Different playstyles and how game mechanics & exploits affect your preferred playstyle and enjoyment

I noticed something interesting along these lines in an observer (debug as Japan on its own island, Marla Singer map) game the other night. Russia founded a city very close to China very early on, which must have been via a hut. It's 41 tiles from Moscow, and was founded in 2390 BC, which is turn 34 of the game, so it's impossible that their first Settler traveled all that distance to found it.

Here's the city:

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(It's worth noting that due to being a Vanilla conversion and radar towers being enabled, most AIs used their starter worker on a radar tower, and thus AI expansion was pretty slow; many AIs hadn't founded their second city by 2390 BC)

Here's the optimal pathing route from Moscow to Novgorod, in Clean Map mode to hide irrelevant details:

Spoiler Wide screenshot :

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Turn 21 = 2950 BC, so the scout didn't make a beeline directly for that hut. Of course, not knowing this was going to happen, I wasn't watching the scout super-closely to see which route it did take.

It generally supports the "AI likes to explore in a general direction, influenced by various terrain factors", but is again one data point. Still, it shows that the AI will sometimes end up with goody hut cities quite close to other capitals, include AI capitals. Given that I was not land accessible on this map (in 800 AD, no AI has made contact with me yet), it supports the results being luck of the draw. Though again, one data point.

Lanzelot is right that the way the AI is programmed and the way we think "makes sense" likely don't line up, especially as we have 20 years of experience playing Civ and talking about strategies that even the humans of 2001 wouldn't have known about. Still, I'm sure there were various reasons that Soren programmed the AI the way it did. Scouting the immediate area is something we know helps figure out where to settle. But scouting far away in a general direction can help lead to contact with other civilizations, and thus trade. I agree with the statements that the direction does not appear to be completely random each tile. Having programmed an exploratory AI for the C7 project that does exactly that, the units tend not to make it very far from home.

I like the proposal of a scientific approach to studying it. And it could be used for a lot of questions. Will the AI connect a luxury or strategic resource, of equal yield, first? Does it matter if you make the unit that the strategic resource enables more powerful? How much to various factors affect AI tech selection? Etc. In some cases there's community knowledge based on an accumulation of anecdotes (e.g. the AI seems to like techs that enable new governments), but if someone had the patience and motivation to do such studies, a good amount more could be learned. Of course, it would also be a tedious process, which is why it's probably unlikely to be done.
 
From endlessly repeating a world map in debug mode, with about 20 Civs in their correct starting locations (except for Dutch in Indonesia, Spain & England in the Americas, Portugal in southern Africa) I could only identify two clear patterns from AI early game movements.

I'd play with fully visible map (so scouts all disbanded) but the Mongols would 99/100 aim their first settler at the prime land of Korea (rivers and luxuries), without ever having scouted it. About 50% of the time they'd be beaten to it by China or Japan (I gave them map making at the start). The Mongol alternatives in all other directions were comparatively terrible.

Similarly, the Persians would 8/10 instinctively and blind head east to settle northern India (again rivers, food bonus) rather than the Himalayas or the contested lands of the middle east and Caspian sea (where I stuck the Turkic).

All the other Civs had a generally less clear cut set of options for their second city placement and so varied their actions more. So, if you held a gun to my head I'd assume the AI knows the location of other AIs and of bonus tiles and possibly rivers. I'd then conclude they have a knowledge of all tiles, as that would be the simplest way to code it I'd imagine.

Also, even though in these debug games I'd inhabit one tile Iceland, most AIs would never find me until they presumably purchased contact with me. So I've seen no indication that the AI takes a special interest in seeking out or harassing the human player.
 
I played Inscryption this past Winter. Quite a bit, including Kaycee's mod even more. I learned something about the nature of turn-based games. In turn-based games, the advantage by the very nature of being turn based goes to the attacker. Think of it this way, if you attack before your opponent does you can kill him. He might not even get a chance to move a single turn! (Inscryption can get "rigged" for certain carefully made decks so that you can do this a lot over 50% of the time easily on a run... it's also what enables defeating the high stat grizzly bosses with some combinations) He had a nuclear bomb or an invisible deadly virus to kill you and knew all the tactics? Possibly irrelevant. You attacked first successfully. He's dead, and never can get a chance to even use those skills! You could have the weakest weapons, but so long as you kill him, the turn based advantage of the first player attacking can render everything else irrelevant if the attacker is just good enough so that the kill state gets achieved.

