I used to play with an empty New World, but not anymore. I had hoped that smaller, more advanced civilizations would colonize it—like in real history—but in practice, it’s usually the already massive empires that end up colonizing it as well, growing even more dominant.
To me, an empty New World is a degree of reassurance I can find more resources later in game without necessarily going to war. I like it for this reason, if nothing else.
BTW where does the Russian confederate flag come from? The one with the bear doing a salute... it's pretty cute
but also pretty badass looking
No specific historical reason, though Yaroslavl is a rather ancient town, but all in all simply representative of the "core" Russian principalities. It just felt aesthetically appropriate; I saw the flag and thought "this might work for a loose confederation of Russian principalities".
This discussion about paths/roads takes special consideration in my game because of how many trees are in the surroundings, building a path takes me like 20-30 turns in those tundras, much more a road, and I gotta build like 7 of those damned things! I got 4 cities (yeah I spammed those settlers lol) and one of them is still not connected to the others so that's a big pain in the ass because I got that one in the only coast I could safely reach, given the available resources (seriously as a kid I loved to settle my civs in tundras but now they all seem like deserts with trees to me), yet it's very far away to the north.
As they say, "there are no roads in Russia, just directions"... Russian NI was specifically designed to keep the territory forested and proper roads painful.
1) Lack of siege equipment. AI insists on using one siege engine in its invasions. This leads to horrible sieges where the AI often doesn't have the patience to whittle the walls down to 0 percent. This issue becomes very problematic with walls and doubly so with castles. Could this be due to the logistics system. The AI aims to not go above a certain lvl logistics so tries to "max" the armies potential of stacking it with non siege equipment? For assaulting cities, the AI needs to have a bare minimum of two siege equipment per army. For larger armies, at least 3. This will get worse with bombards, as my armies will be able to bombard their troops to maximum effect while they offer little counter fire.
I'll look into it.
2) Faraway wars-I saw on a changelog that fixes were made to reduce this but it still sadly occurs in at least Triassic.
I'm not sure there's much to be done there. There isn't really a specific distance consideration that I'm aware of, just "my area"/"not my area", and in case of the biggest maps it begins to break down obviously, as "my area" is the whole of Eurasia (or rather the whole of Old World). Just one more reason to hate the World Maps for me...
3) Bonus Sadness-Naval invasions
I doubt I'll do anything about that one.
This is really interesting! Never thought of it like that before in such concrete terms. If you were to ask me does California extract Midwest, I would say no, but this spells it out pretty well. Though, California's wealth is built on big tech, so technically it plunders the poor regions of the globe for rare earth minerals but I get your point.
Well, to be completely fair, it probably does extract talent, since it provides more opportunities for both education and work, but it's still obviously nowhere comparable to a direct extractive imperialist economy.
My main gripe with it is that AI chooses to build road when a cart path makes more sense. Good example is if a resource is out of the way and not leading to anywhere where your armies need to travel. So, it wastes time constructing roads to an isolated resource when it could have just built a cart path. Not sure if this can be fixed as this requires more spatial and general reasoning?
I am not quite sure a cart path makes that much more sense. Having easy access to a tile might be crucial at wartime (or in a barbarian incursion). But all in all, I believe currently AI simply builds the best route type available to it. It isn't all that hard to change, but I am not sure if it makes enough difference to merit implementing.
Right. I'm a bit tired of having eastern asia or north europe asking me for military help, then hitting me with diplomacy malus for refusing.
"No, I can't invade Ireland right now, nor can I send an army to Korea. I'm a bit busy with, you know, MY NEIGHBOR !"
I'll take a look into the calling into wars at some point. Probably. Not something I'm terribly excited to do.
Is it wasted, truely ? Every AI around me seems to LOVES slavery, and also seems to keep their slaves around (instead of killing them for production boost on building).
That's sad to hear, as I thought I already taught AI to use slaves to rush buildings.
This is just a brainstorm — just getting ideas out and seeing what you all think. I think there's a lot of potential for AI tuning too: the AI should be smart enough to avoid these buildings when it's playing wide, and only prioritize them when it's got a small, dense empire or a super-developed capital.
Would love to hear thoughts! Balancing ideas, name suggestions, better real-world wonder fits.
I won't go into the details of your table, but I'll provide my general take.
Firstly, I want to distinguish between "soft-tall" and "hard-tall"; basically, "playing tall" is not a singular style - it ranges from never expanding to deliberately expanding slower than your neighbours. Basically, a "hard-tall" play would be just sticking to your initial city, whereas a "soft-tall" might be having 6 cities when your neighbour has 12.
With this in mind, I feel RI is already quite rewarding to soft-tall playstyles, as a reasonably tall civ can easily be more effective than a wider empire. There are several diminishing returns mechanisms in place that limit additive benefits of unlimited expansion, and there are also many more buildings that exist in limited numbers and wonders that benefit a single city than in vanilla (and you will be glad to know that there are at least two more wonders and one more mechanic lined up for implementation that are vastly more beneficial to smaller empires).
Conversely, "hard-tall" in my opinion is not and should not be viable in Civ 4 unless a lot of basic design decisions are ripped up and reimplemented differently. Ultimately, one of the pillars of Civ 4 is territorial control. Resource-based gameplay all but guarantees that one city (or a very small number of cities) cannot possibly have enough resources to develop properly, unless provided with all sorts of crutches. While some such "crutches" already exist (such as wonders providing certain key resources to those who can't source them on map), ultimately this is simply something that Civ 4 isn't designed to do, and artificially ensuring the viability of single-city or miniature civs feels exactly that - artificial.
And appealing to small yet successful countries is not really productive - a civilisation isn't a country, even if one can be misled by the usage of country names and flags in-game. "Singapore" is not a civilisation; it's at best a part of Austronesian civilisation. A civilisation can be a singular political entity (USA, or Carthage) but can also be represented by hundreds of independent entities (Holy Roman Empire or historical India).
This is just an interesting tidbit I came across, but perhaps Walter or others would value the knowledge: when you save the game, the Field of View value you have at the point of the save becomes a multiplier for the size of resource icons upon reloading. At 100, they appear very large and carpet the planet if you zoom out entirely, while saving at 1 results in them becoming very tiny. Also, the range of your zoom seems to be modified by this as well, with 100 resulting in a chandelier shaped planet that occupies only the very center of the screen and 1 causing the terrain to wrap but without fully containing the image of the planet on-screen.
It's kind of how it's supposed to work - it uses FoV as a proxy of resolution to evaluate the needed size. The way f1rpo coded it, it can use two methods, FoV or resolution itself, and he allowed changing between them in BUG settings. I wasn't brave enough to mess with BUG stuff (I generally don't unless I absolutely have to), so both options are theoretically there, but it hard-defaults to the FoV one. I feel out of the two it is the better one, as it allows a degree of control of how big you want them. To me, it produces better results at FoV settings I usually use.
I love world maps, specially the Huge. What is it that you guys don't like about them?
I'm sure the AI knows well how to use them, because players with slavery seem to be pretty high in the scoreboard in the early phases (that might have more to do with researching the tech associated with it but... whatever)
