Civ4 BTS : Advice or help much appreciated

[michael20y]

Hello,

I am a long time player of Civ4 and more recently Civ4:BTS.
It is a great game but I have observed some issues with BTS.

1) Enemy units seem to have a very far line of sight
I have experienced this many times, especially with naval units. Even with a destroyer (that can travel many squares in one turn), the enemy destroyer on my tail would always be able to track me and remain on my trail.

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2) Enemy siege units do a greater amount of collateral damage
Comparing between player's siege units and the AIs' with equal promotions, the AI siege units do much more collateral damage per attack. It also inflicts the damage to the maximum number of units whereas player siege units almost always affects less AI units.

Added comment - 21 Oct
I am referring to siege units from AI civs that are used to attack my cities as compared to mine attacking theirs, not against barbarians. I observed that even when those units are with equal promotions, enemy siege reduce my defenders to significantly less health, all else being equal. Actually it happens not only with collateral damage but with direct attack damage as well As far as I've observed, this happens all the time.

Added comment - 22 Oct
I have attached screenshots for the collateral damage issue from my latest game, which is at warlord difficulty :

I have 4 catapults based in the city of Konya, each with the increased collateral damage level 1 promotion.

The AI has a huge stack of units and a number of catapults (screenshot 2).

I attack with each of my 4 catapults. The number of units affected by collateral damage for each catapult attack are : 3, 5, 3 and 3.

The next screenshot shows the number of my units affected by collateral damage after numerous catapult attacks. The numbers are : 6, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 5 and 6

This is the umpteenth time that I am observing this in all my games.

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3) AI civilizations build their cities to restrict free land available to human players
I've noticed this happening at the start of the game. Neighboring AI civilizations build
their cities close to player cities first,leaving a significant chunk of land behind them. It is almost like forming a fence around the player restricting free land with which to colonize. This phenomenon is not isolated to one particular AI civ, all the neighboring AI civs seem to do this. I've always wondered why the AIs could build so many cities so fast until when I sent spies across their lands and discovered that the lands behind them are vastly empty.

Added comment - 21 Oct
From the replies thus far, it seems that this is a common strategy used by the AI civs. So is it a strategy used against human civs only ? Because even when the backyards of the AIs are vastly empty, neighboring AIs do not settle there.

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4) Incredible expansion of cultural borders of AI cities
This is very apparent when AI civs build cities in isolated locations. Places such as lone islands in the ocean, tile surrounded by jungles where there are no nearby food resources. The borders of those cities will expand, more than once, even when there are no cultural buildings built and no workers improving the lands. The cultural border of those cities expand faster and much further as compared to when I tried to build a city under the same conditions. Again I have observed this happening with more than 1 AI civilization.

Added comment - 21 Oct
To clarify the point on workers, what i meant to say was that there was no improvement done to the surrounding jungle terrain to beef up its production capability. Even if AI was able to adjust the culture slider, how would a new found (or captured) city, far away from their cultural influence and with virtually zero hammers, be able to culturally expand that quickly even faster than my own capital city would ?

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5) Unusual defensive bonus of AI cities
I am not sure how the defensive bonus (ie. denoted by the black castle icon) are determined but I have observed on all games played that the bonus of AI cities are significantly higher than my own. I am referring to the cities which have been established for a long time, not those newly built ones. The defensive bonus of the AI cities almost always range from 80 - 100% whereas my own are in the 40 - 60% range. This happens even when I am the most culturally advanced civ for more than a 100 turns.

Added comment - 21 Oct
Most times I noticed this after I have discovered gunpowder and I have my amazing large stack of rifleman approaching their cities. The black castle icon almost always displays 80 - 100%. I would assume this is caused by cultural influence since walls and castles do not have bonuses against gunpowder units.

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6) Incredible production capabilities of AI cities
The AI seem to be able to produce units at a much faster rate. This is especially so when I am at war with them. I've observed that this happens when the cities are out of my line of sight, and those are not the capital city either. These "hidden" cities are able to produce units at relatively fast intervals regularly but when I move my units to just within sight range, it is not able to do any more.that the cities are "visible", they are not able to do so anymore.

Added comment - 21 Oct
I understand about whipping and drafting but why would the cities whip and draft units when my units are not even within line of sight but instantly stop for long periods when I move within visibility ? Most times, that's what I would do when I notice an unrealistic number of enemy units being hurled at me; I move units to within sight of their cities and almost like magic, the enemy stops producing.
In fact, the only times I have not seen this happen is with barbarian cities.

