas, an environmentalist Seonduk is a weaker opponent than an exploitative Seonduk etc. With how long a typical Civ game is your sample size is too small to really know definitively. A player who might have had a couple rough games will say it's harder, players that have breezed through theirs are going to say easier.

All I know is that the AI can now cannibalize eachother which increases the likelihood of a runaway on the other continent. That makes me happier.