The gap between prince and king

[pennjersey83]

To the OP, I would definitely recommend going on Youtube and typing in "Let's Play Civ 5". Find a video of somebody with a good voice (not annoying) and make sure you see them put the settings on Emperor difficulty. Watch at least 2/3 of their game. This is a sure way to become pretty good. You will notice that many of the good players are perhaps more aggressive than you against the AI.

 

[sparkyal]

I've been looking for the videos but no luck so far in finding one i think would be appropriate. I see those with dual maps, but to be honest that is not really playing the game, you just attack you one enemy and you are done. Your game is totally fucused on one opponent.

I have been playing huge, king, and the second longest speed. I am looking to improve my game play. Some things I have learned so far....

1. Selling open borders and exploring everything possible is important.

2. Sign research agreements often and early.

3. Decide early if you are going tall or wide. I almost always go wide, so maybe this is where i am erring.

4. Only build Wonders that you think you need...I tend to try to build every one I can.

The only thing is that i still get killed by happiness issues after a certain point and the AI doesn't really trade lux very willingly...yeah, they will take yours but i want theirs!!

I would really like some more advice from more of the diety level players

(So for any typos...tablets are great, but they are a pain to yype on sometimes )

5.

 

[brilhasti666]

To the OP. I recently moved up from prince and found the most useful thing was to watch the lets play Rome series from MadDjinn here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/SBFMadDjinn#p/c/F4D5F1B2D3006A9F

Watch the Rome videos on the right of the screen in order closely. They improved my game hugely.

Once you've watched a few, try and emulate the game he played, Rome, Pangea but on King. Take the same policies, wonders and tech tree and you'll start to see it come together.

 

[pennjersey83]

I've been looking for the videos but no luck so far in finding one i think would be appropriate. I see those with dual maps, but to be honest that is not really playing the game, you just attack you one enemy and you are done. Your game is totally fucused on one opponent.

That's strange. I've watched dozens of videos on emperor level, standard and huge maps on YouTube.

You mentioned you want advice from deity level players but in all honesty most of the deity victories come from people who play duel pangaea maps who just want the deity victory. Emperor provides just enough challenge to make you maximize your efficiency without tweaking settings just to get the win. If you are really looking for a challenge Immortal difficulty is always an option. Deity is something that just doesn't interest me because playing a 12 players huge map on deity would be impossible.

Check YouTube again because there are plenty of emperor level videos and once you beat emperor, king will be too easy.

 

[CrazyHorseSouix]

This thread has been very informative! Personally, I can win consistently on Prince, and have about as many losses as wins on king. I'm picking up a lot of great tips from this thread. Particularly, letting go of the "illusion that the AI is beating you" was really helpful.

 

[Blanchflower]

So programmers being programmers, they respond by saying 'Meh, just give the AI moar bonuses' - because they are too lazy to program a better AI and they take shortcuts ALL THE TIME.

Well, I hope you are wrong here but if you are right, this spells big trouble for the future of gaming! I thought that as technology improves, the AI behavior would also improve?

I can't believe that programmers would take shortcuts or are too lazy to create better AI.

 

[Aristos]

not necessarily laziness...

You cannot hold the accusation of "lazyness" against someone that does not have the skills...

I think the latter is the case here.

On Topic: some have mentioned it here: do not base your learning on "phyrric victories" in "higher" levels. A higher level of difficulty is not only determined by the diff setting; quite the opposite. A deity level game manipulated to favour the human is probably easier than any of your "full" games at King or even Prince. So, as others mentioned, try to find help from those who can show you how to play a "full" game without manipulation. From those you will learn a lot about the game; from the others, you will learn a lot about "gaming" the game. Which one you want depends on you, but judging from your questions, you seem to prefer the former.

 

[binhthuy71]

Well Prince is too easy, although it could easily be much harder. For example in my Prince games I usually end up building a huge army and conquering everyone, because the AI can out-wonder and out-gold me very easily owing to its happiness cheats.

However, because maintaining a large army is so expensive, even when I raze poor cities and slap down trading posts on every inch of available land, I am still vulnerable even at the peak of my power if only the AI would GANG UP on me, i.e. pool its resources and send all its armies at once and in different directions (fronts - it could easily carve up the less well-defended parts of my empire while the main army is staking out half-way across the world).

If the AI took me in the a'ss more often, I wouldn't win all the time ... the AI already has the resources it needs at Prince to beat me, it just doesn't use them.

So programmers being programmers, they respond by saying 'Meh, just give the AI moar bonuses' - because they are too lazy to program a better AI and they take shortcuts ALL THE TIME.