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7) Incredibly elite AI units
I also observed that AI civs seem to have very elite AI units and a lot of those. By elite units I mean those with 4 or more promotions. During war time, each AI city seem to have at least 2 of these and not to mention the assault teams that come to attack my cities - there are amost always more than 50% of those in the stack. My own units (even with barracks, vassalage etc) will need to win a tremendous amount of battles to attain that kind of "eliteness" and some of these AI civilizations have never even gone to war before.

Added comment - 21 Oct
Yes, I understand that great generals can construct multiple military academies in a city but the fact I discovered when I drive them to extinction and explore the city details (I do that just to see how they manage to produce those elite units), only 2 or 3 of their cities have one military academy. With one academy and even with vassalage and theocracy, how would they have produced units with 4 promotions, without ever going to war before ?

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I do not have data or numbers to back up my claim. It is from playing the game that I have observed these issues.

I have experienced these issues in every BTS game I've played. Civ4, by comparison, does not have these problems. However, I prefer BTS because of its added features (for example the random world events and the additional civilizations) and would play it more often if only these issues can be resolved.

I would always be playing single player at warlord difficulty, huge map and marathon. I have tried patch 3.19 but have switched to 3.17 because aside from waiting time optimization, 3.19 seems to have these issues compounded.

Can anyone offer any advice if there are any patches or mods that would even-out these "unbalances" for BTS ? Does playing at a different game length or map size make a difference ?

Any other tweaks that would help ?


Thank You

 

[Handel]

Basically - about the defenses - I noticed the AI favors building walls until the human player rarely builds walls. I am not sure but this should be the same in the vanilla Civ too.

 

[-Asterix-]

First of all, if you're experiencing this kind of issues (especially points 3, 4 & 6) at huge/marathon/warlord, there must be something badly wrong with your playing style or strategy. Suggest checking some basic guides from War Academy. Another suggestion would be to play some standard size/normal speed games instead of huge/marathon to get better feel of overall progress of the game. A single huge/marathon game takes tremendous amounts of time and you don't get much experience on different stages of the game that way.

About some of your points:

2) Kind of hard to believe that this is the case. Would like to see some pics or something for a proof.
3) This is a basic strategy. Works also against the AIs, you just have to be faster that them to get the good spots.
4) There are also other ways to gain culture besides buildings: creative-trait, caste system, religion, building culture, culture slider, etc. Workers improving lands rarely have anything to do with cultural expansion.
5) Could be the walls as suggested by Handel.
6) Units can be built fast for example by drafting or whipping. Nothing strange here.
7) In BtS, protective leaders tend to have city defenders with multiple promos as many units get CG1 + Drill1 automatically. There's also a way to get experience for units without waging war with other civs. It's called barbs.

Anyway, I consider BtS much better than Vanilla because of lots of added content. It's also better balanced.

 

[lymond]

AIs will absolutely always build walls and castles, whereas the human will usually ignore them and rely on cultural defense. So wall/castles + culture defenses + possibly Chitzen Itza will put AIs in the 100% to 125% defense range. That is quite normal. Just bring more siege or use spies. It's the castles really though that are the big difference since they did not exist in vanilla.

Once you hit levels above Noble, AIs will get some production bonuses. Regardless the AIs use the whip in war just like the human. The human can produce just about as fast as the AI in that regard. I think the difference here is that simply the AI is better in BTS than vanilla, thus AI is making use of it's advantages. If not, the game would be WAY too easy.

Not sure I buy the collateral damage observation. Maybe it's a difference in the promos you use vs. the AI on siege or the math is off. Regardless, I don't think they get an advantage in collateral.

Rest of your observations I chalk up to inexperience and the newness of BTS. BTS is leaps and bounds better than vanilla. There are plenty of differences and improvements, so it takes a bit of getting used to. I find it easier than vanilla and warlords, at least on higher levels.

Oh...as for cultural expansion, I'm not sure what point in the game you are referring to. There are many ways to expand borders other than so a monument or whatever. If not Creative (which will expand borders quickly), you have religion, running artists in caste and building culture. AIs will take advantage of all these options and the human can use them just as easily. Regardless, in general, I found the AI cultural pressure/expansion to be about the same between the two versions.

 

[vincentz]

#1 : Yep, the AI cheats greatly with viz, especially on water. I think they get 10 squares (or radius, cant remember) of visibility. Otherwise the AI would be very incompetent with their navies, coz they dont "remember" what units passed by them (if a human player sees a frigate passing by, they know in what direction it went, and therefore knows in which direction to search. An AI doesnt)

 

[Handel]

#1 : Yep, the AI cheats greatly with viz, especially on water. I think they get 10 squares (or radius, cant remember) of visibility.

