Realism Invictus

[RezerCuid]

And what if you enter the setting in the main menu, select 1 unit per tile or as usual
That is, a separate setting with the combat mechanics of 5 civilization

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

And what if you enter the setting in the main menu, select 1 unit per tile or as usual
That is, a separate setting with the combat mechanics of 5 civilization

Sure, I'll gladly make such a setting. Will you do the honours of porting Civ 5 combat mechanics? Should be a trivial task.

 

[AllTheLand]

I've noticed that from time to time the AI will suicide-attack with an already weakened unit instead of letting it heal. I don't know what is going on behind the scenes, it's very strange.

Technically, this already does exist with the "Show Demographics" threshold, but that is the initial rung and a very low bar to clear. I think implementing a secondary tier that requires a more serious investment in espionage would be quite interesting! It makes historical sense and would help mitigate ridiculous and senseless wars between not even remotely neighboring belligerents based solely on a power metric that doesn't factor things like distance into the equation, and tying this to espionage would indirectly tether it to things like distance, as the allocated amount is itself likely to be a function of things itself indirectly influenced by distance, such as relations modifiers. I have no idea how feasible that would be to implement, but if you can figure something workable out, that could be paradigm shifting potentially.

Distance should not affect power ratings, preventing excessive distant wars must be done through other diplomatic tweaks.

The idea that's been thrown around in the past is to separate power level into offensive power and defensive power, so a civ with a lot of defense might be seen as a poor target to attack, but not as a threat that will likely attack you.

That's an interesting concept.

It's definitely not intuitive! The buttons make it appear like you have to select it, but in truth the units do it automatically. And it took me ages to learn all this too. I didn't realize a fortified unit can attack and preserve the fortification bonus until a month or two ago, when I checked a unit's stats and thought "hmm, that shouldn't be there" and experimented.

Very interesting. I have very often attacked from defensive positions into stacks to use the fact that the unit won't move and will stay defending the city, hill or fort, but I never knew this kept the fortification bonuses.

Talking about defenses, do any of you ever use promotions that enhance attack and defenses on terrain in maps where the climate is so damn varied you'll be having desert, tundra, jungle, plain and all that horsehocky in one same continent? I like them but I feel that some units just lose their value once you have conquered every tundra city (to put an example with arctic combat) in the entire world

Hill promotions are good (especially for recon units), forest promotions are useful in the early game but lose value, arctic and desert are very situational, unless playing an arctic or desertic map, I wouldn't bother, except for fresh units with low XP used as cannon fodder.

I really do feel like the computer uses better promotions, but I don't play with ''AI plays to win'' rule, do you guys recommend it?

The "AI plays to win" rule does a lot less than most people assume. It makes the AI more aware of the endgame victory conditions such as culture victory, space victory, etc. but it doesn't make the AI otherwise play smarter.

Well, given how strength works in Civ, there isn't that much difference. If you have lots of units, you are a credible threat on offence, even if you didn't specialize them for that.

That's only true to a degree. With similar amount of units, a leader with the protective trait is going to be better at defending and worse at attacking than a leader with the conqueror trait. And if you don't have specialized units for city-taking, you're going to struggle much more. That being said, when evaluating war, the risk of a counter-attack by the other side is also very important, so evaluating only the offensive potential of the attacker against the defensive potential of the defender could be a huge mistake.

 

[AspiringScholar]

Distance should not affect power ratings, preventing excessive distant wars must be done through other diplomatic tweaks.

I believe you've misunderstood me. I was saying that it can indirectly influence the allocation of espionage, which in turn (by your hypothetical proposition) would influence the AI's awareness of power ratings, such that it is less likely to be aware of the power rating of faraway civs and target these.

 

[Zomgy]

Hi all, loving this mod. How is multiplayer for the mod? I see a game right now on Saturday night with 3 people.

 

[JDCP]

Hi all, loving this mod. How is multiplayer for the mod? I see a game right now on Saturday night with 3 people.

