And let me explain why difficulty level is so important to this discussion:
1: People keep reffering to conq's and the UA being fun, while that may be true, fun is not that much of a priority on deity, and not all that relevant to this discussion, which I believe revolves much more about strength then fun factor, hence Poland and China being so high up.
2: With all these Spain lovers I figured I'd start a couple games, see how it works out.
Deity, continents, large, standard, standard number of civs and CS.
First game I have fuji nearby, but a CS is 1 tile away and it's impossible to connect via road due to the arabs and morrocans being in the way, clear no go, oh and no sick amounts of cash due to the aforementioned scouting it earlier.
Second game I find 2, one explored already, with the only one not being settled yet being blocked off by a cs with 4 workable grassland tiles and a whole load of sea, so a no go.
Third game I start out on my own continent with not a wonder in sight, another waste.
Repeat till about the 8th game, which is what I'm playing now, 1k in cash and 2 settled wonders, great start, but not worth restarting 7 times.
Restarting this many times might not be an issue for players on lower difficulties who could care less about a real challenge, but you don't start deity to have to rely on cooking the settings.
3: On king and upwards the AI starts off with more units then you do, which means more scouting which drastically decreases your chances of being the first to discover a wonder, while 100 gold can definitely be useful, it's really not worth an entire UA.
Indeed, I cannot agree more. The economic bonuses and extra starter units of the AI players on Deity puts Spain's UA in a very different light. However I'd like to add a few words to the topic.
As for me, I do not have the gaming experience to call myself a Deity player. I did manage to beat the game on Deity level, but that's more like a "Holycraphowdididothat?" situation, since I still play on immortal most of the time, trying to beat a set of AIs with less favored nations & less preferred tactics.
One thing I would to mention tho': what I've been trying to stress whenever i was casting a voting on or against a nation: I was using the perspective of how that specific leader/empire performs during a
multiplayer game, with no AI players around, or at least the humans outnumbering the AIs on the map.
In these games those strict laws of "how to behave around a Deity AI" just simply won't apply -
no matter how experienced your opponents are, the other guy will get to start with the same old one settler + one warrior unit combo, and they have to put effort into getting any kind of unit by spending either hammer or coins - so the chance that a Natural Wonder is going to be discovered/settled by the time you get there, is pretty much the same from any other player's point of view. At start everyone has the same set of tools to become the dominant empire of that region. And if someone dislikes Spain's choice for expansion,
they won't just suddenly give birth to, or
conjure up an Uruk-hai army in a couple of turns and erase the town - or if they do so, that is going to cost them either in gold or hammerwise.
Not to mention the
absence of these diplomatic shackles what the human player has to roll with on a match vs. the AI. For example when I was trying out the Rise of the Mongols scenario a while ago, after I went to clear off one of the AIs I instantly went for his former CS ally. After I captured the city, all the other AIs started to hate my guts as one, refusing to trade or do Research Agreements with me, and so on - even civs settled so far that I wasn't even sure how the hell he knows that I even exist... But after a reload, I decided to leave one city for the poor guy I just steamrolled, finish off the CS ally first, while it's locked to the fella and then capture the last town of the AI - noone gave two f*cks about what happened. They signed RAs with a wide smile, without asking for anything extra in return - with the
SAME genocidal maniac! And the difference was only a minor switch in the kill order.
When someone pulls out a move like this versus human players, I'm sure most of them won't treat the warmonger differently based on the order of the cities he took. And probably a player piling techs two continents away might not even care at all about the fate of another player and his CS ally, he might just sign an RA with our warmonger as well, just to maintain his technological advantage and keep his rivals occupied for at least a few more turns.
Conclusion: I ran my tests on Emperor, because I believe that's the AI which doesn't have sky-high balance factors, and moves around in a pace which can be expected from any player you might face online.
I agree it's dumb as a rock, but at least it does something.
And for the map,
Inland sea is a map which can be scouted for at least 70-80% just by using your starter land units. This might help in finding these NWs laying around, but also gives a chance to EVERY single player on the map to find them (because of the nature of the map type itself), as long as they aren't located in the middle of the sea. As i mentioned before, I prefer the map because of the "moshpit-like experience", and I wanted to show that on an arena like map, Spain can take advantage of it's UA very quickly.
The reduction of the map size also should be mentioned, that was mostly because I play this game from a 7 years old laptop, which barely runs the game. Above maps larger than "Small" my machine causes severe lags, increasing loading times between turns and so on - so i choose to stay on smaller map sizes and less players, where my HW sewttings won't make the game unplayable for others. This laptop's sole purpose was to help me in my studies - and by being a stereotypically broke student, right now I cannot afford to buy a better one.
One more thing. Although everyone is aware of the fact that I am not a native English speaker, so if I'm misunderstanding the use the word "fun", I appologize. But I believe that if an individual sits down to play Civ5, he or she is "having fun" in general, regardless of the difficulty settings.
but I am happy at my choice so far.
