How to quickly win standard settings Deity

[budweiser]

How long should it take for Civ 5 to be "acceptable"?

It may never be "acceptable". The game play reminds me too much of that D+D game that came out a while back, Temple of Elemental Evil.

 

[g++]

I'm also surprised the AI doesn't bid as aggressively on city states when a vote is pending, even when they are sitting on wads of gold. I have been in the situation, however, where I was trying to buy my last city state, which happened to be next to the biggest civ on the other continent. I dumped more than 2,000 gp into its coffers and it still wouldn't rank me higher than friend. The other city had built up so mch reserve standing I couldn't flip it.
So buying all states at the last minute doesn't always work, and if you help out states you will get more influence with them over time - or you can liberate them for a permanent vote.
Just wish the AI would be a bit more aggressive trying to mess up my plans - while still failing to stop me in the end.

Thats actually a bug that happens when you get into a flipping war with the AI. Next time instead of wasting of wasting money wait one turn and gift a scout. Blamo their your best friend again.

 

[stii]

If you can beat it on deity then maybe you should change something to make it harder. For example if continent is easy then play pangea (not sure if this is harder) or no selling cities back to the AI or no selling anything to the AI, not getting 300 per lux makes a huge difference.

The AI in civ4 was awful too it was just that stack of doom meant your small well played army couldn't hold them off, which doesn't really seem better to me.

 

[Gaspar~]

A UN win was my first win on my first game at Civ 5.
Question to the civ vets. How does the release of Civ 5 relate to the release of Civ 4 Vanilla? Some of you played Civ 3 alot and was your reaction the same when Civ 4 came out as it is now with Civ 5?

How long should it take for Civ 5 to be "acceptable"?

For what its worth, I thought Civ 4 Vanilla was the best non-modded version of Civ ever, and I've played them all at least to some extent. I'd take to the bank that this Civ will never reach Civ 4's heights with official content, and only the excellent modding community will leave us with a fun, playable game.

On the OT, the Diplo win in this game is absolutely asinine. No amount of coding can fix the mechanic, they need to make a way for the full Civs to interact with one another besides in competing to win. The City-States are not robust enough in their behavior to make "Bribery Victory" at all compelling.

 

[dexters]

Luck and starting condition plays a huge role here. I find my Civ5 game are usually more varied in challenge and what victory condition I can shoot for.

In some standard continents game, there won't be enough CS around for the required 10 votes because the AI ate it all up.

As it stands, even if you count on having enough CS just from your continent, you have to assume AIs didn't conquer any of it, which is unrealistic. At which point,you need continental ownership and liberation to get you those votes, and that's sort of getting close to domination lite.

Continents in Civ5 is also varies as you can find one game lumped together with 5 other Civs and another with just one other Civ (I've had games where it was just me and Askia on a decent sized continent) The OP's example appears to be the latter.

As for the exact victory conditions, a very easy way to fix it without borking the CS vote is to require a check on relationship status. A CS which you didn't have a relationship with for most of the game will have their votes weighted lower.

A CS that's been allied with you for at least 100 turns is weighted at 100% , below 100 turns and its fraction of that with a hard cap at 50% weight. If you just bought it in the last 10 turns, its worth 50% max. So 0.5 votes. That should be enough without being too onerous.

Edit: I never liked Civ4's pop weighting for the UN. For me, the UN vote was always a sort of weird victory condition. Civ3 had similar issues where 1 Civ 1 Vote led some people to complain about the bribery aspect. But the domination lite solution in Civ4 was also unacceptably boring to me. I would prefer bribery to at least have a slightly different victory condition.

You can still do the domination lite UN victory in Civ5 anyways. Liberating CS and Civs is the easiest way to get votes, no gold necessary.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Targeted liberation is cheap, cost-effective, and would beat any AI reprogramming.

This problem is very simple: nations need representation according to their size. Give city-states some multiplier of their pop as their vote count if you want, but it should never be possible for a juggernaut AI to lose a UN vote.

End running the core mechanic of the game (pop -> power via Science and Hammers) simply should not be possible. The Space win is fine; you need a lot of Science and Hammers to pull it off, and the AI gets a fair shake. But a speedy Modern beeline and 1000 Hammers is far too inexpensive a win condition, given the ease with which you can drag the AI's armed forces to the wrong spots.

 

[aimlessgun]

Targeted liberation is cheap, cost-effective, and would beat any AI reprogramming.

