New patch 20 December

[Tuvok694]

You'll laugh when you see that the new alert action they just put in place is not even working properly.

I just wanted to ask this: Has anyone ever seen a unit actually wake up when an enemy approaches? I did not observe this one single time till now.

 

[Magil]

You'll laugh when you see that the new alert action they just put in place is not even working properly.

Honestly at this point I'd just be too annoyed to laugh.

 

[Esperr]

I'm not sure I understand...if you take a 10-pop city working mines and lumber mills and with an internal trade route or two, 50 base production is pretty easy, even before talking about encampments and industrial zones. Add a 50% policy modifier to that and you have 75 production. Online speed that means a tank takes 3.2 turns without doing anything crazy.

Later in the game building older units before unlocking new ones is another good way to go if you are production-starved. Use the 50% discount to upgrading units and I've really never had a problem making more units than my economy can financially support.

Thats one city, how many optimally placed citys can you get? Likewise your not taking into account the production of the builders to build all that stuff, the time to grow the city, move the builders ext. If you spam and overlap you have a higher net production, individual is only important for things like ruhr valley and the space race. Not to mention when you get DOW'd and lose 2 or 3 citys right away its much better if all of your citys are raisin bran rather then lucky charms. And not every city can have a trade route, even if you only hit ten to fifteen citys by t100 you would have to focus soly on commercial and trade routes to ensure each had even a single route, let alone 2.

Well you were saying in your previous post that factories start to spring up around T120. If games are decided by turn 150, how can you say that the first 4/5th of a game don't matter ? until you get to factories - t120- overlap bonuses never mattered AT ALL since there aren't any.

I never said they don't matter, I said the only thing that matters. You build up to win in 20-30 turns. The only thing that matters before is getting as many citys as possible, by spamming and conquering your continent or immediate area.

 

[LDiCesare]

I think some of the critism here of Firaxis is a bit unfair. You would expect them to fix the big issues first. One of these was the games constantly crashing due to certain bugs. Some are now reporting this is fixed. This is no way the final patch here. I expect other patches to follow in next few months.

Makes sense to clear up the issues that are causing their 2k support staff most work.

No. The biuggest AI issue is that it is not challenging at all.
The reason is that it has no clue how to attack a city past the early game.
Did Firaxis address more important problems with the resources they have?
They have worked on the AI, so they have an AI resource who worked on the patch.
What did they do?

• Improved AI Deal negotiations and analysis => nice, but irrelevant
• Improved AI handling of Promises; including that they are more likely to agree if they like you, and also will consider how trustworthy a civ is by whether they’ve kept previous promises => not in any way important
• Improved tactical handling of Great Admirals and Great Generals =>totally useless, since the other units will still not attack cities
• Improved AI interest in Terracotta Army => irrelevant
• Improved handling of leaf techs => unclear, but the AIteching is not the problem, it's its tactics that are the big issue
• Improved building of Forts => useless
• Improved resource grabbing in late game => useless too as the player has already won by mid-game due to AI tactical inability
• Improved Last Viking King agenda’s analysis for who is in bottom percentage of navies => nice, but totally useless in most of the games one will play
• Improved handling of several complaint or kudo messages from AI => unclear, but since diplo is useless because AI is a wimp, it's useless too
• Rebalanced Catherine’s evaluation of the ‘no spying’ Promise => totally useless in most of the games one will play
• AI will not try to convert unconvertible cities => good, but since the AI will apparently still suicide its apostles against your own standing in his holy site, increasing yoru religion, it's, again useless.

So, a lot of small changes, none of them being big issues. Your argument doesn't hold.
As for game crashing, mind you I had zero crash before the first patch, and had some afterwards. Overall, the stability remains very good and I would say stability issues are very minor with regards to making the game enjoyable.

 

[orasis]

40% less cost for space race parts (at least that's what I read).... Why? As it was I think space victory was already too easy, no? After domination I found that space was the easiest way to win.

Maybe it was to help the AI? It has to be...

 

[Chibisuke]

Donno if anyone else noticed, but since patch AI seems less interested in plundering trade routes and stealing workers.