Actually the AI seems to cheat with the viz on the land too. The best way to lure an aggressive neighbor to start a war is to leave a border town defenseless and to keep large stack somewhere behind on suitable reach. This can be made with spies of course but it happens too often and I don't believe the AI keeps spies w/o work just for sightseeing.

 

[God-Emperor]

1) Enemy units seem to have a very far line of sight

As mentioned by vincentz, the AI gets to see farther because they decided not to implement the necessary notifications of unit movements and memory of them for the AI. That saved some (possibly semi-complex) programming that would have slowed down the turns and used more memory. Instead they allow AI units to see farther. It is something like the regular visibility distance plus the units speed, or possibly just the speed if it is larger - something like that, anyway. On land this is barely noticeable. At sea it is frequently quite noticeable. It is one of the few "AI cheats" that people complain about that is actually verifiably real (if you knew where to look, you could find it in the source code for the DLL that comes with the game).

2) Enemy seige units do a greater amount of collateral damage

The source code for the part of the game that does the combat calculations comes with the game. It is the same for the AI as for the player, except for barbarians who often get penalized (particularly at lower difficulty levels, in fact the AI gets a slightly better bonus against them than you do at Warlord difficulty, they get a 25% bonus but you get a 20% bonus; on the other hand you get a 50% bonus vs animals but the AI only gets 40%; as it turns out, at all difficulty levels the AI gets a 25% bonus vs. barbarians but the player's bonus decreases at every level until it is 0 at Monarch or higher). Also, don't forget this: the random number generator is evil. It will make you think the game is cheating.

3) AI civilizations build their cities to restrict free land available to human players

This is good strategy, if irritating. The system they use to give plots a value for settling includes a factor that makes settling near other civs slightly more valuable than an identical location that is not near someone else. They also do it to each other, but since they are doing it to each other it is less successful than it is against you if you are not doing it to them.

4) Incredible expansion of cultural borders of AI cities

Once it has the tech needed to do so, the AI frequently builds culture until the first border pop, and occasionally after that when it is close to getting another one. It also sometimes bumps up the culture slider a couple of steps for a while. It likes to "culture bomb" cities that are near other civs (using a Great Artist to add a large amount of culture to their city).

5) Unusual defensive bonus of AI cities

A city uses whichever is higher: the physical defense rating or the cultural defense rating. Walls give 50%, castles (which require walls) give an additional 50% for 100% total. The Chichen Itza wonder adds 25% to whichever is higher, I think. Cultural defensive bonuses are always even multiples of 20: 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, or 100% at legendary. Gunpowder units ignore the physical defenses so only cultural and, possibly, Chichen Itza's bonus apply (I don't remember if that bonus also is negated or not, but it is obsolete once the owner gets rifling anyway).

Also, walls and castles reduce the damage done to the defense for a bombard of the defenses (by 50% for walls and 25% for castles) but not the damage done to units in the city when attacked.

6) Incredible production capabilities of AI cities

The AI cities don't produce things any faster than you can at Warlord difficulty. In fact, they produce things slightly slower - at Warlord difficulty, the AI's production cost for units and buildings is 10% higher than your cost (if a unit would cost you 40 production to build, it would cost the AI 44).

The AI makes use of the rush capabilities of the slavery civic (known as "whipping", it trades population for production for the cost of a little unhappiness for a somewhat shortish time - although the happiness stacks if you whip again before it is gone). It uses that a lot and to good effect most of the time (it has been known to sometimes cripple a city by whipping away too much population, leaving it will small cities that can't grow for too long due to excessive whip related unhappiness). You are probably not using it effectively, if at all. It will also make use of the rush buy available with the Universal Suffrage civic (pay money to finish production on the current build item). And, finally, it will make use of drafting, available with the Nationalism civic.

The AI also chops forest to get the production bonus from that. Probably a bit excessively at times (for example: if the Mathematics tech is not far off for you, you are frequently better off holding off copping until after you research it to get the 50% increase in production from chopping that it gives; the AI generally has no clue about timing things like this).

