I just played my first Gemini difficulty game in BERT and won with ease

I played as Duncan Edwards on an Archipelago map but I didn't find the game difficult. Suzanne Fielding found 2 fragments of the signal circa turn 130 on Epic speed. I built a city around 15 tiles directly away from her capital in case she case she could have attained Contact victory, however she didn't declare war on me or anything.

She got into a bit of war with Eloide and I was easily able to take Suzanne Fieldings capital. Plus no other colony came even close to reaching a victory, only 2 colonies researched the tech to reach their victory but their affinity points were a good bit behind mine.

Will Soyuz difficulty be much tougher? I'd like for to be around Emperor difficulty from Civ V.

 

I suspect that Apollo is the difficulty level of choice for experienced players. I played my first game on Gemini difficulty which I thought might be a mistake but it turned out to be an easy win after the first scare.

And surprisingly, my starting position was between Koslov to the west and Moon to the east. Both less than 20-30 tiles from my capital. The new Moon character appeared to be intimidating at first but was just a pussy in my game. He loved my big army and that I did a lot of covert ops. He never DOWed me once during the game at all. Koslov did and the first time he did, he nearly took my first aquatic city but after that scare, I utterly decimated his naval forces, he gave me one of his cities and he never posed a threat again. He certainly tried, DOWed me several times but it was a joke and I ended up taking all his land cities. Duncan took the rest and 'finished the job'.

Barre built the beacon and fired it up and I sent one Countess and a floating tank to his continent and destroyed the beacon. Two units! End of beacon.

I have to be honest, even though I like it a lot, 1UPT has killed the challenge from the AI in Civ. The game just can't manage it at all. I have never lost one of my cities in Civ BE and only twice in Civ V and on the first of those occasions, I was trying to lose to see how long it would take the AI to beat me with its massively superior army both in tech and in numbers. On the second, I was too blasé about the AI posing any threat. It never happened again after that.

 

The current Apollo is around civ 5 emperor difficult. Their is a big jump of difficult from Soyuz to Apollo but trade routes make everything easy. In Apollo the AI starts with more cities, production, units so on.

 

If Apollo difficulty is increased, I hope Soyuz is as well. In vanilla Apollo difficulty was raised but Soyuz was not it seems. So I was in a place where I didn't want the game as hard as Apollo but Soyuz was too easy.

Right now I agree, Apollo is Emperor difficulty equivalent.

 

The gap between Soyuz and Apollo is already huge, they should just add a difficulty below Apollo to fill that gap and 2 above Apollo. Just increasing the difficulty only creates even bigger gaps the higher you get.

 

Totally agree. I used to play vanilla apollo. They raised the Apollo bar but Soyuz remained easy... I was stuck between both

Currently I'm playing Apollo, and it's enjoyable. If they raise the difficulty of Apollo, then I pray they raise Soyuz too.

Anyway, back to teh OP. HArd to say if Soyuz will be too difficult for you - cos I don't know how you play. But if you beat Gemini with ease, then try it out. What have you got to lose?

 

Well, if not then this mod will be updated to also mimic the new old Apollo Bonuses:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=363868544

 

The choice for experienced players right now is just going back to CiV sadly, as there effectively is no diety equivalent. I'm sure we'll get a rebalance to make the game more difficult at some point in time that artificially makes the AIs more likely to DoW you, and gives them more silly bonuses without actually doing anything to balance the mechanics that make the game too easy in the first place though, so something to look forward to kinda somewhat sorta I guess?

 

The AI and balance just need improvements. Giving more bonuses will indeed increase difficulty but it will result in ridiculous games. For example science wise it would have to make the AI win in like 160 turns and military wise it would need to make a crap load more units.

Fixing the base balance first and improving AI behavior are more costly but a way healthier way to improve the challenge. The Apollo AI has enough bonuses as it is.

 

I agree with Acken, less bonuses more ai!
But to original poster, AI always had problems with water maps. Continents (terran ) or single continent worlds will provide more challenge.