 

[RealAntithesis]

Yeah, the developer's patching priorities seem a bit off. They should be taking into consideration the key issues being experienced by the community (who have probably played the game much more than the developers ever would) rather than the seemingly haphazard or random approach they appear to be taking. The lack of communication probably doesn't help either and gives the impression of a company that just doesn't care about the needs of its customers (who, after all, had already bought the game). Unless those key issues are too hard to fix, in which case, I'll be extremely worried about the future (given that its too late for a refund)...

 

[Brutus2]

So now that unique districts must obey population requirements like standard districts do, does this boost the evaluation of Rome and/or Kongo since they will have the only unique districts that can be built anytime?

In my opinion Rome is already a strong civ and the Bath is a decent district so the fact that it keeps the ability to be built regardless of population when almost everyone else lost that strengthens an already decent civ.

 

[Morgawr]

Fully agree that the recent AI tweaks are mostly useless. A more optimistic scenario might be it's a matter of feasibility vs priority. Eg the devs have a backlog of 100 AI bugs to fix. They start working on 50 of them. Only 10 are completely fixed and QAed by the winter patch Dev deadline. And of course those tend to be easy low hanging fruit like "Catherine s evaluation of whatever". The more critical but complex ones like "AI is too chicken in combat" are worked on but aren't fully solved and tested by the deadline so remain in backlog.

At least that's what I would LIKE to believe

 

[whyidie]

Completed three games with the new patch. Quit 1 due to losing my cap early to Arabia.

Two on Deity including the loss to Arabia I also lost out to Russia via culture on turn ~320. The culture loss was a game I started pre-patch and finished post patch. I had an awful start close to India and Sumeria. Could only get three cities and it was cramped, just not enough tiles. Decided to play peaceful to see what the AI would do. Production was poor and after the patch I was looking at 50+ turns to get spaceports out. Awful game, was still surprised by the AI victory. Not a single war even with Sumeria as an immediate neighbor. I can rationalize this as I was the poor neighbor throughout the game. Why waste time taking my production and population starved cities. Better to focus on other things.

The other loss was due to an early rush to Arabia. Well timed run by them using two city state allies to crush my minimal army.

Rolled out a domination victory on Emperor just to get the stench off. Happy to report Brasil took one of my early cities when I overextended. AI was as aggressive as it could be given Emperor, declaring wars on me at least 6 times up to the atomic era. Happy to report production times weren't too bad but I was Rome and had a 20+ city empire with trade routes in the high 20's by the end.

Science felt just right, but culture slowed to a crawl at times, but this is likely to me completely ignoring culture.

Just as in most my pre-patch games map was covered by cities (standard AI/Civ) by the end game.

Overall a nice patch came at a good time as I was losing a bit of interest.

 

[bladex]

You'll laugh when you see that the new alert action they just put in place is not even working properly.

are you kidding me?!!

 

[CultureManiac]

So now that unique districts must obey population requirements like standard districts do, does this boost the evaluation of Rome and/or Kongo since they will have the only unique districts that can be built anytime?

In my opinion Rome is already a strong civ and the Bath is a decent district so the fact that it keeps the ability to be built regardless of population when almost everyone else lost that strengthens an already decent civ.

Aquaducts and neighborhoods don't count against the limit for any civ.

 

[General Tso]

Yep i just tried this game again after the patch... when this bug was still present i just closed the game. never seen such a dumb bug stay in a game for so long.

I agree. The last build bug in combination with the 2 click hassle for looking at a city's buildings is causing me to wait for a fix before playing the game for any serious amount of time.

 

[nzcamel]

Surely a patch will come out with the other 2 DLCs, most probably at the 90 day mark (January 21st),
when the Aztecs go freely into the base game...

We'll see what that brings...

And maybe then SDK will be rleased for the modders to get to the AI...

I think we'll see patches every month for quite a while yet.

I just wanted to ask this: Has anyone ever seen a unit actually wake up when an enemy approaches? I did not observe this one single time till now.