Hello friend, here's some info taken from the Realism Invictus 3.6 manual:

''Realism Invictus should be stable in multiplayer. In several test multiplayer games, one run until the mid-Industrial era, we did not run into any Out-of-Sync errors. Nevertheless, we had reports of OOS occurring between several players with different OS’es (though don’t take that as a guarantee of errors – some of our games featured a Win7 system playing with WinXP system with no problems). Make sure the host has the most powerful and stable (preferably 64-bit) system .Also, running a pitboss server leads to much more stable multiplayer games. Remember that for Direct IP play, if using the Steam version, you will have to revert to the original non-steam Civ 4 by selecting a “beta” in Steam (Properties->Betas). This is, in practice, not a beta but rather the definitive pre-steam version of the game, which has Direct IP play enabled and generally works better with mods. To set up this kind of multiplayer, unless you have a real LAN, you’ll need some kind of virtual LAN (ZeroTier has been tested to work quite well and is free, but there are probably many other options as well).''

Hope it serves and have fun!

 

[Sinocpm]

Hey guys, I've been reading some of the discussions here about possible updates and improvements to this already outstanding mod, but I'm afraid it's just too much to keep up with all of it However I'm excited for what's to come, keep up the good work everybody and a special big thank you to our master builder Walter!

I'm currently playing two games myself, one single player and one multiplayer with @AspiringScholar , both times still using the last official update. I therefore hope I can contribute a little bit myself:

One thing I have noticed in my single player game as the Turkish is their pretty weak, because arriving too late, unique unit the Janissary. I think that one has already been mentioned here and is getting a modification.

Another issue which I could not find any mention of using the search function here is that of the doctrine Maneuver Warfare. It has an incredibly short shelf life of just two technologies before it's already obsolete again. I don't think that is intended this way, is it? I'd go so far and argue that it's a doctrine which is still very much alive and used today and therefore should not go obsolete within the timeframe of RI at all. To quote Lt. Col. Stephen "Godfather" Ferrando:

 

[trashmunster]

Found another visual problem.
Mughal civ uses default euro pikeman, instead of something more culturally appropriate

 

[JDCP]

Found another visual problem.
Mughal civ uses default euro pikeman, instead of something more culturally appropriate

*searches WTH is a Mughal* ah yes, this is pretty weird lol there are some nations that if you look at their units they really need some changes, this is mostly for derivatives. I'm pretty sure the people behind the mod are aware of this given that the others, more well known civs, don't have this kind of problems.

 

[AllTheLand]

- It's really unfortunate that we only have the DLL code, because increasing the visual size of tiles to allow to display buildings on the map without cities sprawling all over the neighbouring tiles would be welcome. My capital is nested between two rivers, so as a result its buildings sprawl over most of 5 tiles.
Look at this:

Spoiler One city, five tiles :

Unironically, I preferred the Civ3 city screen. You had to go off the main map, but it didn't look so ridiculous and cramped.

- From high above, roads look like dirt roads, but when zoomed in, they look paved.
- Am I the only one to think that Engineer specialists are rather crappy? You don't get access to them in the early game, but when you can finally get it, their only selling points over craftsmen really is the great people point, otherwise they are similar or inferior.
- Regarding espionage, I read in the dedicated thread that the AI will start increasing its espionage investment when a civ gets the "can see research" option. But if you don't spend much espionage points actively, you get a higher available pool of espionage points, so not directly launching spying missions against a civ pushes it to invest more against you...
- I'm not sure about other UI changes to make the system clearer, but the way weights work to allocate espionage points towards different civs is frustrating, especially when the overall amount of generation EP is low. Walter, can you point me at the place where it's handled?
- Isn't the sudden jump in espionage generation from prisons excessive? I'm not yet there in the game, but +4 and +50% is a huge amount.
- The AI doesn't seem to properly evaluate resources in relation to religion. I have an AI running Taoism willing to pay 7 gpt for silver although it won't receive any happiness for it.
- I think a major snowball factor is resource scarcity. A small civ will simply lack many resources to grow its cities because lack of resources means less happiness and health, and resource trade can't patch it up. On the flipside, expansionism yields great happiness and health rewards from resources. There is a degree of historical truth to this, but the effect is very exaggerated in-game. For happiness, perhaps a slight increase to base happiness and an "out of touch government" happiness penalty for big states could curb the effect (in addition to tweaks to culture). For health however, I don't see a good way to proceed. Completely redoing the resource system so that a tiny state could still easily get access to 20 different resources through trade seems out of reach. Another way is to reduce how much variety of resources matters for health.
- Coal is too scarce. In the real world, it is quite abundant, in my current game on a massive continent with over 80 cities, I can see only 8 coal deposits. Maybe there is some luck element with more coals having been generated on the smaller New World continent, but that's still not a satisfactory explanation. Not having coal available for a civ is devastating, but with 11 civ on my continent some are bound to not have it, and not just minor civs. I can see a 6-cities civ, a 7-cities civ and a 8-cities civ that don't have any coal available.