Now in our beloved civ III, the human player moves first! Don't believe me? Load up a new game. Found a city in 4000 BC. Retire. You will find that you founded a city before any of the AIs did always. You move first. Ceteris paribus, you can kill all of their settlers, capture all of their cities, or raze all of them at a numerical index earlier in the sequence than any AI can, since you move first. So the human player by virtue of moving first, ceteris paribus, has the advantage in civ III.

The same applies to the combat system. Yes, Buttercup, of course, a defensive unit can kill your offensive unit on your turn. But the combat system isn't only about the battles between offensive and defensive units. It's also about the battles between your empire and the AIs empire. Between your citizens and their citizens. Between your offensive units and their settlers, and their offensive units and their settlers (to review, killing off a civ's last settler is sometimes the only or fastest way to end them). Combat between your armies outside of their city and theirs inside of their city doesn't end when you kill their units. It ends when your army waltzes in and installs your government in place of their government or your soldiers burn the city to the ground. Thus the human player has a serious advantage for the combat system.

That rifles (spears) with the same number of hitpoints as cavalry (archers) have a multiplier while cavalry do not thus can get viewed as compensating for the turn based nature of the game which favors the attacker. Zone of control can too, I think.

The human player is already at a massive disadvantage because of the combat system because of the way the numbers on each unit have almost zero impact in their combat prowess, however, building a 'better' unit costs significantly more shields - ergo: being more advanced than an AI opponent during battle is actually a crippling disadvantage because it means one can only produce half as many units as the AI.

Your scenario assumes that the human player has more technologically advanced units than the AI. They are NOT at an even level. Yes, advanced units cost more. But, bigger empires should be more likely at more advanced stages of the game. Better means of production can or do exist at advanced stages of the game. Factories. Coal plants. Hoover Dam. Courthouses. Police Stations. Communism possibility. And theoretically, it should be easier to get a "we love the leader" day at advanced stages of the game since more progression means more luxuries, more probability of having marketplaces, more probability of having temples, cathedrals, and colosseums or happiness producing wonders. Manufacturing plants. More tiles worked. More improvements on tiles. Or a more experienced player potentially smarter at the game. Yes, of course, not all of those are useful enough to have value to many of us, but the design of the game is such that those buildings can help improve production, and communism can be a sizeable overall boost to total production. So, I don't think the design of the game works as you claimed it does.

I don't think the army unit is a way to solve those issues. The army unit doesn't happen for free. It has to get produced by battle. It's probabilistic, and intended to come as difficult to get in some situations, since no doubt, the game designers knew it would sometimes take a lot of battles to get. And you need an elite to spawn one. You don't get elites for free. You have to fight a bunch to increase skill level from regular to elite, or have the economy, smarts, and time to build barracks, and still have to actively fight to get an elite. Then you have to actively fight for that elite to get an army. Alright, you could theoretically luck into much of that, but it's kind of unlucky. But, every unit can easily die by engaging in dumb battles or experiencing bad luck. There were risks involved in trying to get an army or playing in such a way to try to get an elite. Or there was an invasion and one needs some way of dealing with that crisis of invasion. Armies are a way of rewarding the player for taking risks, or for coping with the prospect with a seriously threatening invasion.

I do think that you've raised interesting questions with your post though Buttercup.
 
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The proposition and it's value will very much depend on scenario specifics, but, yes, by the time of the industrial age one knows whether one is screwed or not. In that the game will probably have been quit prior to that should any variables have not worked out or should the player not be in the mood to 'graft' out a 'tougher' game using every trick in the book (this will happen for most players somewhere around 4000BC when one is spawned in the middle of a desert or on a tiny isolated island, etc.

Because, by having foreknowledge of what needs to be done, one can quickly say 'nah' at a very early stage of the game rather than 'grind out' every starting position available. Ergo, we develop a natural cognitive bias about "what is the best way to work around the more horrendous aspects of the game".

I think you have good points here.


To which the point of the initial post was that, for example, if you have 6 cities spamming MIs and the AI has 6 cities spamming Swordsmen, you're not really gaining much by being an entire tech page ahead of them, and, in fact, could be at a disadvantage, because you're paying far more for barely any change in combat prowess and, exploits aside, the AI Swordsmen will probably win in the long run because they're making them at a far greater pace than you can produce MIs. And, similarly, Pikemen have barely any noticeable advantage over Spearmen, they die almost as easily regardless of terrain and etc.

