Specifically, I was wondering which custom game options you guys use (e.g. No Vassals)? Fr1po especially I would love to know, but really everyone is very welcome to answer; the more the better!
The reason I originally asked this was that with 'No Vassals' enabled, the AI often leaves a near-dead rival with 1-3 cities before making peace. I have been wondering if that is a part of the UWAI, and to do with vassals being turned off. Which got me thinking, is this mod intended to be played with vassals on or off? And I figure I might as well find out the general idea behind which settings this mod was designed around.
To make a long story short, I'm attaching a screenshot of my most commonly used configuration.
No Vassals:
Spoiler:
I never play without vassals. For the sake of testing, I err on the side of enabling options that make the game more complex, but I also prefer playing with vassals because the possibility of having to conquer and manage fewer cities is worth a lot to me. Vassals should also help AI leaders with warlike personalities, which tend to underperform overall. I occasionally test every option on AI Auto Play, but I don't pay close attention to those games, it's mostly to check if anything is broken.
The AI sparing the last couple of cities sounds like a result of UWAI comparing the gains of continuing the war – which are small when putting the remaining enemy cities relation to the current cities of the conqueror – with the cost of keeping a wartime economy going for another 15 or 20 turns. I thought that I had already addressed this problem by letting UWAI assume that no wartime buildup will occur when an enemy is a pushover. Maybe my "pushover" check is too narrow. Ideally, this would be more nuanced, i.e. the economic side of the AI (e.g. city production, civics) would gradually shift its focus away from the war as the opposition dwindles, and UWAI would predict the buildup and other economic effects accordingly ... All this being said, I do think that leaving a civ alive can be the right choice when there are still a decent number of defensive units for a last stand.
Other options: I've been trying to keep every option in working order, especially the defaults (all boxes unchecked) and those non-defaults that I assume to be widely used.
The Random Events option is enabled by default and it seems that a majority of AdvCiv players keep it enabled, but I really think the events (and I guess even the system that fires them) are pretty bad in their current state and would be a ton of work to improve significantly. I do play with events occasionally for testing purposes.
Even when I don't enable the No Slavery option, I'll normally not use Slavery at all. Too fiddly and bizarre. I'd like a different mechanism for converting food into production best, but so long as that isn't implemented, disabling or not using Slavery is still the least bad option for me. Fortunately, a fair number of play reports featuring habitual use of Slavery have been posted, so I don't feel obligated to keep testing Slavery myself.
I've come to think that Choose Religions might be a slight improvement over, uh, letting the game assign the religions.
"Choose Religions" might help the AI insofar that it stops religious leaders with a Medieval favorite religion from beelining to Theology or Divine Right.
So I guess I'll be playing with that option half of the time or so.
I think Tribal Villages are balanced enough now that they can only grant progress toward a tech, and I like how they can shake up early-game strategies a bit (albeit rarely). Also, the free Scout from Hunting is closer to having the right power level with Tribal Villages than without.
Tech trading is very overpowered – and in a pervasive way –, but having to research every tech myself is even worse; also seems even more egregiously unrealistic than tech trades. Not to mention the impact on diplomacy. I don't really think "No Brokering" helps anything or strikes any compromise.
Permanent Alliances: I find the AI conditions for agreeing to an alliance quite artificial, and it's awkward that two players are allowed to win the game (both fully? each half a victor?). Unlikely to come up even if I were to enable alliances for testing purpose, so I don't bother. (For AI Auto Play testing, I have some special code that makes the AI agree more readily to an alliance.)
Then there are the two options I've added (never mind "No Animals" – maybe I shouldn't have bothered to add that). I still use Start Points as Handicap sometimes to fine-tune the difficulty level, but it's a little tedious to figure out what the proper number of points should be. R&F is more like a game mode. I play that sometimes because I enjoy it (though I've rarely ever finished a whole game), and it's also a way of testing map scripts that are too unbalanced for regular games and world sizes larger than I would normally want to use and a lower difficulty level than I would normally use.
(When I write that I play certain settings "sometimes," that's a bit misleading because I really don't play many games.)
I normally play with all the options unchecked, except that I turn Choose Religions on. I didn't even know that it was an option until last summer when I watched Sullla's AI Survivor series, and some of the games had Choose Religions on. Now I use the option most of the time. It's fun to actually see Islam and Christianity for once (have you ever once clicked the button to build the Islamic Shrine?) and I think it adds more variety to the game.
I normally play with the usual settings of Normal speed, Temperate climate, etc.