 

[RezerCuid]

Found another visual problem.
Mughal civ uses default euro pikeman, instead of something more culturally appropriate

View attachment 705339

The same as the Finns

 

[JDCP]

- Coal is too scarce. In the real world, it is quite abundant

You're right on this one, I've had games were one continent doesn't even have coal. I have had to fight over a stupid tiny island in the middle of nowhere for coal... god damned coal!!

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

One thing I have noticed in my single player game as the Turkish is their pretty weak, because arriving too late, unique unit the Janissary. I think that one has already been mentioned here and is getting a modification.

Yep, already changed, Janissaries now arrive much earlier.

Another issue which I could not find any mention of using the search function here is that of the doctrine Maneuver Warfare. It has an incredibly short shelf life of just two technologies before it's already obsolete again. I don't think that is intended this way, is it? I'd go so far and argue that it's a doctrine which is still very much alive and used today and therefore should not go obsolete within the timeframe of RI at all.

Well, it specifically refers to the dominance of large lines/blocks of troops and manouevering them on the battlefield, which is a rather specific feature of late XVII - early XIX century warfare. I will move the obsolescence a bit further, but generally speaking, doctrines should be rather short-lived, powerful as they are.

Mughal civ uses default euro pikeman, instead of something more culturally appropriate

Oops, that's definitely an oversight. I have a lot of Mughal units to choose from, that's not from a lack of material.

- It's really unfortunate that we only have the DLL code, because increasing the visual size of tiles to allow to display buildings on the map without cities sprawling all over the neighbouring tiles would be welcome. My capital is nested between two rivers, so as a result its buildings sprawl over most of 5 tiles.

Well, RI has already scaled down the CityLSystem by 50% so that 4x more stuff can fit on one city tile, and technically speaking increasing the tile size is possible (and even easy, with one XML value), but it breaks so so much stuff visually. It's very clear that value wasn't really meant to actually be touched past early development stages.

- From high above, roads look like dirt roads, but when zoomed in, they look paved.

Yeah, quirks of the texture MIP maps. I also noticed that interesting effect.

- Am I the only one to think that Engineer specialists are rather crappy? You don't get access to them in the early game, but when you can finally get it, their only selling points over craftsmen really is the great people point, otherwise they are similar or inferior.

They kind of are, aren't they. But more generally speaking, their original "niche" (generating production) is taken, so they are a bit devoid of purpose as specialists. Simply giving them more production feels like a buff for the sake of buff. More research?

- Regarding espionage, I read in the dedicated thread that the AI will start increasing its espionage investment when a civ gets the "can see research" option. But if you don't spend much espionage points actively, you get a higher available pool of espionage points, so not directly launching spying missions against a civ pushes it to invest more against you...

Might be true, though remember that K-Mod could have radically overhauled many vanilla behaviours.

- I'm not sure about other UI changes to make the system clearer, but the way weights work to allocate espionage points towards different civs is frustrating, especially when the overall amount of generation EP is low. Walter, can you point me at the place where it's handled?

It is an awful way, isn't it. I don't really know how to improve it. It's handled in the espionage screen, CvEspionageAdvisor.py

- Isn't the sudden jump in espionage generation from prisons excessive? I'm not yet there in the game, but +4 and +50% is a huge amount.

I was thinking at some point about an intermediate building (medieval?) to offload some of that espionage to. One problem with adding strictly espionage-related stuff is that espionage can be turned off, and then you get a building without any gameplay purpose.

- The AI doesn't seem to properly evaluate resources in relation to religion. I have an AI running Taoism willing to pay 7 gpt for silver although it won't receive any happiness for it.

A quick look in the code tells me you're right. That's something that can be fixed relatively easily (and obviously should).

- I think a major snowball factor is resource scarcity. A small civ will simply lack many resources to grow its cities because lack of resources means less happiness and health, and resource trade can't patch it up. On the flipside, expansionism yields great happiness and health rewards from resources. There is a degree of historical truth to this, but the effect is very exaggerated in-game. For happiness, perhaps a slight increase to base happiness and an "out of touch government" happiness penalty for big states could curb the effect (in addition to tweaks to culture). For health however, I don't see a good way to proceed. Completely redoing the resource system so that a tiny state could still easily get access to 20 different resources through trade seems out of reach. Another way is to reduce how much variety of resources matters for health.

