[R&F] Marathon Golden Age threshold not scaling?

[Boccages]

I just started a game with the Marathon speed and right away I saw that there was a problem with barbarians encampment. By the end of the Bronze Age, I was able to double the amount of points required to get a Golden Age by simply play wack-a-mole with the barbarians. Everytime it would give me +3 points, and in "Marathon" speed, barbarians have more than enough time to respawn often.

I might have mistitled this thread as scaling up the Golden Age threshold as the right solution? Maybe scaling down the points barbarian encampments give you may be a better solution?

 

[MrRadar]

Try Online speed, as the game seems to fit best that one

My experience was like sitting on the swings: dark-heroic-dark-heroic... without much effort to aim for that specifically.
Scaling is really strange - deals always last 30 turns, be it Online or Epic, but diplo agreements seem to scale, so if you make friendship on, say, epic and add some open borders and monetary deal in the bundle, they end at different times - money and open borders end after 30 turns, but friendship goes on longer. Very confusing.

To say nothing about governor establishment times. 5 turns in every speed. Much less abusable Magnus on Online, abusable like hell on Marathon, I imagine, as he moves 4 times faster.

Like many elements in this game, scaling across different speeds seems unbalanced and unfinished one.

 

[Boccages]

I only play single player. What is online speed? Very very fast?

 

[MrRadar]

I only play single player. What is online speed? Very very fast?

250 turns for a game as opposed to 500 turns on standard, i.e. twice as fast. "Online" is just the name, you don't have to play multiplayer.

 

[Ivan Hunger]

I might have mistitled this thread as scaling up the Golden Age threshold as the right solution? Maybe scaling down the points barbarian encampments give you may be a better solution?

The best solution would probably be scaling down the spawn rate of barbarian outposts on slower game speeds.

 

[Disgustipated]

actually playing a marathon game right now. I kind of like the pacing a little better. But I can see the frustration with barbarian camps. And Spawning a unit every turn is more an issue of marathon than on online speed. Luckily barbarians didn't cause me too much trouble my game, but it took a while to clean them up.

We'll see if I finish this game. I tend to dislike marathon speed in the later eras. But for the first era I think it works pretty good.

 

[Boccages]

My solution was sending a scout or any military unit on guard in the regions where barbarians would spawn so as to constantly have these regions under watch. Barbarians won't spawn if you can see the troublesome tiles.

 

[WillowBrook]

The problem with the golden age threshold and different game speeds is that some era score sources scale with speed while many don't. You'll get more barbarian camps cleared at slower speeds, but the number of points available for things like meeting civs, settling on other continents, and finding wonders are all map dependent, while other sources are fixed (first tech of era, creating unique unit, city pop achievements, etc)

If we're trying to balance speeds, I agree it seems better to adjust the rate of barb spawn than to change the score thresholds.