This problem is very simple: nations need representation according to their size. Give city-states some multiplier of their pop as their vote count if you want, but it should never be possible for a juggernaut AI to lose a UN vote.

End running the core mechanic of the game (pop -> power via Science and Hammers) simply should not be possible. The Space win is fine; you need a lot of Science and Hammers to pull it off, and the AI gets a fair shake. But a speedy Modern beeline and 1000 Hammers is far too inexpensive a win condition, given the ease with which you can drag the AI's armed forces to the wrong spots.

I think end-running this 'core-mechanic' should be entirely possible, for the sake of having win conditions that are substantially different. If it's never possible for a juggernaut AI to lose a UN vote, what the hell is the point of the victory condition? You'd need to effectively win a domination victory to win 'diplomatically'.

The current form may be too easy and poorly balanced, and maybe it can never be totally balanced, but I would rather have it be different and slightly broken than just homogenized to domination lite. People who don't like it can just turn it off.

Anyways, I don't have any bright ideas right now, but there has to be a creative way of making diplomatic victory a unique, different, but still challenging victory condition.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Spin up SMAC. Play as Yang on a Huge map with low sea levels. Run a Size 5 in the capital so you can get some actual research. Get Centauri Eco and Industrial Automation, run Police State/Planned/Wealth. Build the Planetary Transit System. Now ICS. Build Colony Pods, Formers, and garrisons with the Police ability only. Don't bother with anything else; the AI will be terrified of your horde of 1/1/1 units.

You will win a peaceful Diplomatic Victory. I promise. That's with a 1 pop -> 1 vote mechanic where 2/3 of the vote is needed for the win.

There's no reason you couldn't do the same thing in Civ 5 with a Warrior rush backed by an ICS. It would be just as tedious, and just as effective, under a 1 pop -> 1 vote rules set.

 

[Rulle_Kebab]

How long should it take for Civ 5 to be "acceptable"?

Civ IV took 2 years before it was playable... hehehe

to me atleast!

So patience my friends.... patience.

 

[ccubed]

UN Vote weight should be based on some combination of existing game resources such as population, happiness, number of techs, wonders, army size, etc. The civilization that becomes the defacto leader of the world should have many different strengths that all add up to be the best, not just a fat wallet.

 

[aimlessgun]

Spin up SMAC. Play as Yang on a Huge map with low sea levels. Run a Size 5 in the capital so you can get some actual research. Get Centauri Eco and Industrial Automation, run Police State/Planned/Wealth. Build the Planetary Transit System. Now ICS. Build Colony Pods, Formers, and garrisons with the Police ability only. Don't bother with anything else; the AI will be terrified of your horde of 1/1/1 units.

You will win a peaceful Diplomatic Victory. I promise. That's with a 1 pop -> 1 vote mechanic where 2/3 of the vote is needed for the win.

There's no reason you couldn't do the same thing in Civ 5 with a Warrior rush backed by an ICS. It would be just as tedious, and just as effective, under a 1 pop -> 1 vote rules set.

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you agreeing with me that 1 pop > 1 vote is silly, and possibly even worse than the current Civ5 diplomacy victory?

 

[Rittmeyer]

This isn't a fool-proof win plan. I've been in at least two, three games where there weren't enough City States to make a win by the time I got to the other continent with enough money to bribe every one. I had to assemble a continental invasion to liberate them.

This. But it just doesnt change the fact that this game is horrible. Also, I still believe the greater issue lies in the AI not trying to win. If they did, it wouldnt be so easy to beat the super runaway AI (always present) with a bribery victory.

 

[TheBlackHole]

Although I haven't thought this out completely, I was wondering if it would simply be better to remove the "gifting gold to City-State" mechanic completely. To compensate for this, gifting units will cause a bit higher influence (compared to what it does now) and completing quests will increase relations dramatically. In this way, truly going out of your way to HELP a city-state with its troubles (not just bribing it) is the ONLY means of getting it on your side.

If this were implemented, I would certainly pay much more attention to quests, if I knew it would reap me dramatic results. As it is, I usually ignore many of the quests (particularly, "eliminate city-state X for city-state Y") because I simply don't care enough (i.e. not worth my time) to do it.... after all, for the same bonus, I could just spend a few hundred gold and not even bother with quests.

