First Civ that's too easy to be playable :(

[Rellin]

I don't hate the game, I am seriously upset that the game was released in such an unfinished state.

 

[kirbdog]

Really I think they just made the AI not have ridiculous starts. In Civ V diety you'd see AI's with a few cities up by the time you meet them, here you always land first and the AI doesn't get as much bonuses.

Yeah the first thing to do is to turn off staggered starts. Unfair to AI and just weird IMO for a Civ game.

 

[screamingpalm]

The poor AI is one of the things that has made me wait on buying the game. Seeing kirbdog's sig brings me to a question though. Do mods help at all? I'm skeptical that they can get 1UPT to work, and sometimes they mess with fundamental features of the game, but wondering if anyone has had any success getting a challenge out of them? I saw someone on the Steam forum say the Beyond Balance mod makes the AI more aggressive, for example. Cheers.

 

[kirbdog]

Do mods help at all?

You're right; they don't fix the tactical AI. They also don't do much for the strategic AI, at this time. But they do address some of the very "broken" mechanics.

This both increases the fun of playing (because the monstrosities aren't there) and happens to make the AI relatively stronger (because they didn't have the intelligence to abuse these broken mechanics as ruthlessly as the player did).

Only way to know is to give one of the mods a chance. (And keep in mind that both the game from Firaxis and the mods are works in progress... things should get better. But yeah, don't hold your breath for strong tactical AI in a Firaxis 1UPT game...)

I'm having a lot more fun after modding some balance changes, personally...

 

[screamingpalm]

Thanks for the reply, I'm sort of looking for an excuse to buy the game being close to my birthday and all...

And thanks for working on a mod and potentially making the game more enjoyable for folks.

 

[Darvon]

Agree with OP. The game is so trivially beatable on Apollo, even on your first game, that I can't see any reason to start a second.

Before BE I had thought that Civ5's level of difficulty, where you could do a diety science win on 1 city challenge, was going to be a low water mark for the series: obviously I was incorrect.

 

[Cannes]

Yes you can abuse broken and unbalanced mechanics to win easily even at apollo, or you can download some already available mods that fixes alot of these issues and challenge yourself.

 

[Thormodr]

It's obvious that Firaxis is aiming for the casual audience who just want to beat the game a few times and that's it. They want a game that's easy to learn and easy to master.

We Civfanatics are in the tiny minority of Civ players. We aren't the target audience.

 

[Darvon]

Yes you can abuse broken and unbalanced mechanics to win easily even at apollo, or you can download some already available mods that fixes alot of these issues and challenge yourself.

The trade route mod you're pimping isn't the sole problem, it's just the largest and funniest one.

You could trivially steamroll Apollo even without building a single trade route (or tech slingshotting or flipping capitals with spies etc.) - it'll just take a few more turns. You don't need cheese, you can just need to lazily research your affinity unit and then roll over everything in range.

 

[TLHeart]

Yeah the first thing to do is to turn off staggered starts. Unfair to AI and just weird IMO for a Civ game.

actually turning off staggered starts hurts the AI... those factions that land later than you, get more military to start, along with workers, and science boost.

Have the slavs land last beside you, and you will be attacked.

 

[Gamewizard]

The trade route mod you're pimping isn't the sole problem, it's just the largest and funniest one.

You could trivially steamroll Apollo even without building a single trade route (or tech slingshotting or flipping capitals with spies etc.) - it'll just take a few more turns. You don't need cheese, you can just need to lazily research your affinity unit and then roll over everything in range.

Sorry, but I'm gonna call bull on that one. The ai can win turn 240, without trade routes you wouldn't come close.

 

[jshelr]

Let's be patient. Civ V started out imbalanced. You could build 4 horsemen and always take over the world. I got bummed and tuned out. They fixed it while I was not looking and I missed out on a couple of years of good gaming experience.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Let's be patient. Civ V started out imbalanced. You could build 4 horsemen and always take over the world. I got bummed and tuned out. They fixed it while I was not looking and I missed out on a couple of years of good gaming experience.

Yeah, people are forgetting that civ5 vanilla was far far worse on release than civbe.

 

[s0nny80y]

I hadn't needed to declare war on anyone since going for the Contact victory on Apollo mode.

In fact, the downfall of my other Apollo games had been due to going to war with the wrong factions.

Once your geopolitically secure, one could pretty much roll on the AI on wonder building, albeit Contact is arguably the easiest and least time consuming victory of them all.