 

That's my point; what we NEED are changes to the AI and the base mechanics, what we're gonna get are more stupid AI bonuses and more artificial "challenges" (ex: DoW happy AIs, inflated turn times for victories, etc).

 

I don't mind DoW happy AI. Imo more agressiveness is fine as long as it's justified (want more land, is a warmonger etc) and as long as you can still make friends and alliance somewhere.

 

Auto-Play suggests these as some of the major problems:

- If the AI starts with a sea-city it will put way too much emphasis on moving the city. Not only a few times have I seen the AI move the city 3 times before doing anything else, often moving 2 tiles forward into resource-less coastal land and then moving one tile BACK before it finally starts producing stuff.
- The AI will lose SO MANY Settlers to Sea-Aliens it's insane. They're completely reckless and will push into a swarm of Aliens that, after not attacking them for 1-2 turns, then finally eats the Settler.
- The AI will completely ignore semi-decent city spots, especially if they're close to a neighbor. Hardly do I see an AI actually settle that free Space between 2 territories, instead it masses units, dances around for a while and then tries to attack their neighbor after running through 5+ tiles of miasma.
- AI doesn't know when to focus on Land or Sea Units. If it has mostly coastal tiles on an Island Map it will build tons of land-units.
- Speaking of Armies: The AI has no idea how to play a "peaceful" late-game (mid-game). It will always spam units instead of trying to push their science.

 

Back to Civ IV for me a bit. I do hope the difficulties get revamped as the BERT improved a lot on BE vanilla.

 

I wish there was a way to start at a lower difficulty then have it ramped up, I usually find my game is make or break by turn 100, its either abort or the rest of the game isn't challenging. Usually dictated by the amount of alien activity around your first city.

 

That would be because of an AI that isn't given the tools to compete. It's one of the problem civ5 also faces where deity is challenging mostly for the first half and then if you played correctly you have a guaranteed win because the AI is a very poor techer.

CivBE probably faces the same challenges: AI never taught when to build science, harsh tech penalty that backfire wide AIs etc.

For my mod I was forced to add special triggers for the AI to make extra science buildings and also made the tech penalty a concave function (x^a a<1). Basically the AI had no trigger to make it build universities etc beyond libraries for example ! So it's no surprise it was making them late only relying on flavor values.

Sadly that kind of manipulation is only available through DLL modding.

 

Seriously though, Gemini feels like I'm playing Settler. Trade routes, artifact wonders, diplomacy/warscore are all completely broken. Who the hell balances this stuff? They should feel embarrassed.

 

AI does some really stupid things, like:

1) Moving units in groups and ignoring enemies that fire 3 tile away at them. This allows you to reduce enemy army in half in couple of turns without suffering a single loss (usually happens in naval combat).
2) Embarking units in fire range of ranged enemy units.
3) Attacking some very strong units with no chance of winning. Like sending aircraft to attack Kraken/Worm, doing like 5 damage and dying in the process. Why do that?

It's not like it requires very complex strategy making to not make those mistakes. I was surprised that such AI behaviour got in release version and was not fixed in expansion.

 

My first game on Gemini was a steamroll. I'm currently on my second game on Soyuz and it's pretty clear that this is going to be an easy win as well. I am not a good player. I blundered through a handful of games back in vanilla and then dropped it. Now I'm back blundering through choices horribly mismanaging my empire, but I'm light years ahead of the AI in affinity. I have 22 affinity points while my closest rival has 13. Again, I have no idea what I'm doing. I had to put in a lot of time to rank up the difficulty ladder in other Civ games, but this is too easy. It feels like it's impossible to lose at this point.

I think the artifacts and expeditions are letting players get too far ahead of the AI. The AI doesn't seem to invest much effort into them, so I wind up sweeping up the majority of them. Perhaps they are not sending their explorers back to cities to reset their expedition counter. Plus I have yet to see an AI actually kill an alien nest.

 

Yeah, sorry, but no. Nope. No.