I also would prefer this because personally I think gold is a little TOO versatile right now. It literally helps every single game mechanic except for maybe culture. By eliminating the monetary city-state gift option, you'll have to truly work for your huge maritime bonuses (etc.) and have to actually work for your diplomatic victories. And maybe with less gold buying power, there will be just oh-so-slightly-less incentive for trading post spam.

 

[jorissimo]

Although I haven't thought this out completely, I was wondering if it would simply be better to remove the "gifting gold to City-State" mechanic completely. To compensate for this, gifting units will cause a bit higher influence (compared to what it does now) and completing quests will increase relations dramatically. In this way, truly going out of your way to HELP a city-state with its troubles (not just bribing it) is the ONLY means of getting it on your side.

If this were implemented, I would certainly pay much more attention to quests, if I knew it would reap me dramatic results. As it is, I usually ignore many of the quests (particularly, "eliminate city-state X for city-state Y") because I simply don't care enough (i.e. not worth my time) to do it.... after all, for the same bonus, I could just spend a few hundred gold and not even bother with quests.

I also would prefer this because personally I think gold is a little TOO versatile right now. It literally helps every single game mechanic except for maybe culture. By eliminating the monetary city-state gift option, you'll have to truly work for your huge maritime bonuses (etc.) and have to actually work for your diplomatic victories. And maybe with less gold buying power, there will be just oh-so-slightly-less incentive for trading post spam.

I agree. I also think that city-states close to you that feel threatened by their neighbors should ask you for help. And you should be able to demand tribute from them, by positioning a large army near their borders (which would of course have diplomatic repercussions from other city-states and major civs )

 

[neptune2000]

Although I haven't thought this out completely, I was wondering if it would simply be better to remove the "gifting gold to City-State" mechanic completely. To compensate for this, gifting units will cause a bit higher influence (compared to what it does now) and completing quests will increase relations dramatically. In this way, truly going out of your way to HELP a city-state with its troubles (not just bribing it) is the ONLY means of getting it on your side.

If this were implemented, I would certainly pay much more attention to quests, if I knew it would reap me dramatic results. As it is, I usually ignore many of the quests (particularly, "eliminate city-state X for city-state Y") because I simply don't care enough (i.e. not worth my time) to do it.... after all, for the same bonus, I could just spend a few hundred gold and not even bother with quests.

I also would prefer this because personally I think gold is a little TOO versatile right now. It literally helps every single game mechanic except for maybe culture. By eliminating the monetary city-state gift option, you'll have to truly work for your huge maritime bonuses (etc.) and have to actually work for your diplomatic victories. And maybe with less gold buying power, there will be just oh-so-slightly-less incentive for trading post spam.

This is an interesting idea. I think you should be able to bribe a CS from unfriendly to neutral and neutral to friendly, but perhaps not friendly -> allied. Or perhaps increase the cost per "point" as your current points/standing goes up. Better yet, what about an inverted bell curve for cost/point, so that it costs more in gold when the CS is really angry or friendly. Quests and gifting units would be unaffected by your current relationship.

 

[bluedevil99]

This is basically how I got my first diety win the other day. I was going to start a thread on this but it fits into this one well enough. Frankly the way I did it was pretty exploit-y but it was an interesting game and got me thinking of a bunch of issues.

