C2C - Tips and Tricks

I would have to say that in most of my games, if I start anywhere near any other AI, they are very likely to pop all the goody huts before I ever get even one wanderer out, due to their multiple free units. (Emperor or Immortal, diety puts the AI too far ahead for me to enjoy it.) On top of that, my wanderers need to survive the potentially dangerous wildlife (not guaranteed even standing on a forested hill, although dangerous wildlife might not yet have spawned in the first, say, 30 turns) and the hut must not be defended by a barb unit (also somewhat unlikely this early, but possible).

At most I might get one or two nearby goody huts that I discovered with the initial (split) stone throwers, whereas others are too close to the AI and are claimed by them (or else popped by my throwers to deny them from the AI). Usually this also requires I have a high-hammer start, otherwise I'm still building e.g. klasie caves by the time Nomadic is complete.

That said, as you say, the potential of a good reward from a hut is probably still better than a civic change that doesn't benefit you at all since your tech per turn isn't high enough to round up (and even partial research progress could be worth dozens of turns saved vs. just a +1). I do tend to go for Nomadic first anyway simply because it gives me something to do after I've built the early buildings so I'm not just spamming brutes (which idle and just cost maintenance) or leaving the city idle (wealth production being not yet available); I hadn't analyzed it as closely as you have. I might even get Gathering before I go for Language - it could reveal a good commerce resource to work. Probably the only way I might get Language first is if I settled near a natural wonder.

 

Hi

I want to ask about the Neandertal barbarians. I am now in 21688 BC, is that normal, that these guys have got over 400! units already?
As you can see on the attached image, only in this city they have got more than 250 units, and on the adjacent tiles another 150. And as i could see, their number is increasing.
I have got right now about 25 units only. Is this a bug? Are they gonna upgrade their units in the future? If they decide to march toward me, there is no way and i will survive...

Thanks in advance!

 

Are you playing with Barbarian world/raging barbarians? I have noticed similar numbers in my games, although they are very content to just sit inside their territories and do not attack. They seem happy to just mill around until I get to trained dogs, at which point I am usually able to clear out their numbers, making for good great general experience and for slaves. The dogs have high movement and -terrain cost modifier to let them "sortie" and kill units without ending their turn next to the stack, in which case the stack will overwhelm you. But I also play with Surround and Destroy, so the dog's bonuses are able to weaken strong defenders enough that they easily defeat them.

A recent SVN update reduced the number of units they create but, in theory, made the barbarian player more aggressive - both in barb units attacking individually and in sending out parties to harass other players. I haven't updated to that SVN yet to see what effect it will have on games.

 

Yes i think so. Actually i managed to defeat them, i have trained a bunch of chariot archers, and merged them into a stronger unit with a strength of 9.
I had about 10 of these stronger units, and every single turn i have killed around 10 units, and the captured units i have trained into either archers, or Neanderthal warriors, and straight away sent them back to fight. So the number of killed enemy units increased in almost each turn.
I have got a question; the icon for merging 3 same units into one stronger one doesn't always show up. Even if all three units are on the same plot and still have the full movement points, does anyone know whats the reason for it?

 

Maybe some units are merged to different sizes?

 

Well, i have got this problem with newly trained units as well.

 

Upload save then so @Thunderbrd can look at it.

 

They must also all be fully healthy and be ungrouped.

 

yes, like i said before, they are all newly trained units.

My other question, that actually happened in my previous game before, that i am playing on Noble difficulty now, and i was happy to see, that i am the second most advanced empire, but the one on the first place is already far away from me. I got a notification, that Islam has been found, and this tech is 77 techs in front of me!
Am i doing something wrong? Or how come, that someone is so much more advanced? I have set no tech diffusion, no tech brokering.

 

There is an option where you can choose the religion to be founded.

 

I've started a new game on a earth map with space stuff, this one, and I'm playing as Egypt in africa. On the old world, things are very well balanced: the european civ is just a handful of techs ahead of me and at 1.1 relative strenght, they have more cities but it's a close match. The oceanian civ has a sprawling sea empire, the asian civ is playing tall with relatively good success, and the middle eastern civ is struggling in tech but that's because we've all coalitioned against them and they've had to go all in militarily. All in all this is great fun, it really feels like everyone's had a fair shot. Espionage is balanced too, I'm not drowning in money, veery good.

