June/July Patch Notes

The patch/DLC hiatus is on an increasing trend : 1/2/6/... If it follows the same pattern then the DLC will come 15 days after .332 which is 07/11/11 !

 

After this patch i've run into a bug just after i research for coal. As soon as i mine it crash! If i saved it before the crash and reload it from there about 10 turns later it crashes in the middle of cycling through units. of coursing i'm playing on a modded game. Crashes around the industral to Modern. can't finish...

Joey

 

My advice... Don't play any modded games until the modder states his mod works with this patch.

Mods almost always break with new patches. Just be patient, most mods will be fixed soon.

 

Thanks to the various people who answered my prior question on page 38 about the meaning of two of the balance changes (great person tile improvements and defense penalty promotion). You clarified those perfectly.

 

It was ever thus. For me anyway, figuring out how to game the game (On SP anyway) has always been part of the fun. To be sure there will always be dominant strategies and some of us will try the, become bored, and move on to winning with alternative strategies. Me? I'm going to try a Babylonian Bowman rush with raging barbs turned on. Should be fun now that ranged attacks are full strength. Barb mugging for and volleys for my neighbors.

 

Hello friends, why not have added more resources?

 

Every Civ has its own exploits that can be taken advantage of and I don't have a problem with that. Not all of us even use the same exploits, or some which may seem great for some people are not good for others because they enjoy different strategies.

Personally, I find the Navy and Air Force to be massive exploits in this game, I tend to dominate any map with those two wonderful items because of the mobility, power and range. I can take over an entire civ with just 4 or 5 highly upgraded ships or airplanes.

Personally, I am totally psyched about the new patch because it's adding a whole bunch of new excitement to my playing of the game which I never quit (total hours played is at least 1500 now, if not more, though I do leave the game on overnight). New strategies will make it a lot more fun.

 

Going to war and taking cities is really going to be difficult; they pretty well turfed domination victory at higher levels, prince and up.

BUT this is a direct result of certain peeps whining that the game was too easy.

 

Players should be allowed to build and conquer as many cities as they like.

Being too easy or hard is a direct problem with the AI, not how many cities the player can build or conquer, but instead of making the AI more competent, the devs only know how to keep on nerfing the player and buffing the AI with cheats.

 

What I meant was, on these and other sites I've read about how deity was too easy. Several of these nerfs are a result of these complaints.

 

That's exactly what he was responding to. People aren't complaining that Diety is too easy because of the mechanics, diety is too easy because the AI is inept. If the AI in the free Chess game that comes with Windows 7 can be as good as it is (granted I haven't played it much, but it seems pretty good) the devs of Civ Devs should be able to make an AI in a single player focused game that can at least compete with a person without having massive cheats.

I bet the AI in StarCraft II could play circles around the AI in Civ V at Prince. I would love to see a time in Civ when Diety is where the AI and player are completely equal.

 

Wow. This is actually a patch that might get me to try this game out again. Firaxis still needs to regain my trust, but I have a bead of curiosity now.

 

I don't mean to sound like I'm defending exactly how bad the Civ5 AI is, but I'm not sure you understand how difficult a good AI is to program. The reason that free chess game is so good is because there's a fairly small number of permutations to a chess game. A modern computer can calculate every single possible combination of moves for the entire game in just milliseconds. Since the board always starts the same, it can also be pre-programmed with entire sequences of winning maneuvers from the opening and when the board or portions of the board match a certain configuration. It can also very simply analyze one move versus another to objectively work out which is better, since the only goal of the game is a check-mate, which can only be accomplished a finite number of ways.

A game like civ is exponentially more complex in every single aspect, and therefore these same approaches don't apply. Think of it like predicting the weather. It's much easier to determine what will happen in an indoor terrarium than it is to predict what will happen outside. Meteorologists are also frequently wrong for the same reason that it's simply a much more complicated problem than most people realize.

 

People keep bringing up SC2 as an example of "good AI", and although I'm a noob at the game I find it poor. It's strats are incredibly predictable: it just relies on high apm on higher levels (if I had 1000 apm I'd do decently too). Civ is *much* more complex in it's mechanics than SC2 and the options available are far more open-ended than "build units and send them crashing into the opponent's units" which is essentially what the SC2 AI does. So no disrespect to SC2 (love the game) but it's not the pinnacle of AI programming some make it out to be imo. Sorry to go OT.

 

Chess AI has about half a century of research behind it with the same ruleset. Civ AI has about a year with more or less the current ruleset.

 

I would rather play against cheating AI if that meant the game was difficult instead of not cheating AI that made the game easy.

If I truly want a challenge I would play multiplayer. Unfortunately the multiplayer in civ5 is terrible. Hopefully next patch will be the multiplayer patch.

 

Huh? Paraphrasing a comment I made in another thread; even if Firaxis could come up with the tens of millions necessary to create a chaos theory/neural net AI capable of going toe-to-toe with a human player you'd need a super computer to run it.

 

Thank you, I agree with this completely and wish it was a more common opinion! I always see people examining the AI under an absurd microscope to try to catch it acting on information it wouldn't have had it been a player and such, and throwing a huge fit when they're under the impression that it's "cheating." I don't get why they'd rather have a mimic of a human instead of something that's just intentionally fun to play against.

The way I see it, if the AI isn't smart enough to use proper logic and planning to determine an arrangement on the battlefield most likely to benefit them, it's almost as good to have them magically know where my units are and keep theirs out of range, or exploit an unseen weak spot along my front to break through. I wish there was an option in the game settings to "let the AI cheat a bit."

 

I don't think the bar is that high. Seeing the AI arc around helplessly when it pops a Great Person is just silly. (Even sillier is the Great General wandering around unguarded.)

Don't think the AI being good enough to beat a human straight-up is realistic either, but aside from combat AI, if it just put together a decent opening infrastructure strategy it could do without some of the massive high-level bonuses. (Multiple techs, multiple extra units, multiple cities/settlers.)

 

I think people are upset at "un-humanlike" or "cheating" AI in Civ 5 is because the developers purposely designed them to play like a human and try to win like a human, as opposed to just empire building for the sake of it.

The victory conditions are the root cause of this...but it's simply unavoidable because a game must have direction. Perhaps after the DLL is released a mod can come out that completely rewrites the AI to play as a leader as opposed to a competitor.