Yeah, the snowballing tied to resource access is definitely a core mechanic of Civ 4, probably the main factor behind "bigger is always better" in vanilla Civ 4. Every city you settle doesn't just give you its own output, but (at least if it is in an even remotely optimal spot) improves your empire in some way.

- Coal is too scarce. In the real world, it is quite abundant, in my current game on a massive continent with over 80 cities, I can see only 8 coal deposits. Maybe there is some luck element with more coals having been generated on the smaller New World continent, but that's still not a satisfactory explanation. Not having coal available for a civ is devastating, but with 11 civ on my continent some are bound to not have it, and not just minor civs. I can see a 6-cities civ, a 7-cities civ and a 8-cities civ that don't have any coal available.

The original balancing behind it assumed at least half of civs wouldn't make it to an era where it actually becomes relevant. Since then AI got better at surviving, so revising that upwards seems sensible. Not by too much though - while I agree that coal is rather abundant in real world, since we're not really dealing with quantities and 1 coal resource is enough for a fully functional civ, reflecting real-world abundance would be detrimental for gameplay.

The same as the Finns

Finnish pikeman is Swedish at that time = default. As I said, I may add a flavour one later, but for Finland the default one is perfectly good.

 

[trashmunster]

The original balancing behind it assumed at least half of civs wouldn't make it to an era where it actually becomes relevant. Since then AI got better at surviving, so revising that upwards seems sensible. Not by too much though - while I agree that coal is rather abundant in real world, since we're not really dealing with quantities and 1 coal resource is enough for a fully functional civ, reflecting real-world abundance would be detrimental for gameplay.

I personally hate it when there is an abundance of resources everywhere, especially strategic ones. One of the best parts of the game is to secure all necessary resources for development, civs that lack resources resemble civs that have fallen behind at some point of history which is cool. If there is no snowballing AI there is no fun at all.
Even late game can be problematic if you have no gold = no microchips. (unless you get GA and Minecraft) Its so bloody boring when your starting fatcross has two cows, horses and Iron, yeah and next city has saltpeter and coal behore you know it. yawn.
I almost always play Totestra or perfect mongoose with perfect world style resources, hopefully that balance wont be changed for that mapscript

 

[giorgio1234]

Hi @Walter Hawkwood,
any feedback about this (possible) bug?

Realism Invictus

:crazyeye:way to go Marine, he attained to his true feelings and also left his old deeds with piracy by joining the military. What a role model!! Wow, that was pretty funny... I loaded up the WorldBuilder to test it and sure enough, they seemed like they were slapping a spider with their flip...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[[Y]]

I personally hate it when there is an abundance of resources everywhere, especially strategic ones. One of the best parts of the game is to secure all necessary resources for development, civs that lack resources resemble civs that have fallen behind at some point of history which is cool. If there is no snowballing AI there is no fun at all.
Even late game can be problematic if you have no gold = no microchips. (unless you get GA and Minecraft) Its so bloody boring when your starting fatcross has two cows, horses and Iron, yeah and next city has saltpeter and coal behore you know it. yawn.
I almost always play Totestra or perfect mongoose with perfect world style resources, hopefully that balance wont be changed for that mapscript

I'll echo this. While snowballing is hard to balance, a 1200-1600 turn game where all 30 something or more civs are locked in a stalemate isn't fun to play through. Some civs growing and eating others makes the game more dynamic and keeps it interesting as it goes on, and resource imbalance allows that to happen more reliably. Keeping up with a snowballing AI is a mark of how well you're playing, too. Walter has an excellent handle on this, I think, but I wanted to share thoughts in case others might find the perspective different or interesting.

 

[AllTheLand]

They kind of are, aren't they. But more generally speaking, their original "niche" (generating production) is taken, so they are a bit devoid of purpose as specialists. Simply giving them more production feels like a buff for the sake of buff. More research?

One idea I had at some point is that engineers could help boost the production of craftsmen, but making it easily understandable to the player and well-balanced could be tricky. Giving engineers +1 science could also work I guess, at least as a first step.

By the way, why are artists generating science too?