On another note, hopefully we see all these 'good' players here playing multiplayer more often....lord knows how much one cringes at the host for kicking out stronger players (yes this has happened before online).

 

[Rellin]

Yeah, people are forgetting that civ5 vanilla was far far worse on release than civbe.

But they had the base of Civ5 to work with for this game, the fully patched and expanded Civ5 base, not vanilla. Did they learn nothing from the last release, not to mention the expectations that the NEXT game would be better than the last, or at least, nearly equal? A few minor little issues, I could totally understand and could care less about, what we have here is a massive colossal epic disaster.

As soon as you know how to play, that is, how to win, you can not avoid winning and there is absolutely no challenge in doing so even on the most difficult setting.

 

[Paszczak]

Apparently finding the right balance between fun and challenge is a very hard thing... and I'm not even being ironic.

When Civilization 5 used to be challenging majority of playerbase complained that the AI behaviour is artificial, hard-coded to hate the player, always backstabbing the player, always trying too hard to win, yada yada.

So the AI in Brave New World and Beyond Earth has been made more reasonable. They will leave you alone most of the time, which has been a welcome change of pace, but it also means less challenge. They will focus more on silly things like culture, religion, and not enough military - again less challenge. They will trade every single resource with their neighbours ,and when war finally breaks out they will be stricken with unhappiness and poverty - again just making it easier for the player who always knows better.

Fun vs Challenge, really. Very few games did it right.

 

[Pusherman]

Domination is actually seeming like the easiest way to win this game, considering how bad the AI is at wars. Everytime I play it takes so long to win the Affinity victories I end up capturing most the capitols just out of boredom of waiting.

 

[Lassekanasse]

Namecalling and bruised egos aside, this topic is quite relevant.

We are talking about the TOP level here. That means the top players should struggle. And this just isnt the case....
In fact i am no top level player, but i breeze through apollo. Sure once in a while you get rushed or an AI runs off, but this is all manageable in BE...

The ai's inability to wage war, the trade spam and the quick win options makes it a cakewalk....

So here is hoping the comming patch ramps up the difficulty.

 

[Ghost_Nappa]

AI tech efficiency

I'm assuming that this is the biggest problem for the AI right now. While the tech web is great for human players - as it gives us tons of options to pursue, for almost every kind of situation - the AI struggles here.

I'm able to build on my strengths as a human player and become even stronger. And this very quickly. When I've got a weakness, I can easily counter it f.e. with something from one of the virtue trees.

This makes this game far less unforgiving than CIV V.

So, while this is great for me and for mp, it's a whole nother story when it comes to the AI and SP and very efficient players, who always go straight min-maxing. In V, there are popular and efficient roads to go. in BE it's pretty much left open. And the problem with AI decision making shows pretty quickly. This is countered a bit with the stealing tech/science ops and I think the AI pursues some possible roads anyway.

Since the difficulty levels aren't cutting it, I set myself some additional limits. Only having trade routes to stations f.e.

Just because I have an option, doesn't mean I have to use it. Esp. when things are getting too easy. I often play on terrible+sparse maps, too. Managing a victory from a bad position is my kind of fun. And BE encourages that play a lot. But hey, that's just me.

 

[Thormodr]

I'm assuming that this is the biggest problem for the AI right now. While the tech web is great for human players - as it gives us tons of options to pursue, for almost every kind of situation - the AI struggles here.

I'm able to build on my strengths as a human player and become even stronger. And this very quickly. When I've got a weakness, I can easily counter it f.e. with something from one of the virtue trees.

This makes this game far less unforgiving than CIV V.

So, while this is great for me and for mp, it's a whole nother story when it comes to the AI and SP and very efficient players, who always go straight min-maxing. In V, there are popular and efficient roads to go. in BE it's pretty much left open. And the problem with AI decision making shows pretty quickly. This is countered a bit with the stealing tech/science ops and I think the AI pursues some possible roads anyway.

Since the difficulty levels aren't cutting it, I set myself some additional limits. Only having trade routes to stations f.e.

Just because I have an option, doesn't mean I have to use it. Esp. when things are getting too easy. I often play on terrible+sparse maps, too. Managing a victory from a bad position is my kind of fun. And BE encourages that play a lot. But hey, that's just me.

Indeed. A basic feature is pretty well useless if the AI can't use it properly. The Tech Web is interesting but it utterly befuddles the AI then perhaps they need to change it.