It has worked for me

So now that unique districts must obey population requirements like standard districts do, does this boost the evaluation of Rome and/or Kongo since they will have the only unique districts that can be built anytime?

In my opinion Rome is already a strong civ and the Bath is a decent district so the fact that it keeps the ability to be built regardless of population when almost everyone else lost that strengthens an already decent civ.

There's no way that they could have the Bath & Kongos district locked to population; given the standard versions aren't.
I don't think it makes either Civ that much stronger as their specialty districts are still blander than the others.

 

[Tuvok694]

It has worked for me

Really? Then I must have made some other mistake.
At least I am sure that units inside a city do NOT wake when enemy approaches.
Could it be that barbarians do not count as "enemies"? (which would of course be completely senseless)

 

[bitula]

Yep i just tried this game again after the patch... when this bug was still present i just closed the game. never seen such a dumb bug stay in a game for so long.

It’s like in XCOM2 (which was surprisingly solid compared to this game, and same company here…) the hit chance of current target would display the hit chance of current target from the previous turn, when eg.: the sectoid was 10 steps further away, lol. And, even if given a spaghetti code, I am quite sure that fixing this bug requires no more than 10 minutes. Devs please use currentlyBuiltItem() function instead of previouslyBuiltItem() on line 1256… This is not an unrealistic expectation, right? And before any AI bugfix the false representation of game data on the UI must be fixed. This includes unresponsive numeric indicators (food, production, science etc). On several panels your actions, like rearranging citizens in the town are not reflected.

 

[RealAntithesis]

No. The biuggest AI issue is that it is not challenging at all...

• Improved AI Deal negotiations and analysis => nice, but irrelevant
• Improved AI handling of Promises; including that they are more likely to agree if they like you, and also will consider how trustworthy a civ is by whether they’ve kept previous promises => not in any way important

I would have thought some of the more glaring inconsistencies in AI behaviour resulting in an unimmersive and confusing experience would have also warranted some immediate attention. In my current game, I'm Germany. The Aztecs are my friends and allies. Then I get messages from my "allied friend" (I assume it's the Aztecs since they are my only friends and allies) that:
1. "An allied friend reports that Aztec has just formed an alliance with Germany". Great, that's because we just cemented our friendship with an alliance. We now have open borders because we are allies.
2. A couple of turns later: "An allied friend reports that Aztec is beginning a military assault on Germany". So the Aztecs are such good friends and allies that they inform me (without declaring war or anything) that they are preparing to invade me.
3. Same turn as the message: Aztecs units (thankfully an era or two behind me in tech) cross the narrow sea and enter my lands. And due to open borders (because we are such good friends and allies), they can do this without declaring war.
4. I have no idea what's going to happen next...
What am I supposed to think about all this except that this game makes no sense?

 

[dac050]

Really? Then I must have made some other mistake.
At least I am sure that units inside a city do NOT wake when enemy approaches.
Could it be that barbarians do not count as "enemies"? (which would of course be completely senseless)

I wonder if "being inside a city" renders the alert moot? That too would be bad, but it would make more sense than not seeing a Barbarian as an enemy.

 

[bladex]

they made it so cutting barely adds production to wonders now!

 

[Gumbolt]

So, a lot of small changes, none of them being big issues. Your argument doesn't hold.
As for game crashing, mind you I had zero crash before the first patch, and had some afterwards. Overall, the stability remains very good and I would say stability issues are very minor with regards to making the game enjoyable.

Yeah I get that the Ai is pretty nerfed here. I doubt it's something they can easily fix in 30 days. Some people were unable to complete any games due to the game crashing. For me that makes it a major bug if you can't even finish a game. I am sure they are well aware just how poor the Ai is here. Hopefully in future patches this will improve.

Remember Ai will always follow a defined code. The issue here is the players always use optimal strategies. On this game it appears to be stealing Ai settlers early on. Also taking advantage of the AI poor military strategy. There is never a plan B for AI. The basics for the game are there. Hopefully modders will be able to improve the Ai here more. Let's hope firaxis can before the expansion.