It is an awful way, isn't it. I don't really know how to improve it. It's handled in the espionage screen, CvEspionageAdvisor.py

Python, oh no... I'll have a look still, because it's really annoying to deal with.

I was thinking at some point about an intermediate building (medieval?) to offload some of that espionage to. One problem with adding strictly espionage-related stuff is that espionage can be turned off, and then you get a building without any gameplay purpose.

What if instead of allowing to turn espionage off, the option only allowed to turn spies and spy missions off, with the generation of espionage points and passive missions still enabled? I suspect most people who turn espionage off do it because they don't like getting their cities hit with various forms of AI sabotage, rather than out of a dislike for the passive system allowing to see charts, research, etc.

The original balancing behind it assumed at least half of civs wouldn't make it to an era where it actually becomes relevant. Since then AI got better at surviving, so revising that upwards seems sensible. Not by too much though - while I agree that coal is rather abundant in real world, since we're not really dealing with quantities and 1 coal resource is enough for a fully functional civ, reflecting real-world abundance would be detrimental for gameplay.

Real world abundance would have probably ten times more abundance as I'm seeing on my continent. I think only twice as much would be fine.

Speaking of not really dealing with quantities, I've found that RI's resource transforming system allows to make quantity matter more compared to base Civ4 (except the horrible corporation system), since the number of transformer buildings is limited by the number of base resources. However, this also makes the trading of some kind of resources much less interesting than in BtS... This incentive to not trade away extra resources make the situation much worse for smaller civilizations.

I personally hate it when there is an abundance of resources everywhere, especially strategic ones. One of the best parts of the game is to secure all necessary resources for development, civs that lack resources resemble civs that have fallen behind at some point of history which is cool. If there is no snowballing AI there is no fun at all.
Even late game can be problematic if you have no gold = no microchips. (unless you get GA and Minecraft) Its so bloody boring when your starting fatcross has two cows, horses and Iron, yeah and next city has saltpeter and coal behore you know it. yawn.
I almost always play Totestra or perfect mongoose with perfect world style resources, hopefully that balance wont be changed for that mapscript

I'll echo this. While snowballing is hard to balance, a 1200-1600 turn game where all 30 something or more civs are locked in a stalemate isn't fun to play through. Some civs growing and eating others makes the game more dynamic and keeps it interesting as it goes on, and resource imbalance allows that to happen more reliably. Keeping up with a snowballing AI is a mark of how well you're playing, too. Walter has an excellent handle on this, I think, but I wanted to share thoughts in case others might find the perspective different or interesting.

The current scarcity of coal mean that some civs are just condemned to roll over and die because one of the most important resources in the game is incredibly harder to get access to than in real life. Making coal more common is not going to make control of strategic resources trivial. I mentioned above a doubling of its frequency, and if anything that's conservative. The more I look at how important coal is in the late game, and the more I'm convinced a doubling is insufficient.

I just looked at some converter buildings (I possibly missed some):
- To produce aluminium, you need bauxite and coal.
- To produce plastic, you need salpeter, coal and oil.
- To produce steel, you need iron and coal.
- To produce cement, you need limestone and coal.
- And if you want to get paved roads without having access to two limestones, you'll need two coals. But you'll have fun afterwards when you want to use that coal for something else and discover Civ4 doesn't have a "delete building" option without opening the world builder.

So if you don't have at a minimum four coal resources, you are condemned to be lacking either cement, aluminium, plastic or steel. Now don't forget that some further converter buildings consume steel so ideally you want multiple steel which requires one coal each time. Try to tell me again how 8 coal resources total for a 80+ cities continent with 11 civilization is fine. I'm going to be ok, I have already control over 2 coals, and since unlike the AI I understand properly how important the resources can be and how to manage an economy, I can make plans to gain access of further resources. But the AI will just die badly. Although the game probably won't get to that point because I'll be bored of steamrolling the AI.

EDIT: This actually seems so extreme that I'm starting to assume that the limitation on how much a resource can be used is per-building (so you can't build two steel factories with only one coal or only one iron, but you can build one steel factory and one chemical factory that makes plastic). This of course changes the balancing point - but the fact that without coal, a civ is just condemned to roll over and die is clear from how many things absolutely require coal, with coal to make energy to power high-production in the industrial age being also so necessary. END-EDIT

In my current random map game, my strongest rival, the Byzantines, completely absorbed all the territory the English, and got territories from other places too, with a total of 24 cities under its control. It's helped by my modmod reducing numcities maintenance (about 120 gpt instead of 180 gpt in their case) and it's extremely successful for an AI. Nonetheless it has only two coals and is still not going to have enough...