7) Incredibly elite AI units

The AI likes to settle multiple great generals that it earns in a single city. The +2 experience points they give stacks so if you have 2 great generals settled in the same city every unit built there starts with 4 extra xp, with 3 you get +6xp (good for mounted units since barracks + stable gives 5 and 6 more gets mounted units with 11xp when built which = 3 promotions), and with 4 you get +8 (which is also a good level, since added to the 3 from the barracks it also puts you at 11). Various traits also give bonuses (watch out for Boudica, for example: aggressive + charismatic gives a free promotion to melee and gunpowder units plus promotions cost fewer xp). The AI also fights barbarians, which can get a unit up to 10xp, which is the required amount to get 3 promotions (unless the leader is charismatic, in which case it only takes 8). The Native American unique building gives 3 extra xp to archery units (and Sitting Bull is protective, so his archery units start with two free promotions already, then barracks + totem pole means at least 2 more from starting xp). The Theocracy civic gives +2xp to all units built in cities with the state religion, and Vassalage also gives +2xp to every unit (and using both at the same time gives +4). And so on. Lots of ways to get experience points and promotions. All of them are also available to you.

I do not have data or numbers to back up my claim. It is from playing the game that I have observed these issues.

I have experienced these issues in every BTS game I've played. Civ4, by comparison, does not have these problems. However, I prefer BTS because of its added features (for example the random world events and the additional civilizations) and would play it more often if only these issues can be resolved.

I would always be playing single player at warlord difficulty, huge map and marathon. I have tried patch 3.19 but have switched to 3.17 because aside from waiting time optimization, 3.19 seems to have these issues compounded.

The 3.19 AI is slightly smarter (they added some of the improvements people around here were doing, plus a few of their own). That is almost certainly the only effect you are seeing other than the effects of the random number generator (which can be quite irritating - long streaks of bad luck are pretty common, but you do also get long streaks of good luck from time to time).

Can anyone offer any advice if there are any patches or mods that would even-out these "unbalances" for BTS ? Does playing at a different game length or map size make a difference ?

Any other tweaks that would help ?

If you don't want to be so crowded by AIs on all sides, you could play a map with more separate land masses. Pangaea type maps are likely to be the worst for this -everybody is on the one big land mass and if you are not on some peninsula, or at least near the edge, you can get crowded from all sides (but if you are on a peninsula, you can be cut off from most of the land by a single AI - and they will often do this to you if they can - which is ultimately usually even worse). Try an Archipelago type map: you are likely to have chunk of land all to yourself (possibly several of them).

 

[Handel]

...except for barbarians who often get penalized (particularly at lower difficulty levels, in fact the AI gets a slightly better bonus against them than you do at Warlord difficulty...

Don't know if this is the reason or not but when Civ IY was new and I played a little bit more I tried 2 games on monarch with raging barbarians. The result - in the first game I established a religion and could clearly see the barbarians *hugging* the AI cities and going from the other end of the map straight for my cities. Of course I fell behind so I started a new game and chopped The Great Wall. The result was a disaster - 3 (three) AI civ were destroyed in the next turns. Since then I never play with raging barbarians.
And now I started to play at new on prince and when I chop The Great Wall quite often at least one AI civ die from the barbarians. Which I understand as the devs never ever cared to "teach" the AI to deal with them - the bars simply were supposed to harass only the human player.

 

[michael20y]

Thanks for all the replies so far
Have added additional comments to my starting post to answer some of the points mentioned.

 

[Handel]

Michel, I am a casual player; played a little bit years ago; started to play again (everything was forgotten) a week ago. I too had and still have the impression even on the prince the AI has huge bonuses (although the devs says at prince both sides are equal); the truth is it really has some huge bonuses - for example in upgrading the units - it upgrades the units practically for free; but it has no bonuses in battles and in culture itself. But it has huge production bonuses on higher levels so yes, it can churn units and buildings much faster - but really only on higher levels.

 

[michael20y]

I have attached screenshots for the collateral damage casualties issue. The AI always seem to achieve high casualty numbers for collateral damage as compared to the players and this is always the case for siege weapons in my games.

Hey Handel, thanks for your comments so far I have never played beyond warlord difficulty before so I can't comment if it gets worse at higher levels. I have just edited my starting post on the collateral damage issue, might I ask if you have observed this before ?

 

[Handel]

I have attached screenshots for the collateral damage casualties issue. The AI always seem to achieve high casualty numbers for collateral damage as compared to the players and this is always the case for siege weapons in my games.

Hey Handel, thanks for your comments so far I have never played beyond warlord difficulty before so I can't comment if it gets worse at higher levels. I have just edited my starting post on the collateral damage issue, might I ask if you have observed this before ?

The collateral damage depends on the unit promotions. Usually the players promote the catapults and such for barrage which increases the collateral damage; they can be promoted with city raider which increases the chances of survival - it is usually more useful for the trebuchets which have 100% bonus which get promoted with this.