Other than that, I play with Tribal Villages on and Random Events on. I know that many players consider it standard to turn both of them off, but I actually enjoy the variety that these options add. It's frustrating having a Hurricane come and destroy a Courthouse in a faraway low- city, but I think some of the other events are kinda amusing The only event that I hate is the Vedic Aryans barbarian invasion, though I thankfully haven't had that one happen in a long time. I'm not beyond going into WorldBuilder and deleting the Vedic Aryans if I feel like they're going to ruin the game.
I've never played with Permanent Alliances enabled before. I was thinking about giving it a try, seeing as how I've always seen in the Technology tree that Communism and Fascism allow them... but after looking around, I found that most people find the mechanic to be pretty bad, since your research rate ends up halved.
I haven't really tried many other game modes or scenarios yet. There are still some leaders which I have never played yet, and there are many strategies that I'd like to try using first.
It's frustrating having a Hurricane come and destroy a Courthouse in a faraway low- city, but I think some of the other events are kinda amusing The only event that I hate is the Vedic Aryans barbarian invasion, though I thankfully haven't had that one happen in a long time. I'm not beyond going into WorldBuilder and deleting the Vedic Aryans if I feel like they're going to ruin the game.
Yes, Hurricane is one of the worst. Vedic Aryans: v0.99 will include a small balance change adopted from the BUFFY mod, which requires at least one civ to know Priesthood before that event can trigger. The current requirement is Polytheism.
I've never played with Permanent Alliances enabled before. I was thinking about giving it a try, seeing as how I've always seen in the Technology tree that Communism and Fascism allow them... but after looking around, I found that most people find the mechanic to be pretty bad, since your research rate ends up halved.
been playing some advc...(mostly loosing shamefully...)
random events - never: i think its too chaotic and can impair AI. i prefer less random stuff. also, i dont know if events are stable enough for MP games.
choose religions - i never played with it. but the discussion here makes me wonder about it. also - i prefer historical path.
random seed
no barbs
no tech trade
with tech brokering
tech diffusion (made it into a game option in my mod, in advc its via xml)
no city flipping after conq
no vassal - i always found that to hard to tackle ai and its masters together
no animals
no slavery
archipelago
epic speed
small map
low land
tropical
Do you think choose religions is more or less historical? I am always put off by the inevitable Hindu or Buddhist Isabella and it feels more accurate if she can at least pick Christianity.
Thanks guys, this was very helpful. What difficulty do you all normally play on? I've been finding it very hard to get used to the Emperor changes to costs, but Monarch is way too easy. I feel I'm in some kind of limbo.
v0.99 will decrease the human handicap for building production on Emperor and above – because, unlike units, many buildings have a pretty limited potential for rewarding skillful play.
Are you saying that the jump to Emperor is too big, or are the increased costs just annoying? I didn't expect that to bother players much because costs were already dependent on game speed. It's a bit like shifting from Normal speed toward Epic as one advances from Monarch toward Deity. (But since each level requires greater efficiency of play, the pace of the game should pretty much remain constant.)
You could try Monarch with the Start-Points-as-Handicap option, but, if it's "way too easy," then Emperor should be the way forward.
I've been trying my hand at Immortal lately. Got a reasonably large continent with just me (Charlemagne) and Isabella. No Copper for me, and Horse and Iron difficult to access. Without using Slavery (No Slavery option), it seems outright impossible to deter Isabella long enough to reach Friendly attitude. Building some extra Archers (beyond what's needed against the Barbarians) early on at least delays the inevitable. (Though only after fixing an oversight that had made the AI very eager to rush with Archers on Immortal and Deity.) After several restarts, I've gotten to turn 150 and might still have a chance to win – but it would seem like a long shot through some sort of nuclear cheesiness; screenshot attached.
I'll have to try some easier starts on Immortal. My tentative impression is that Immortal is too big a jump in a mod that already makes Emperor fairly challenging.
In single player, I always play events on, everything else default, standard sized bigs & smalls map. Emperor difficulty provides a good challenge.
In multiplayer we play 3v3v3v3v3v3 on the same settings but huge map. Emperor is too easy and immortal a bit too hard, so we manually tweak the difficulty to be essentially around 3/4 of the way to immortal. Same penalties on the human players as on immortals, AI gets half of its immortal bonuses, and barbs just emperor level. Immortal level barbs are a bit ridiculous imo. Agree the jump between emperor and immortal in this mod is brutal.
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city, but I think some of the other events are kinda amusing 
The only event that I hate is the Vedic Aryans barbarian invasion, though I thankfully haven't had that one happen in a long time. I'm not beyond going into WorldBuilder and deleting the Vedic Aryans if I feel like they're going to ruin the game.