Regarding happiness and health, I think it's a very problematic design that small civs have such a strong penalty on city size and development potential.

To take an example of my game, I'm in 928 AD and I have access to 11 happiness resources and 12 health resources. Most of my mature cities are around size 15-16. Now let's take a 8-cities civ which was for most of the game at the top of the tech research (not some 1-city loser civ). It has +3 base happiness and +2 base health over me from difficulty level. It has access, including with trade, to 8 health resources and 7-happiness resources (4 of which would be disabled by Taoism, thankfully it switched to free religion with help of the wonder for it). Its cities are nonetheless limited to size 12-14... Another 7-cities civ has 7 health resources and only 2-happiness resources. Taoism temples giving double the happiness helps it a little, but the civ has big problems with happiness.

If I had an equivalent difficulty level, my empire would be easily running cities size 20.

The AI is not very good at getting the full potential out of what it has, but if in addition to less cities, the individual cities are also much weaker, there is a serious balance issue, and the only thing that really slows down unbridled expansionism is num-of-cities maintenance.

I'd prefer expansionism to be slowed down by other factors than an artificial economic penalty.

Nonetheless, that's not to say I'm arguing that snowballing shouldn't be possible, or that it shouldn't happen with AI civs. I'm just arguing that small civs are too handicapped.

I will also point out that, the stronger the AI, the more it's going to snowball small advantages into big ones. In a recent change, the AI is now much more willing to cut open borders with civs that are technologically backward, so civs that fall behind are less likely to recover. Once I'm done with improved power ratings, smarter diplomacy and enhance economic management, again stronger civs will be more likely to exploit their position and become even stronger. So I don't think the fear of an endless stalemate is justified, also considering the fact that right now it's definitely not an issue either - as the 24-cities Byzantines prove in my game.

Walter: what about allowing to tie open border deals with resources and gpt? A small state with a critical resource could get a tech boost from trading away the resource.

 

[trashmunster]

If you have a resource, you can use it in all the applicable converter chains at once.

Maybe before starting a rant and demanding gamebreaking balance changes somebody should finish a game or two first, or better yet 20+ games. Otherwise it's easy to fall into false assumptions.

 

[AllTheLand]

Maybe before starting a rant and demanding gamebreaking balance changes somebody should finish a game or two first, or better yet 20+ games. Otherwise it's easy to fall into false assumptions.

Finishing 20+ games would take me approximately 200+ days, with the finishing point being "I'm completely dominating the AI in every possible way", not one of the standard victory conditions. The game isn't my life, so I'm of course going to comment on things before I have full-knowledge of every detail. Of course I'm going to say things that are wrong from time to time and someone will have to point out I'm wrong, but that's the nature of such discussions. If everyone that wrote in this thread making false assumptions about some aspects of RI was prevented from posting again, there wouldn't be anyone writing, including Walter.

I figured out that the converter buildings work in an unintuitive way (I say unintuitive, because the basic experience you get from converter buildings such as the bronze forge is that you need more resources to get more converter buildings working... Why could you use one coal twice on two different buildings but not twice on two times the same kind of buildings? It goes against natural expectations) after thinking that needing 4 coals is too crazy to not have been noticed and patched previously. My remark about how a civ without coal is dead in the industrial age stands, and all my comments about health and happiness too.

One thing I have no special comment on and I'm curious about is multiplayer. @Sinocpm said in the previous page that he's currently playing a multiplayer game with @AspiringScholar, and my question is how does it work? Is the turn-by-turn nature of the game preserved (but how do you play enough turns for the game to not last years?) or is it possible to move units at the same time (which is unfair in its own way)?

 

[trashmunster]

My remark about how a civ without coal is dead in the industrial age stands, and all my comments about health and happiness too.

Some civs have to die without player intervention, if everyone will get balanced amount of resources it will be simply boring.

As for game length, try smaller maps. I personally usually go for small size and add 3 more AI civ, that will get classic or even ancient wars happening. But less clicks and less micromanagement. (still you'll see stacks of dozens though). And that means game will be finished in 2-3 days. But that's a personal taste thing of course.