I think that's a bit too critical. Consider IBM's Deep Blue. Deep Blue won a game of chess against the reigning world's champion (Gary Kasparov). On the other hand, Chess involves 32 chessmen of six different types playing on a board with 64 squares. Now consider Civilization. Civilization is played on a field with thousands of tiles. There are dozens of different unit types and their number is only limited by resources and map size. Moreover, Civ also involves borders, buildings, Zones of Control, ranged fire, Wonders, etc., etc. The requirements for an AI to effectively play Civ are orders of magnitude more demanding than those required for an AI to effectively play chess. If you didn't mind paying several thousand dollars for the game and a few tens of thousands of dollars for a computer to run it then yes, the AI could probably beat a human player without any bonuses. Until then...

 

[carbontaxes]

About the "if they just improved AI", if you are talking about AI combat, I'm thinking that this might be a classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenario. For instance, on Immortal/Deity, it is simply breathtaking sometimes the army numbers that an AI might field (I'm talking just pure roaming army). Not unusual to see 10+ units ready to do something. Now just imagine these units suddenly being used properly... you're probably just going to die. I'm talking about ranged units suddenly being used properly (esp mobile ranged like Camel Archers but really all of them), AI units actually columning properly, switching out as necessary, properly timed mass-attacks for taking cities, and so on. Even *great* players would be in a lot of trouble here.

Now you'd have to ask yourself how did the AI produce some scary armies in the 1st place- well the giant gold/science/pop/production bonus. But we're suggesting that in exchange for good combat AI, these bonuses either go away or get very toned down. So maybe it would even out. I really think that some of these AI combat improvements are actually achievable now but that's only my speculation.

--------
Back to the original question, watching players like Wainy, I get the impression that you really need to know just how much you can possibly get for any AI transaction. Apparently there are adjustable formulas that he has on paper to use in various situations for selling luxuries, open borders, strategic resources, peace treaties, etc. Being in the negative off and on for the first 100 turns should not panic you if you know the optimal trading strategies and you're using your military fairly aggressively to pillage the gold you need and/or find a favorable peace treaty.

Then there are advanced techniques like timing research agreements or calculating the timing of the conclusion of a RA with your own science plan. Planning your science route and making adjustments to that is important. Checking your military adviser before a major war decision or to check on the status of potential or current enemy is important. There's just so much more to say though.

Finally there are the "reckless techniques" that seem reckless or counter-productive but might be necessary. Like selling a city that an enemy AI is on the verge of taking from you to a different civ, selling a city you've just taken back to its original owner, ignoring a powerful AI that just DoW'ed you while your own army is entirely in a different region warring on another AI... just weird off-the-cuff things like this that you might need to do.

I think it's probably possible for most people to get "good" at this game, but realistically it's not attractive enough for the majority (including myself) to get there.

 

[Blanchflower]

not necessarily laziness...

You cannot hold the accusation of "lazyness" against someone that does not have the skills...

I think the latter is the case here.

Well, in that case, I think that humans are incredibly stupid. They can't even create an AI which is more intelligent than them..........

Look, we can't even create a processor that runs 1Thz in clock speed or increase the hard disk space to 1 Exabyte per platter. Also we can't even solve the scaling issues in SLI or Crossfire setups.

I fear for our future...........

 

[The Pilgrim]

I think that's a bit too critical. Consider IBM's Deep Blue. Deep Blue won a game of chess against the reigning world's champion (Gary Kasparov). On the other hand, Chess involves 32 chessmen of six different types playing on a board with 64 squares. Now consider Civilization. Civilization is played on a field with thousands of tiles. There are dozens of different unit types and their number is only limited by resources and map size. Moreover, Civ also involves borders, buildings, Zones of Control, ranged fire, Wonders, etc., etc. The requirements for an AI to effectively play Civ are orders of magnitude more demanding than those required for an AI to effectively play chess. If you didn't mind paying several thousand dollars for the game and a few tens of thousands of dollars for a computer to run it then yes, the AI could probably beat a human player without any bonuses. Until then...

People don't realize what AI programming means.
Deep Blue was able to calculate in average 7 moves ahead considering 32 pieces and 64 squares, and that computer was a monster. In terms of 15 years ago, but still. We're far away from having a computer that can search a game tree in significant depth in such complicated environment like Civ. Not to mention nobody will ever spend hundreds of millions or even milliards of dollars to build one. And people don't want 7 moves, they want 350 moves! Not gonna happen. Not in our lifetime anyway. Therefore AI will never be good. All devs can do is to find all sorts of tricks and shortcuts to cover its flaws and to make it look no so bad, while it is and always will be. Gladly, there are plenty of those tricks. Forums are full of good ideas and suggestions. Some of them are definitely usable and easy enough to execute.