If Civ V is so easy, why isn't everybody winning on Emperor?

[dannythefool]

It really comes to a point where you know you will win... I know this has been said a million times, but I like the first 2/3 of the game more where you have to really think what the next best move it, instead of what is the fastest way to end the game moves...

Sure, but then, ten percent submitted their *Settler* wins. I would expect at least that crowd to submit their Deity wins as well if the game was so easy. I mean, I *think* it's easy too, but I've been playing Civ games that were much harder. I'm just thinking there is a disconnect between experienced Civ players and the much larger market of normal people who didn't memorize every single detail about Civ IV to be able to win on Deity.

I've seen people bring up the layoff news from earlier this year as if to say that it's no wonder the game is bad if they fired all those QA people. But I think you gotta ask yourself if that may have been caused by the games not being appealing to a large enough audience in the first place, and if Civ V is *maybe* not easy because they did lay off those people, but rather because they *had* to lay off those people...

 

[Makaz]

It is not so much "free unit factor" although I used to think the same !!!

I personnaly went easily through emperor and have been only able to win 1 immortal game in 5 because the AI gets tons of free riflemen / musketmen / cannon when you are sitting with 5 longswordmen 2 trebs and 3 crossbow.

The only time I won was cause I had a nice chokepoint and I slaughtered everything he keep throwing at me over 40 turns.


I thought "this is unfair and unfun to see how the AI cheated".

So I ran some test... and found out I was wrong. Here is what really happens.

AI unit creation speed, gold output and teching speed is 100% determined by the number of cities / no matter how bad the city is placed or what building is in it, with no happiness restriction. So a AI with say 4 cities will tech slower than you with 5 cities even in immortal but an AI with 12 cities will tech 2-3 times faster while generating awesome amounts of gold and generating armies quickly...

In any game I lost, the AI throwing at me tons of riflement during medieval age had indeed around 12 cities... So the question - why while your average AI in the game has 4-5 cities, one has 12-14 already ???

So launshed an immortal game and focussed on filling the map with scouts and getting open borders to "see how the AI is playing and what is really happenning out there. Here are the results:


1./ The culprits:

Napoleon, Iroquois, Washington essentially


2./ The early facts:

The above mentionned and a few others (like Rome, Egypt, Arabs but these tends to be less good at warmongering), tend to expand very fast and grab land quickly (basically they will have always 1 or 2 more cities than you which is usually fine and does not yet generate unbalanced amounts of units.

As they have lots of cities, they have also lots of archers / warriors.


3./ When it goes wrong.

By settling everywhere early, they create tensions between each others which end in them making groups and DOW each others.

In the game I was playing as an "observer". Napoleon had expanded 6 cities, Iroquois as well and they DOWed on each other. I saw 2 lines of spearmen / archers / warriors + 2 catapults for napoleon against 2 lines of warriors and 1 lines of archers for iroquois facing each others. Start of any good, long and bloody war.


4./ The bug that spoils the rest of the game

I don't know if you remember but the 1st patch released of the game corrected a bug that used to make the AI give up all of their cities (except capital) to the player in the middle of a war.

Well the bug is still there but not for the player... It is still perfectly in operation between AIs...

So in my observer game, Napoleon was kicking Iroquois ass badly, Napoleon had 2 spearmen, 4 archer, 1 catapult left while Iroquois was running away with 2 archers. No city had been taken so far

when the incredible happenned:

- they declared peace (so far ok)
- All Napoleon cities (except capital) so 5 of them turned from blue to grey at the same time on the map... while he was winning the war... giving iroquois 11 cities !


6./ what happens next

I couldn't play much very longer as an AI, aware of my weak spread army of scouts, decided that my capital would make a good addition to their empire BUT in a few turns of play, I saw iroquois go to swordman, musketman and cannon and his 11 cities where creating units at an alarming rate.

When I lost he had dowed Darius and taken 2 of his cities already to an army of musket and cannons...




So here is why the AI seems to get free units at an alarming rate in immortal (and maybe deity - haven't tried deity yet as I want to complete immortal first).

Simply because AI power depend on the number of cities and there is always 1 or 2 ai to abandon all they have to another early in the game to another AI.


I hope that gets fixed in the next patch but when it happens, I fear I might start steamroll immortal... and I don't really know if that is good !

 

[aimlessgun]

Wow that screenshot is horrifying. Slow going even with the robots.

 

[Hrundi]

Winning in this game is also a long process that's not too fun. I can know that there's basically nothing in the world that can stand against me by turn 150, yet it might take me until turn 300 to win, with the last 150 turns being a slow process I often don't bother with.

 

[katipunero]

omg, that's obscene! from stacks of doom to well uh tiles of death? the great thing about the former is that it takes only a few nukes to gut down the numbers of a deity AI. looking at the screenshot, it'd probably take more than a scorched earth approach to reduce china's army to a manageable sum.

indeed, with the 1upt mechanic, land is power, otherwise, where else would be able to park that amount of units?

 

[kaltorak]

Lol Piece of Mind, what a pic.

 

[Mivo]

PoM's screenshot demonstrates nicely what happens when you combine a terrible AI with 1UpT.

To the topic starter: Intelligence doesn't increase with money or other material goods. This applies to human intelligence and artificial intelligence alike. That is the complaint.

 

[gonzo562]

The only reason I haven't beaten Deity yet (well, at least this is what I like to think ) is the ridiculous advantages the AI gets in unit costs and the what-would-be extremely tedious task of slogging through this many units...

Spoiler :

There are so many reasons it's flawed to use the stats about Steam Achievements to assess the difficulty of the game, it's hardly worth going over again. It's already in the thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9690683

holy. Well looks like im not gonna try Deity

 

[PieceOfMind]

Well, to those of you who found that screenshot interesting, you might be interested in the other two when I originally posted them: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9688417&postcount=24

People in that thread have observed that late in the game on Deity the AI loses much of what little tactical prowess it had due to the sheer difficulty in coordinating units in such a densely populated landmass.