Here's the skeleton:
1) Played Greece on Large Continents, default settings.
2) Got a good start, plains river capital with wine and two riverside gold, and adjacent to mountain. Founded Sparta 5 tiles away to claim coastal location with horses.
3) Beelined HBR. Took Berlin and Munich easily, claiming marble and sugar. Bismark had two cities remaining and offered lots of gold for peace.
4) Declared on Askia, who had a fairly large army, took two of his newly settled cities (not capitals) in good locations and picked off his army until he was willing to pay for peace. Repeated the process with Napolean and Hiawatha, took both capitals. Napolean had expanded aggressively and was left with a sizable base; Hiawatha was left with one city and was never a factor again.
5) At this point I had 12 cities, 10 of them puppets. I'd adopted Liberty, taking Citizenship and Meritocracy (thanks pir8 and alpaca, this proved to be a HUGE bonus). Managed to build Macchu Picchu which ended up generating huge amounts of gold over the course of the game. I picked up Scholasticism from patronage shortly after hitting the medieval era (as I've said elsewhere puppet cities REALLY should add to social policy costs...).
6) While wrapping things up with Hiawatha, Askia re-declares. I was prepared for this, having beelined Chivalry. I let him retake his original two cities but my knights/cavalry decimated his army in the field. I took retook the two cities and his capital plus one more, and he sued for peace.
7) Hit the renaissance with banking (yeah bulbing) and immediately started on Forbidden Palace. I had 16 cities at this point and was allied with the 2 maritime and 5 cultural city states on my continent. Athens was a great production/science hybrid, Sparta was pretty useless (really only founded it for horses & buying naval units). I was spamming trading posts like mad and heading for Rationalism's Free Thought, planning to backfill and hit the Industrial era with Biology.
8) Then a snag: Napolean hits the renaissance era. Crap, musketeer spam. I send my knights over and begin a war of attrition. My economy's making 200 GPT at this point, so I rush buy a companion cavalry every other turn, use them to pick off a weak unit or two, then upgrade to knight. This part of the game could have been really problematic had my economy not been so strong. I also bought 2 caravels immediately on finishing astronomy to find those maritime city states I hoped were still alive on the other continent.
9) Was still finishing off Napolean (actually took 4 more cities from him and razed a couple others, man he had re-expanded fast) when I hit the industrial era with Biology. The forbidden palace was a huge boost to my 20 city empire (18 puppets) and Order's Planned Economy showed up soon after. Even better, 2 more maritime city states were alive on the other continent, and Arabia, the Ottomans, England and Egypt were still vying on the other continent (they'd wiped out another player, Washington IIRC). Back home Bismark had declared on Askia. I signed research agreements to keep everybody happy. Eventually I paid everybody to pile on Ramses, who was threatening two of my city state allies.
10) Now here's the part I was proud of. Hit the modern era around 1200 AD with plastics, picked up at the same time as penicillin via Scientific Revolution. Around 10 turns earlier I'd started Athens on the Taj, while also running max scientists to pop a GS around the same time it finished. I manually researched Ecology, and at exactly 1300 AD finished the Taj and Ecology, and bulbed Globalization using the GS I'd popped a turn before. Boom, 15 turn golden age, and with the hydro dam I'd purchased Athens could build the UN in 13 turns. Ten turns later, at 1560 AD, diplo win.

Basically, the puppet mechanic is seriously broken. Diplomatic victory is probably more so. I am not that good a civ player. Yes it was a good start but I really think the AI has almost no shot against a fairly good player who goes for horses early, buys up city states, and beelines the UN. Arabia and the Ottomans were sitting on huge reserves of cash and could have at least made life interesting by outbidding me. I'm not sure it's even possible to get culture or space by 1560 AD on Diety but would love to be proven wrong!

 

[chaunceymo]

Anyways, I don't have any bright ideas right now, but there has to be a creative way of making diplomatic victory a unique, different, but still challenging victory condition.

Each remaining civ (the "security council") gets a # of votes based on their relative size. If there are seven civs left, the biggest gets 7 votes, the second-biggest 6, the third-biggest 5, etc, down to the 7th biggest getting 1 vote. Eliminate this "plays to win" hogwash from the AIs; they are freaking AIs, not people, and have them vote for the player if and only if the player has behaved honorably and had good relations with them the entire game, or liberated them (currently the only way they will vote for the player). Make this somewhat personality-based too, with peaceful AIs more likely to vote for the player and aggressive AIs less likely (giving the player a reason to assist peaceful AIs, who tend to get eaten early at higher difficulties), financially-motivated AIs voting for the player if they have done a lot of profitable trading, and aggressive AIs respecting a strong military and honorable war record (no razings, sneak attacks, etc).

City-states (the "general assembly") vote as a bloc, getting X votes where X = the total # of surviving city states, and they vote for the leader who is allied with the most of them, but add in something to make their allegiance shift based on your actions.

2/3 vote needed to win.

This would give it more of a true diplomatic feel. Backdoor domination would still be possible, but only if you eliminated so many rivals that actual domination would be much easier. City states would still be important, but not quite as easy to buy and less important than behaving "good".

 

[Bandobras Took]

I like it -- of course, the AI being nice to you because you've behaved honorably would be a huge improvement all by itself.

 

[Jamuka]

It's sad watching such good players giving up on the game already. Issues like the UN being broken and the AI's fear of water will obviously be fixed.

 

[stii]

It's sad watching such good players giving up on the game already. Issues like the UN being broken and the AI's fear of water will obviously be fixed.

Why do you think that?

The civ4 AI couldn't handle water either.