problem with emperor difficulty

artyom

Warlord
Joined
Feb 5, 2011
Messages
283
i think this difficulty needs some adjusting or perhaps a new difficulty needs to be implemented. The game difficulty mainly depends on the civ you choose, and it just so happens that all my favorite civs are the "easy" civs, even on emperor (france, england, vikings, russia, germany, prussia, turks, japan, and a few others)

the game is really hard if you pick some civs, but these above mentioned civs seem a piece of cake on 600 AD marathon speed (the only settings I play). The problem may be that the difficulty isnt hard enough, or it may be just that when you play the above civs its very easy to dominate and see no rival civs.
-An example would be my beloved french whom I love to play in any mod the most but whom I never play because they are OP in every freaking mod. anyways, with the french, once you build your patronage wonders, half of europe including london will flip to your side leaving no competition at all for the rest of the game. The only potential military rival may be russia, as in any game, but russia tends to collapse every game I have played since 1.9 and they never pose a long term threat because they expand and then fall.
-english. on normal speed they may pose difficulty, but on marathon speed piece of cake, no competition at all from neighbour civs. by 1500 AD: build all the catholic wonders, settle half of africa, found protestantism, be first to liberalism, and be half way into culture capturing paris. what threat could there possibly be? (only mughals?). But theres no strong France or Prussia, no spain, nothing which happened historically.
-vikings: if you wanted to, you could raze all of europe several times. nothing can stop you since you can get like 10 good cities before 900 AD
-prussia: sometimes you may have to restart due to bad luck. but most of the time you can just stomp mainland europe by 1800 AD (hire infinite mercenaries and upgrade them for free). but, rarely would you see a strong France, or russia, spain. and even if you do, they collapse sooner or later. the only problem is the english, but they too seem to collapse every now and then. which often leaves me and england as the only power in europe by 1850's because eveyrone else just collapsed for the simple reason because they conquered too much.

i hope you get my point. maybe, on emperor difficulty, AI civs like russia/france/spain shouldnt collapse as often just because they had such a success conquering their neighbours. or maybe instead of collapsing, foreign cities would declare independance. I'd really want to test VD unit graphics on a european power like france, but its no fun when its already evident what will happen
 
Play on Emperor/Normal. Then come back and tell us what you found.

Oh, and btw all AIs always play on Monarch difficulty. There should be little difference in their performance whether you play on Monarch or Emperor, unless you deliberately help/hinder them of course.
 
I agree, Marathon is usually worth an entire difficulty level.
 
just tried england on normal speed with my marathon strategy. there is a substantial difference. couldnt finish UHV #2(asia part).
one thing I noticed is that in both speeds it takes roughly the same amount of turns for AI leaders to change relations with you. for example, both on marathon and normal speed it takes like 30 turns for isabella to improve relations with me to allow open borders so that I can settle africa. which results in me settling africa at about 1000AD on marathon and about 1300 AD on normal as the english

the main difference in the outcome of marathon vs normal in my english game seemed to be research as I wasnt able to win the tech race to sistine chapel/versaille and surprisingly to lieralism as well which I got at 1600 compared to marathon which i'd have it at 1550. rifling also came a bit late, at 1727 as compared to marathon when i'd have it at around 1670.
I suppose the slower tech for english on normal speed is related to the later africa colonization which gives a substantial boost to economy if settled early enough.

total amount of produced units/structures on the british isles seemed identical for both speeds.
I guess i'll switch to playing normal speed for now. the main downside of it is you have to be very cautious and not make mistakes or waste any turns because every turn counts
 
Oh, and btw all AIs always play on Monarch difficulty. There should be little difference in their performance whether you play on Monarch or Emperor, unless you deliberately help/hinder them of course.
Nope, the difficulty level you choose affects the AIs, also. See HandicapInfos.xml and all the AI parameters. The "always Monarch" Custom Game display is misleading.

Examples - when human plays Monarch, AI builds units at 110% of human hammer cost.
When human plays Emperor, AI builds them at 100% of human.

That's actually a factor that contributes to the perceived easiness of the game - the AI actually receives a malus at building units at Monarch, and is only equal to the human at Emperor. I always change it to 90% and 85%.

When human plays Monarch, AI's have 60% of human Inflation. At Emperor, it's 55%.

Etc.

AI civs like russia/france/spain shouldnt collapse as often just because they had such a success conquering their neighbours.
That's a large part of why I make stability.py softer.

I guess i'll switch to playing normal speed for now.
Personally, I prefer Epic.
 
I never play on Marathon, so can't comment on those parts, but I absolutely agree on the stability part - it simply happens way too often that if fx. Spain <-> France / France <-> Germany happens to conquer each other, it results in both civs collapsing, which doesn't make that much sense. Of course there should be a stability hit for taking and holding cities in another civs core, partly being offset by the increased production and commerce output, but the AI can't handle it. If you win a big war and capture your neighbours, you should be rewarded, not punished - and for the AI, conquering an enemy civ is (too) often a kamikaze project.
 
I think you're right about AI stability. A higher expansion threshold seems to be the best solution.

Edit: I've just noticed that the handicap modifiers to stability apply to everyone, i.e. if you play on Emperor the AI becomes more unstable as well.
 
I think you're right about AI stability. A higher expansion threshold seems to be the best solution.

Edit: I've just noticed that the handicap modifiers to stability apply to everyone, i.e. if you play on Emperor the AI becomes more unstable as well.

Makes sense! I wondered about that, since Portugal was so much harder at emperor, with fewer civs alive for the open borders UHV
 
I think you're right about AI stability. A higher expansion threshold seems to be the best solution.

Edit: I've just noticed that the handicap modifiers to stability apply to everyone, i.e. if you play on Emperor the AI becomes more unstable as well.

As you know I'm not the biggest fan of Stability maps, but I think any Civ should get some sort of significant one-time stability bonus for conquering another Civilization.
 
That would only trivialize domination.
 
Domination pffft, Conquest is a real victory not those fake victories you win.

I really doubt it's even slightly possible on DoC now with all the new Civs and respawns though.
 
Conquest is a lot easier than Domination with a good teching civilization, if you want my opinion.
 
Conquest is actually easier than Domination if only because of OCCs.
You never have to pay attention to stability and can just do anything you want,
a great tradeoff for only being limited to one city.
 
Iam playing on normal speed and I see barbs in places and times I have never seen on marathon speed.
Russian Crimea has an extensive amount of barb horse archers summoning
As does America to the point where I flipped like 20 dog soldiers at start and many european cities in america got destroyed by barbs.

I have never seen this on marathon speed. Is this intended? Maybe its a new patch? Bug?
 
Did you update the SVN recently? There's a thread on the fora called "barb overhaul".
 
I think I haven't committed anything of that yet.
 
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