By the way, yes I did send a unit over to that continent so I could scout it, and to my surprise that was quite difficult.

 

[Makaz]

Screenshot is awesome !

At least on Pangea you can "try" to control their expansion... Although if the maps too large, its not really feasible to act as the UN in 1000 BC with 2 warriors and 3 archers

 

[KAuss]

Sure, but then, ten percent submitted their *Settler* wins. I would expect at least that crowd to submit their Deity wins as well if the game was so easy. I mean, I *think* it's easy too, but I've been playing Civ games that were much harder. I'm just thinking there is a disconnect between experienced Civ players and the much larger market of normal people who didn't memorize every single detail about Civ IV to be able to win on Deity.

I've seen people bring up the layoff news from earlier this year as if to say that it's no wonder the game is bad if they fired all those QA people. But I think you gotta ask yourself if that may have been caused by the games not being appealing to a large enough audience in the first place, and if Civ V is *maybe* not easy because they did lay off those people, but rather because they *had* to lay off those people...

You know why I don't play game to the end anymore too? The victory screen SUCKS! I mean man does it suck hard...

 

[PieceOfMind]

Screenshot is awesome !

At least on Pangea you can "try" to control their expansion... Although if the maps too large, its not really feasible to act as the UN in 1000 BC with 2 warriors and 3 archers

Yeah, to be honest, the only reason the situation got that way in that game was that the 3 major powers (i.e. not including me, not that I'm suggesting I was one ) were not warring with each other for a fairly long amount of time. When AIs aren't at war, where else are those units going to go? (lol, for Alexander and Augustus, the answer to that question was partly - in my territory)

 

[Falk]

(lol, for Alexander and Augustus, the answer to that question was partly - in my territory)

What would have happened if you had canceled the Open Borders without them having any room for those units to go?

 

[krasny]

In my first game, I beat it on prince without even trying. Picking random techs and builds.

On BTS I struggle on prince.

 

[KAuss]

Check to see if they're locked in peace... In my last King game it happened between Egypt and Russia... They literally felt safe to go fighting because they won't fight each other... In that one game I've had like 6 - 7 civs locked in peace...

I had to bust out the whooping stick and destroy all that was peaceful...

I liberated the poor states that got pwnt early only to have them tell me next turn they didn't approve of me expanding near their land (cause they are liberated next to my border) LOL...

 

[501st Legion]

One of the nice things about Steam -- and, full disclosure, I'm a fan -- is that it allows you to see what people are doing by awarding achievements and publishing the related statistics. This is why the early achievements are so trivial: If 12 percent of the people haven't founded a second city, ever, you know most of them just have the game sitting around on their computer, pretty much unplayed.

Now we can use these statistics to check the claim that Civ V is "too easy" and "dumbed down". Let's look at the numbers about victory levels:

Baby Steps (Settler): 10.2 percent
Taking off the Training Wheels (Chieftan): 15.3 percent
The Alexman (Warlord): 6.6 percent
Charming, Really (Prince): 4.8 percent
The Once And Future King: 0.7 percent
The Golden Path (Emperor): 0.3 percent
Flawless Strategy (Deity): 0.2 percent

Obviously there are a lot of people not finishing their games, but we already know that (personally, I tend to quit any Civ game when I either get too far ahead or too far back).

If Civ V were really as easy as the detractors here claim, I would expect the percentage of wins on Emperor and Deity to be a lot higher, with people ramping up the difficulty to try to make the game enjoyable. It's not like everybody is leaving in disgust, either, as you can see by the number of players on the Steam Stats.

(Personally, I'm trying to tell my sense of self-respect I should at least win one game on Settler just to get the achievement...)

There are a couple of possible reasons for this:

- Not everyone who has bought and installed the game plays in online mode.

- Considering how long one game is, I would be surprised if more than a quarter of the players got such achievements this soon... maybe one year later, perhaps.

- Some players don't actually play until the very end when they know they've practically won the game.

- They don't want to fight against an AI that cheats.

- Most players aren't hardcore Civ fans, who'll move to another game after winning one game or two.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Oh yeah, maybe they were trapped in the infinite peace bug?

 

[KAuss]

Oh yeah, maybe they were trapped in the infinite peace bug?

Yeah I found this out because I like to use the AI to fight each other so I don't have to micromanage all the fights LOL...

However, after 300 turns they were still peace so I figured that must of been why they were so brave to attack everyone... Never did get fixed...

 

[muxec]

Looks like the AI is the stupidest on archipelagos. On archipelago protecting ~30 of tanks and missile launchers with just a couple of destroyers and single battleship when landing is an easy way to lose the war to a force as weak as 6 destroyers 2 battleships, 1 submarine and almost no land army. I just won my first Emperor, not sure if it worth getting to immortal with the amount of AI cheating there. Probably winnable but not fun, just a grind.


What happens if the AI builds a unit but the whole globe is fully filled with units, and there is already a unit garrisoned in every city? Does the game halt with infinite loop or something like this?

 

[KAuss]

It's probably good on tiny pangea... I see emperor being REALLY aggressive and I like it because they come 3 - 4 civs at a time...

They actually took my city! LOL... But that was before I even had enough turns to put out a third warrior...

I am not at the point where I won yet on Emperor, because I'm annexing and keeping all cities LOL just to see how low the happiness can go and can it be overcome by mass war rushing... I'm at the point now where tech is starting to past me but my longswords should buy me two more eras... I'm hoping I can take enough resources and start gifting useless states once I fall too far back... Rush a few cannons and hope for the best...