So what's the problem? One of the two americans civs (I still haven't met them) has clearly run away with the game. They have more than one era of tech advantage on us, we've just entered the first line of classical techs while they've now entered medieval age in 830BC; they have built almost all the best world wonders, especially the ones that boost research and production and got all the free techs. This being my third game, I set up this game with a few settings (to attempt) to prevent this from happening: flexible difficulty ranging from noble to deity, city limits from civics, revolutions, beelining stings and tech transfer to weaker civs.

Flexible difficulty seems to straight up not being working: it climbed to immortal early in the game and stood there ever since. Even when I've been the 3rd civ out of 7 both in tech and military strenght, it was sitting at immortal and not going lower (with 5 turns between changes). I've also had some strange behaviour where at times the difficulty would increase to deity and then go back to immortal on the same turn. In any case, I'm not sure that lowering the difficulty would help the game play better: I'm in a position where I can (probably) beat all of my neighbors one on one, we're regularly trading techs and resources around, but I feel I would easily overpower everyone else if the difficulty was lower and I'm not sure it would help to catch up to the tech frontrunner in the other continent.

City limits from civics option might as well not be there: everyone comfortably ignored this, the 3-4-5 unhappiness from extra cities is easily neglectable, I have on average 40 extra happiness in my cities and I'm not even the one with the most cities above the civic cap, greece somehow has 4 more than me. Everyone was running at least 4 cities above the civic cap since chiefdom and now with monarchy it's basically not a problem anymore.

Similarly, revolutions doesn't seem to be doing anything: as soon as you put a couple buildings that give 10-20 bonus stability points per turn (especially the governor's pets and menagerie and carnival), the city is guaranteed to never revolt. I've just conquered my first enemy city and just the bonus stability has made it a non issue. I reckon if you had a terrible mess of a city ridden with crime and disease in the middle game it would revolt. But I don't see that happening until the industrial era, which seems off.

Beeline stings is on, but it's seemingly not enough to stop the ranaway civ. I also have the other tech option that should speed up smaller civs catching up and I'm not sure it's doing much either. I'm running 95% tech rate, I've taken financial and open borders to boost commerce, I've started exploiting religion to get another boost, and honestly I feel like we are teching up alright. I don't feel at all like we are backwards, it's just that the AI in the medieval era is much more ahead than what they should be. Any suggestions to rebalance this in progress game?

Forgot to mention, I'm on SVN 10561.

 

This is what happens on higher difficulties currently. It has been seen as the only way to make them more challenging (for the people who were finding Deity too easy...).

What victory type do you feel they are assured of? In my current game, the tech leader would have won by culture in around the 14th century (early Information era for them, early Modern for most of the rest of us), if I didn't have Mastery Victory on.

Flexible Difficulty goes by Score only. There are options as to when it takes effect: eg. goes up only when you're in 1st place, goes down when you're in bottom three. You were expecting it to go down for you when you're in 3rd place? That would depend on your settings. Also do you have "AI Use Flex Difficulty" on? If not, that could provide a bit more of a dynamic leveller when an AI is ahead. I also recommend Win For Losing.

Experience suggests you will catch up in tech by Modern if not before (I was two eras behind, but now in late Modern, the tech leader is only in early to mid Information).

If you do get to the stage where you must defeat the tech leader to prevent them winning, you need not despair. It's sad perhaps, but from one era behind an AI you can still defeat them. Try and get a city on their continent ASAP.

 

Probably none. I may be wrong but I recall reading that Mastery victory doesn't really work at the moment, and there being some issues with space victory as well due to all the revisited space stuff. Taking into account that I'm playing on an earth map where the two american civs are fairly isolated and sheltered compared to the rest of the world, I only enabled conquest and domination victories. Maybe not the smartest selection, but at least if anyone's going to win here they'll have to fight for it. I was also hoping to see some successful breakaways thanks to revolutions, no luck so far but there's still plenty of time.

I see, I wasn't sure what was taken into account to adjust the difficulty. I can't seem to find more detailed settings for in in the BUG menu, this is all I see: . Where should I look?

