Sulla's first Civ V walkthrough

Anyone remember the CivIII star who wrote a walkthrough similar (and similarly critical) to Sulla's Civ5 walkthrough for CivIV back when it first came out?

Does anyone have the Stories and Tales archives from those days?

 

I can't say I know who you're talking about or what specific thread(s), but the Civ III and IV Stories and Tales sections still exist, just go to the main forum link and then to those forums and do a search or browse through them.

 

If that's true (that the AI's will pick on you-but not other AI's) then it really is just Civ2 all over again. That's definitely something I *don't* want-& something I hope they fix *very* quickly!

Aussie.

 

The whole point, though, is it seems like they're going after the player rather than other AI civs. Sorry, but this proves that making the AI "cut-throat" was *not* the way to go. I said, again & again, that a happiness-based system of player/AI constraint would have worked much better. How can you ROLE-PLAY if the AI is always just playing to win?!?!

 

Have we considered the possibility that the act of eliminating a player is what sets the AIs off? In your Egypt game, did any of the AIs take out another civ completely, or just take cities?

 

No, the AI has no problem going after other AI. My intuition tells me that coattail riding may be the way to take advantage of the snowball AI, and that bribing military city states instead of maritime ones may be mandatory to keep up. Just a guess.

Agreed that happiness would have made a more useful AI constraint than whatever it was they chose (see Sulla's game for evidence that they didn't choose that), if any.

 

No, I think they got rid of the old ones that haven't been active.

 

I never was fond of MP Civ because rush attacks and warfare are, well, optimal. I prefer empire-building. So a game system that forces me to warmonger is definitely sub-optimal, and one that doesn't do so well is tragic.

 

How is it that this Sulla fella wasn't involved in Civ 5 at all? (as I understand it he was involved in Civ 4?)

I mean, if half the issues that were picked up on in Sulla's two articles where addressed, then these forums would not full of so much rage right now.

 

I experienced some of the bad AI logic that Sulla mentioned in his review. I was playing Rome on Warlord difficulty and I was in a war with the French. After I captured a small outlying city on the fringe of their empire, the French sued for peace offering up half of their empire's cities, all of their gold, gold per turn, and half a dozen resources. I was not significantly ahead of the French either. This just doesn't add up.

 

I was playing on King difficulty (not that it matters) and I was doing well on my side of the continent with lots of space around me (since I killed off the other civs).

One of the civs (whom I was sharing open borders with) from the other side of the continent sends a huge army over to my side without declaring any hostilities. I was curious (and bored with building) so I let him just walk into my lands. I should add that this particular civ was getting some pretty nice resources in trade from me and I had supported him against Rome, the second most dominant power (I was the first).

Brilliantly, the A.I. declared war on me. I say brilliantly, because, although obviously done, it was nice to see the A.I. do something underhanded and (somewhat) sneaky.

He had my capital (Berlin) right in his sights, and I had very few soldiers anywhere close.

What does he do next? He walks right by cities while I take potshots from my cities and archers. I bought a few longswords to harass him as well.

The A.I. had me by the nuts, and he wasted the opportunity completely. I think he was intently targeting a city of mine closer to his own civ.

 

Another walkthrough:
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/immortalegypt.html

Learned quite a bit reading it!

 

The most absurd example I have found for this is money. The AI trades 300 gold for a lux. If you ask for 10 gpt instead, it wants an additional 15g. Bernanke has finally succeeded in pushing interest rates below zero!

However, I'm confident that they will fix this kind of thing. IIRC, your problem existed with CIV III. Unfortunately, there are more fundamental issues.

 

I've found if you don't expand into their faces and don't declare war the AI will leave you alone even if your army is pretty small. (small sample size obv)

To win at the higher levels on civ4 you need to abuse the AI in osme way I don't think civ5 is really that different.

 

I definitely think part of the weird jerkiness of the difficulty is the lack of being able to do effective diplomacy. In 4, you could make overtures and do things to keep the AI from attacking you, by dealing with them diplomatically. Sometimes keeping them from DoWing when you need some breather. Not only that, but the indicators that they might want war were more noticeable. Bad relations, lots of troops, refusing to deal with you. Being their 'worst enemy'.

All this is gone now, so it feels like each AI is a black box. A stupid stupid black box. They get inSANE boosts on the top 2 difficulties to make up for it, but it feels more like... I dunno, tower defense than a war game at that point.

Here's comes wave 1, Egyptian archers!
Wave 2, Siamese Elephants!
Wave 3, French Musketeers!

 

Here I quote Shafer's words on this, from Podcast 14:

One thing that we wanted to make sure we didn't do is if an AI sees that you are getting closer to winning or that you are really strong, they're not all just going to gang up on you and start fighting you and try to kill you just because you're getting close to winning because that's something that we didn't feel was really a lot of fun. Some of the earlier Civ games have had that feature and it's not one of the more popular ones so we wanted to make sure we didn't have that. That being said, if you're going for a militaristic game and you're attacking a lot of players, you're conquering city-states – that is kind of where we take that away and then we say, “alright this guy is a threat not only to winning the game but killing me. I might want to do something about this.” And that's particularly true with the city-states where as you start attacking more and more of them they'll start to band together and fight you and if you take a city-state somebody's allied or friends with then they're much more likely to attack you and be angry with you, so you kind of have to manage how that goes. They do try to pay attention, they do adapt, but we try to be mindful making sure the game is fun and not exactly cutthroat. This is exactly like multiplayer. So we're trying to strike a balance there.

 

So Shafer coded the CS Ai to be suicidal ( attacking someone that is conquering left to right when you have only one city... ).

The worst is that most likely the real civs are following the same code ... and thus making the exact same decisions.

 

OK. Maybe it is of not much sense, I don't know, I have to think about it...
er, how would you code it?

 

I already made a post regarding some changes I would do in that section in the strats and tips forum ... here. Basically my opinion revolves around the fact that any player, human or AI, has 2 objectives in a game like civ: to survive and to win. And IMHO to survive is far more important, even if because you can't win if you are dead With CS, that have no way to win, their major objective should be to survive ... and launching a crusade vs someone bigger without thinking very well on the feasability of the project is simply stupid.