Anyone tried a late start?

[Melkus]

Obviously not.



Ok, I did, it was supposed to be one of the great features, remember? -

Well, I found it pretty uninspiring so far with Rizal/Siam on Immortal. Clicking yourself some cities on the map wasn't especially exciting, then just calmly expanded while the AIs seem to mostly sit there or mass explorers. They have their yields, obviously, but they don't seem to be aware that you can buy settlers (and merchants) to expand. And the fractured map doesn't help, I guess, that may be unlucky.
Maybe it's supposed to be a multiplayer experience, I don't know. Still, the arc of history is missing, you just start with low constraints and too many options for my taste. Having to establish a foothold in a busy world at this stage might be interesting, but this is not that.



I love the complete "campaigns" as FXS calls them, so far, though the fun lessens slightly with the ages - maybe 9/10 for Antiquity (just to leave some space for patches/expansions), then 8/10, and 7/10 in Modern (win conditions feel too easy too control, they need some twists). But this? Feels too boring to continue.

Anyone with more uplifting late start stories to share? Maybe help me find some motivation to continue and not just restart some juicy Antiquity fun?

 

[ydejin]

This is on the basis of a single, late-game modern start playing on Sovereign. But in my experience, although the AI takes a while to get going, they will get going on building more citites. For a long time they sat at just 4 settlements total, but at some point they expanded out.

Here's my minimap. There are a few places where you could stick some cities, but not that many left, and some of them have Independent City States, which I'm not sure are marked on the minimap. I'm the blue on the royal blue on the right (also islands on the far-left side along with a few scattered cities handed to me in peace deals -- I wish we could see where those settlements are before accepting the deal, at least on Console that doesn't seem to be doable).

Here's my current opponents settlement count. We're almost at the end of the game -- I'm 8 turns from completing Operation Ivy. I've taken quite a few cities, so this doesn't indicate their high counts. I'm pretty sure I've got at least 4 cities from Himiko, And probably about 1 or 2 from most of the others. They put up a pretty good fight and there was a lot of back and forth. Taking a fortified city is difficult, even with a battleline of dreadnoughts backing you up.

I can also confirm that the AI has been pretty good at using Air Power, I've lost quite a few wounded units to air attack. The also build Naval Units, but I'm not sure those have been as effective. I've seen fewer of them -- although it could be just that I'm fighting Himiko mostly and she seems to be focusing on Air Units.

 

[Melkus]

Interesting, but also sort of confirms my suspicions - I try to find an interesting narrative angle but the game may just take a similar shape each time because everyone arrives almost fully formed already.

Relationships have no time to form organically, they're at the mercy of agendas. Attacking a neighbor right away doesn't seem wise (would set you back too much against the rest) and going for artifacts seems even shallower if it's not grounded in historic events. (They didn't really manage to do that, anyway, but I digress.)

I don't doubt that the AI can keep me busy later, I've had an interesting World War at the end of my last complete campaign.
They couldn't really challenge core cities, but they have a way of popping up unexpectedly somewhere and cause trouble. You can get stuck, be forced to retreat and regroup etc. It all felt satisfyingly alive, even when it was pretty clear early in the age that my space ship would eventually win it.

But it worked because there was history with my neighbors. There were reasons and motivations for the diplomatic landscape. The age may simply be too short to make up for the lack of narrative structure. And it's also too focused on balancing the start to do that, but that may be subjective.

Something to revisit later in the development cycle, perhaps. A single exploration age may work well, for instance, if they include win conditions.

 

[ydejin]

Yeah, in my full-all-ages games, it seemed like there was a good rapport with neighbors I had been cultivating a positive relationship with and I was able to maintain it throughout the game through the ages. This modern-start game was much more volatile. They went from being reasonably happy to me to declaring war on me almost instantly at one point, and that’s before any of us had ideologies.

I was playing as Napoleon Emperor though and he gets a bonus for every opponent that is hostile to you, so I never really tried to cultivate relationships with them. I didn’t pay much attention to their relationships, it’s possible there were a few of them allied together and one of the declared war and brought the others in.

If you look at the banners at the end of the game, Hatshepsut is very happy with me. But that’s because we share an ideology, and that still took a while for her to come around. They all declared war on me at one point or another. I’m not sure but the matching/opposing ideology seems to get higher as the game progresses. Or at least I was seeing some extremely high relationship bonuses and penalties by the end of the game (on the order of hundreds, just from ideology).

 

[Melkus]

Yes, ideologies seem a bit extreme, the 2nd WW was won by an alliance of Democracy and [Edit] Communism , after all, and the 1st wasn't even about ideological differences in that sense. Don't know if they manage to model that here.
But what I like a lot is that we have the option of "none of the above, please". And the tension between choosing to match win condition against choosing the most convenient alliance is interesting.

 

[Leyrann]

Yes, ideologies seem a bit extreme, the 2nd WW was won by an alliance of Democracy and Fascism

Uhm, you mean Democracy and Communism fighting Fascism?

Regarding settling: There seem to be a number of bugs related to settling, independent of the Age. This mod fixes a bunch of them, making the AI settle quite a bit faster.

 

[Melkus]

Thx, Leyrann, bit of a nightmarish brainfart on my part... wouldn't even touch Fascism in a game.

Tried the mod already - it has problems too, settles well for sure, but still... certainly ended up with incredible unit carpets, but that can get old quickly.
It might help here though, it's a more straightforward settling task than an Antiquity start.

 

[elephantsidread]

I really like the advanced starts, at least more than civ 6. Sometimes its nice just getting to pick some settlement locations without enemy competition. For example I was playing Hatshepsut and just nabbed two additional settlements on navigable rivers. I actually liked that quite a bit.