My experience attacking pikemen and spearman does suggest to me a noticeable advantage of pikemn over spearmen.

Your point about the human player having a distance from equal situations is very strong.
 
The advantage of the attacker moving first in civ III also does apply to a large set of games where we have evenly matched civs. I would agree that tactically speaking we don't have even matches between the human and the AI(s). I would agree that humans do things better or use tactics that they take advantage of the fact that the computer can't change their tactics giving them a sizeable advantage. There do exist those sorts of things going on for sure for, probably, most players of these forums.

But, I can still realize that the advantage of the attacker would be serious for tactically evenly matched civs basically as follows:

We have A fighting B. There could be lots of losses and dumb moves. But, eventually though someone captures or razes someone else's cities. What happens? The conquered tribe loses production and commerce if only a raze, while the conqueror gains commerce and production additionally if a capture. Now does the defense system make it more likely the 2nd player to move to capture the first city even though it had the first attacked units and the first defended city? Maybe some sort of promotion happens. But, the first player to defend won't be in a position to have a chance to capture a city initially or will be less likely to have units in position to do so. The first player to attack a city will have had units in position attacking a city. The AIs also don't send one stack, and that's it. The other stacks keep coming, at least once they have the unit numbers. The civ that defended, didn't have its second or third stacks of units moving towards another civ's city, while the original attacker did. So, the original attacker has an advantage in gaining production and commerce, and thus making the situation unequal. But with more production, the first attacker becomes more likely to build a larger army and thus even capture or burn more cities.

I'm pretty sure also that the first player also gets the production and commerce first (you ALWAYS finish a wonder if it says 1 turn left and there's no pollution or pillaging by AIs, because your cities produce shields before the AIs produce shields). The first player would win more wonder races over a large set of races. If/when that's a hugely impactful wonder for the AI like The Pyramids, that means that over a large set of games they would emerge as the winners. It does also mean that civs that go later will have something else at a greater frequency.

If I recall correctly, the AI move order also corresponds top to bottom with the spaceship list. I suspect if you examined many games, you would find those at the top of the list more often than those on the bottom of the list doing better, if terrain got controlled for adequately and civs didn't have traits as one mod does.
 
Just for fun, here's another little thing I often encounter, because sometimes I just can't be bothered to build catapults:


Actual link in case you can view embedded videos: ComputerSaysNo - YouTube

Now here, you'll notice there's already one destroyed small town. The group who took that down simply rested up to full health and then marched onto the next town. This group did not lose any men taking the other town, actually, wait a moment, one might have died, I can't remember exactly as I wasn't planning to make a vid, but it was either 1 or zero. Anyway, that doesn't matter to the point. The town was taken with consummate ease without everyone even needing to attack.

As it should be when you are vastly advanced, both in numbers and equipment.

It's an early AI town, they all have 2 spearmen and two archers. You get the idea.

Ulundi is no different but it has one extra Warrior, which doesn't change much to the point.

And you'll see that when this same group attack this second town, it's like a complete reversal of fortunes. Instead of an easy victory with some logical wear-and-tear to slow me up for a couple of turns, it's like I'm battling the 300.

The two scenarios bare so little relation to each other from a tactical and strategic logic perspective that it's almost as if one has been teleported to a different dimension.

And I'm fully aware of everything anyone has ever said about this kind of scenario on the forums over many years. There's nothing new you can say to me regarding why the game functions in this way. How the game is mechanically perfectly capable of such dramatic swings from exactly the same scenarios.

You do not need to repeat yourself in this regard.

But I'm just adding to the discussion the possibility that such scenarios are not random, but are in fact pre-programmed intentional blockers to logical progression. Another means to create a sense of tension and general irritation to the human player.

Because I experience this kind of thing very frequently, being someone who rarely bothers with catapults, plays for fun and not min/max'ing, in a kind of simulationist playstyle. For me, in this game, imagine rampaging vikings rather than Sun-Tzu.

Whenever I have my hoard trample through a civ, they will invariably come across a town like this. But it's not necessarily random. The first town always seems to drop without much resistance, but the 'linchpin' town, aka, the town that seems to most strategically useful for the AI civ, usually tends to be the 300 town.

