New here, but a user of some of the 'Real' mods from before Rise&Fall. I had a break with Civ then, but I'm back with Gathering Storm. I naturally got back to the 'Real' mods I liked, and I'm pleased to have found RST.
Only one game with it under my belt, but as a feedback I can already say that AIs better keep up with the pace of the game. Better teching, and also better translation from tech level to actual unit fielding. I like to play quite naval heavy games, and there's a lot more higher tech level ships. Also landing a Colonial Casus Belli is harder.
I precise I play on Prince difficulty level. I never entered fully into the game yet, and I'm still learning the finer ropes of efficient city building. So no bonuses involved in the better efficiency I observed. I still have the tech lead, and it's still a cakewalk militarily speaking, but no longer I spent a century or two with the only battleship in the world, and I get definitely more pressure from the AIs. Nice work!
I have been folowing the conversation for some time, and two things catched my attention :
1)
And he doesn’t stop - tactically not the best, as he has too many tigers and forgets to bring his melee unit close to city to capture…
Quin keeps bombarding Mecca down in a close mountain pass to zero over and over, turn by turn…
I also saw this behavior with vanilla AI. Phoenicia and France were trapped on a peninsula closed by my borders. 3 cities each, separated by a mountain range with two 2 tiles chokepoints, and Paris on one of the chokepoints. Phoenicia DOWed by classical era, took Paris, then I could see Paris in my line of sight kept to zero but never taken back. By medieval era, I launched an emergency to finally put a legion on that tile, and got sight from France. She had a huge number of archers, but no melee units. Phoenicia couldn't approach without being slaughtered. France position was in fact very good, and she could have sallied and wiped out Phoenicia I guess...
I think the problem was upkeep in this case. With only two cities, and without a foe able to kill some units, she couldn't afford more of them, and disbanding at least one was apparently not a considered option. I'm guessing this army composition problem can occur in other cases (maybe the few melee units are deemed necessary elsewhere, etc). I wonder if it is not adressable via modding, like checking army composition and possibly disbanding some of the most owned units to force build others. Maybe a solution like this could get rid of some of the 'AI won't take city' cases.
2)
Planes.
I play on the largest vanilla map size, normal resources, and since I read here and there AIs have trouble using air units, in my last two games I payed attention to the total number of Aluminium resources on the map. That was 5, and 4.
Taking 5, that's 10 max plane upkeep on the map. 15 with the +1 policy card. 20 with Victor's +1 ability on each. For a map with 20 players, and helicopters sucking up Alu as well. I didn't pay close attention to that in previous games, but I already found it quite rare, and I'm not so sure it is solely an AI problem here. Though given the last screenshots from
@V. Soma the AI is willing to build units it can't possibly pay the upkeep for. (By the way now that's some GDR nonsense!
)