I read the defense value has no effect on the collateral damage but only limited number of units get such damage at every attack. So if you attack enemy stack with 20 units in average they will take 4 times less damage then if you attack a stack with 5 units only.

And as I understand the description of the walls and castle they do not prevent the collateral damage (although they should) - but maybe I am wrong.

Ah, and some units are immune to a collateral damage - the catapults for example.

 

[Rubio]

Pay more attention to culture in general in your games, and watch the AI's border cities lose tiles bit by bit and eventually maybe even flip this is incredibly satisfying......

 

[God-Emperor]

In your screen shots the AI had a bunch of catapults in their defending stack (looks like 12 out of the 34 units in the city are catapults). As far as I can tell you did not have any. A catapult is immune to collateral damage but when randomly picking units to assign collateral damage to they can still be picked. If 1/3 the units in a stack are catapults they will reduce the number of units taking collateral damage by 1/3 (on average) due to this, so if it determines that you should do collateral damage to 6 units but 2 of the randomly selected units are catapults you will only actually do collateral damage to 4 units and that is the number that is reported.

 

[michael20y]

In your screen shots the AI had a bunch of catapults in their defending stack (looks like 12 out of the 34 units in the city are catapults). As far as I can tell you did not have any. A catapult is immune to collateral damage but when randomly picking units to assign collateral damage to they can still be picked. If 1/3 the units in a stack are catapults they will reduce the number of units taking collateral damage by 1/3 (on average) due to this, so if it determines that you should do collateral damage to 6 units but 2 of the randomly selected units are catapults you will only actually do collateral damage to 4 units and that is the number that is reported.

Does this apply to the AIs too, or only to the player ? Because I too have 5 catapults out of total 19 military units in the stack and of the 7 siege attacks it made, it manages each time to collateral minimum 5 or 6 units. I am pretty sure this is not a probability issue because I have observed this in every battle.

 

[michael20y]

Could there be something terribly wrong with my RNG system or something ?
Is there a diagnostic or mod that I can run to counter it ?
Frankly, such strange mechanics in the battle system is making play extremely tedious.

 

[michael20y]

Oh, I'm playing a normal single player game instead of a custom game (ie. main menu, select single player - select play now etc). Does that make a difference ?

 

[Knightly_]

No that makes no difference. I think God-Emperors explanation is correct. But are you sure you still had 5 catapults in your stack? Or did you lose them before during their attack on the enemy stack? Both logs show 1386 as date and i think the player acts first. If you are unsure please reload and check again. Or you can worldbuilder yourself 10 catapults before the enemy stack attacks and check.

edit: the very bottom line in the 4th screenshot shows that you have lost at least one catapult when you attacked the enemy...


Knightly_

 

[strijder20]

Michael, about the incredibly fast expanding borders:
When you are running caste system, running an artist for 2 turns will earn you your first border pop. It's probably that you were observing.
If you are still unsure about some of the points you made, just give yourself some great spies with worldbuilder and infiltrate the AI cities. This way, you can see everything they do, and thus can be sure they do not cheat

 

[capnvonbaron]

On point 6 -- As mentioned, the AI uses whipping and drafting extensively, but it cannot whip/draft any faster than you can without suffering consequences. When you start a war, the AI can almost instantly whip/draft a unit in many of it's cities and send them where it thinks you will attack, which is why you notice the initial surge. Typically it can also whip/draft a second round of defenders while you move in on its cities and then take the time to bombard city defenses, which seems like it keeps the initial surge going. However, unhappiness stacks up and production slows, and a city with a lower population may not be able to whip or draft anymore for many turns. This is why it seems like they all of a sudden stop -- because they sorta do Thats why, typically, if you bring enough seige, taking the first two cities is usually the toughest, and it becomes a steam-roll after that.

On point 7 -- Looking at your screenshots, your point it fairly shaky. Most have only two promos. Now, if you are playing against Charismatic civs, keep in mind they can get three-promo units with barracks, vassalage, theocracy, and a single victory. Also, the AI tends to hunt barbarians, and many times has highly promo'd units because of this. Additionally, keep in mind that protective civs get two free promos for all archery/gunpowders, aggressive civs have free combat 1 for all melee/gunpowders, and many Unique Units start with some kind of promo (Oromo warriors, samurai, etc). One of my favs is Hannibal's numidian cavalry. With barracks, a stable, a settled GG, and theocracy, you get four-promo'd cavalry right out of the box So thats why you may be noticing a lot of extra promos on rival units. All of these are available to you if you use those civs properly.