You wouldn't believe the stacks of swordsmen or Medieval Infantry I've wasted upon towns in my time in this way.

And there's no way to predict with precision which town will do it, but after many, many games, one gets a sense of premonition. And after the first two units struggle that sense turns into a "ah, here it is". But I still go at it, because, well, I double dare it to do it. (and often because I'll use the select all, attack all, mechanic, which saves a lot of time when you don't have to worry about national morale.

But what irritates the most is just the sheer waste of time this all causes.

Because I'm the human player, I'm obviously not attacking hopelessly, I've basically out-paced, out-settled and out-manned the enemy AI, and I'm just attacking them the same way one would barbarian camps. The demise of the AI civ is 'inevitable', there is no way the AI civ can win this war nor gain any victory at any point.

But the game decides to pull this stunt. Just, In My Opinion, to intentionally slow me down. as in it is pre-coded as yet another 'balancing' function designed to hamper fast advancement (like so many other aspects of the game's design).

How it does it and how it decides when to do it, now that is something I don't have an answer for. I just know that it is yet another situation that is not isolated and seems to have a pattern to it, over the long haul of many, many played games, to the point where one develops an intuition, even if one can't perfectly predict it's occurrence.

In this above example, for example, I had such an intuition. Hence I was not at all surprised when it happened.

And regardless of all the myriad workarounds, pro-tips, explanations, scenario-specific detailed analysis, it is an aspect of the game that simply shouldn't be present. The kind of programming that has created the above scenario simply should not appear in a strategy and tactics game. The fact that it does, I feel, In My Opinion, is the primary evidence that there is something afoot far, far, far in separation from simple mechanics playing out, regardless of how wonky and muddy those mechanics have been designed to be.

Making the combat so murky and unfathomable is the perfect shield of ambiguity to hide the fact that there's something suspicious going on behind the scenes that has less to do with logic and more to do with the curse of 'balancing'.

Regarding this game, as I say, advice on 'how to attack 'properly' like' is not required and you'll be wasting your breath. I already know how to 'solve' these kind of scenarios, it's called the magic of reloading a save and then waiting a couple of turns and trying again, the 300 will suddenly turn into the drunken rabble soon enough. But, of course, I'll be denied the pleasure of 'doing it without reloads'. Luckily, I don't care.

Btw, the video is temporary, I'll delete it in a week or two, I just couldn't find another means to upload it, so clogged up my youtube with useless rubbish, hence I'll delete it soon. Feel free to copy it to repost when I do.
 
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And you'll see that when this same group attack this second town, it's like a complete reversal of fortunes. Instead of an easy victory with some logical wear-and-tear to slow me up for a couple of turns, it's like I'm battling the 300.

You had a decent number of victories there. They just had a lot of units there.

The C3X mod, also called the Flintlock patch, enables you to use a stack of catapults to bombard all at once. Maybe you still can't be bothered, I don't know. I don't think catapults would have enabled you to walk into that city. It's a useless attack of a city anyways for getting more powerful, unless you get some promotions which is luck. Size 1 cities auto-raze as you know, and you can't get a single slave. It's only use lies in exterminating the Zulu of Ulundi, which the game's design discourages for any victory condition, but conquest.

You might have missed another possibility than building catapults that could more suit your standards to avoid this situation from what I can tell. When you declare war, don't rush at them and go for captures or razes. Let their units come at you. Maybe even for 5 turns or longer. When the pace of units slow down, then counterattack. Their cities for the most part should end with fewer units, except their capital. Situations like this should become more rare. If you can manage a little courage to let the AIs have the offensive initiative.
 
readily happens when the town will produce an unit next turn . Poster has upto 150 catapults and similar when he has some 300 , redlines enemies whereever , whenever possible despite being the save and reload 10 times a turn type .
 
And it didn't even need a couple of turns, just one turn later and it's 'back to normal':


It makes you wonder how many people play the game and become cripplingly unstuck just because they forget the golden rule of PC gaming in the era of when Civ3 was released, that of saving before anything inportant.

I would never reload 10 times a turn, or anything close, and I think if it got to that stage then I'd quit that kind of game as well, that's just as equally a grind as individually bombarding 100 times a go.

But just the odd reload in a game, maybe just five or six the whole game at max can, as you can see, be so critical to an overall game's outcome it's quite literally phenomenal.

And someone who never reloads will never see this aspect of gameplay.
 
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