Yes, I do have these two options enabled as well. I finally met the tech leader, they have a moderate city advantage, I find it strange that with just 4 cities more than Greece they can have more than one era of lead on us. I wonder if they killed the other american civ early on to get a boost.

That's reassuring. I don't really mind winning or losing, although getting annihilated before the modern era would suck a little if nothing else for the time investment. But I should be able to hold out my position, I believe. What bothers me is the tech leader snatching all the good wonders before it's even a contest. I guess I shouldn't have turned on unlimited wonders, although I wish limited wonders would come with a mechanism that increases the limit per city later into the game, I don't like how your older, larger cities can't build modern wonders later on in the game because there's a bunch of ancient ones.

 

You do get more wonder slots with higher culture categories being reached in cities.

 

No that's the only place I know about. I'm 100% certain that there were once options as I describe.

Oh well. Flex Diff always seems to change the difficulty either too early or too late, so having to switch manually at what seems the appropriate time for you (and manually reverse the automatic changes that come at the wrong time) isn't such a bad thing...

ETA: I have definitely seen Flex Diff lowering the difficulty for AIs, and raising the difficulty for them when they were not leading (because I was). But my best hypothesis is that it raises the difficulty when you are the leader (or maybe 1st or 2nd) of the known civs, and reduces it when you're in last place (and maybe 2nd last).

EATA: In RoMSettings.ini, you have FlexibleDifficultyMaxRank and FlexibleDifficultyMinRank. I don't know how they determine whether to go up or down, but I'm heartened (a bit) that these values can still be stipulated.

 

That's another good way to go about it, I didn't know. I'll have to remember when setting up a new game, thankyou.

I checked the ini file as you said and thanks to this very cryptic phrase "Your difficulty will not change if your rank is above the maximum/below the minimum rank", I remembered seeing those extra options in there too, probably around 5 years ago or so. And possibly a couple extra parameters... I didn't really understand what that meant back then either. I'm not opposed to manually tuning the difficulty though, I think that the point of flexible difficulty is to have a fair challenge all the time, a balanced game is the best fun.
By the way, the difficulty raising and then lowering on the same turn happened again, I got a pic: .

 

Could those messages be for two different civs? With AI Flex Diff I would expect multiple civs to have their difficulty adjusted at the same time.

Did your difficulty change at that time?

 

I hadn't thought it might be for another civ, that's interesting. I'm sure it's not mine though, I check in the game settings screen and it's always the same: I've climbed up to immortal very early in the game and it's been there ever since. Besides the maintenance costs vary greatly, if the difficulty had changed I would notice from just the GPT change.

 

Yes, u were right. But i was still a bit right, i got the news, that someone has invented classical lifestyle, that was about 20 technologies ahead of me. So it means, that someone is researching much-much faster than me. So actually i dont know, which difficulty would be the best. Currently am playing on Noble, but as you can see, on this level the AI is researching much faster, and according to the last list, i am already the 4th most advanced civilization, i was second before. While in the meantime my research is set to 100%, but still am already +500 per turn with the treasury, that is over 36000 right now and i am in 6685 BC. I remember, in the earlier versions i had so much money only in the late game, and during the game i always had to worry about the treasury and play with it to find the correct balance between research and treasury, and later culture and espionage. But in this mod you dont need to worry about the treasury from the very early game, that is not that fun.
I would like to play on a higher level to have more challenge by handling the economy, but in this case i dont have any chance against the AI, because they are gonna attack me with modern tanks, while i am still in the middle age.
Do you experience the same thing? What is the best difficulty? Or do i have the wrong settings?

 

20 techs behind is no reason to assume the worst. But if you are unable to keep up in power, then yes I would say you are in trouble.

The best difficulty is the one where neither you nor the AI walks all over the other. The AI needs a tech lead to achieve this, because, tbh, it is so dumb.

Can you gauge what the relative power situation is?

The other thing to mention is, we (limited data admittedly) have noticed that the tech lead starts to be whittled back at some stage. From nearly 2 eras behind, you can get back to half an era behind by the end of Modern. If you never get this far behind, you may catch up in Industrial or maybe much earlier.