The Romans (Industrious-Deity series)

[DanF5771]

Anyhow, Dan one thing I keep putting off is checking into the Refusal-to-Trade. We should find a better acronym than RTT to prevent confusion. It seems to generally take much longer than 10 turns after canceling deals, and I suspect it may have to do with leaders and other issues, but I am not sure.

Or maybe, the tables are the exact same as the original RTT?

I guess by the "original RTT" you mean the Refuse-To-Talk duration after a DoW which is determined by totally different mechanics than the respective duration after cancelling trades.

Demands to join a war vs. an AI which is pleased with you can somewhat be avoided by quickly asking the victim for a bit of to get a 10-turn peace treaty.

More exploits: AIs can be prevented from switching into the wrong civics by asking them to do a civic switch in a different civic category for the appropriate amount of / a tech before they do the unfavourable switch (if timed right IMO it's easier than flipping with spies). Of course the "That would go against everything..."-bug will screw you here if you don't have the unofficial patch...

Also Defensive Pacts can be included into sophisticated diplo triangulation (requires a lot of calculation).

TMIT is right, in 3.17 passive boat cargo spies never get caught, but don't accumulate stationary-spy-modifiers because they are not fortified. AFAIK this issue hasn't been touched in the unofficial patches.
If preventing spies from getting caught is critical (=maximizing the mission's chance of success) but timing is not *that* crucial, then it is best to have only 1 Spy fortified for at least 1 turn perform the mission without any other Spies in the plot (move the boat out of the city)! And of course Security Bureaus should be targeted first.

Now the really confusing stuff: In contrast to the team-attitude level which is relevant for DoW decisions and tech trades, there is no averaging of attitude levels or attitude values for players who are part of a master/vassal-relationship when it comes to voting for the diplomatic victory! Remember, vassals remain their own team after capitulation and do not join the master's team (AFAIK such melting of teams only happens by forming a permanent alliance). So assuming a regular game where 1 team always consists of exactly 1 player, each player votes according to his true attitude value towards the candidates and the critical threshold here is +8 to get a player from abstaining to voting for you. Thus Gilgamesh voted for you while at pleased - his vassal Brennus didn't influence his vote at all (Joshua got it right). Vassal status is only relevant if one of the candidates is a master, then his vassals are forced to vote for him. With teams > 1 player the attitude values will be averaged.

 

[obsolete]

Dan, thanks for that trading post!

Now I know why it was acting random, and why if you are LUCKY you can get trade after 10 turns or so, and other times... you have to wait two or three thousand years!

As TheMeInTeam pointed out, the fact it doesn't scale on speed is absolutely broken. A newb on Marathon suffers almost no penalty at all, while a standard player can get quite crippled.

A rushed algorithm without much thought behind it, or do you think there was another problem as to why they didn't fix that?

 

[DanF5771]

IMO Firaxis has really done a thorough job to handle different map sizes but a lot of crucial core game mechanics don't adjust to different game speeds at all. I'm not too familiar with previous versions of civ and their concepts of game speed but I guess the added extra speeds we have in BTS now were somewhat rushed and there was indeed only time to implement the proper scaling for the most critical parts to prevent blatant bugs.

The original game rules were of course designed to balance the game at normal speed, IMO epic works ok but quick and marathon are clearly broken. Let's wait for Civ 5...

 

[Gliese 581]

IMO Firaxis has really done a thorough job to handle different map sizes but a lot of crucial core game mechanics don't adjust to different game speeds at all. I'm not too familiar with previous versions of civ and their concepts of game speed but I guess the added extra speeds we have in BTS now were somewhat rushed and there was indeed only time to implement the proper scaling for the most critical parts to prevent blatant bugs.

The original game rules were of course designed to balance the game at normal speed, IMO epic works ok but quick and marathon are clearly broken. Let's wait for Civ 5...

The problem is Firaxis is just really bad at fixing and supporting their games after release. Look at col2, what a joke, totally unplayable.

 

[obsolete]

Now that I think about it, some culture things like that 10% revolt per turn chance also must be severely over-powered at marathon.

Anyhow... some final data.

Spoiler :

 

[SnowlyWhite]

The problem is Firaxis is just really bad at fixing and supporting their games after release. Look at col2, what a joke, totally unplayable.

even the spy on boat accumulating 50% discount in 5 turns was fixed in 3.17(a detail afterall)... Honestly, it's by far one of the best supported games I ever played(and I'm playing since ~1990...). I saw higher number of patches on other games, but usually games shipped in an unplayable shape from the start(thankfully not the case here). I don't have any unofficial patches, so I'm talking about the game with the original patches only.

And I don't find speed issues bugs. Frankly, what screws me most and makes up, by far, for the highest # of losses on deity for me is the cheaper unit cost on marathon which make various warmongers trump me badly in ancient. For whatever reason, they just decided to make units 33% cheaper; but it's obviously not a bug, but an arbitrary decision. Poorly thought imho, but still, not a technical bug.
Another reason why I have problems on slow speed is borders popping slow enough that it allows AI settlers to slip before a blocking is achieved. But while thinking about it in my spare time, I couldn't come up with a reasonable way to avoid it from a programming POV.

And frankly what made me buy multiple copies of their product to support them is the AI, which, while pretty totally dumb from a human POV, it's by far the best AI I found so far - quite a vital feature when you play SP mostly(GalCiv 2 has a pretty good AI too, but that's about the only exception between TBS games which generally don't have any AI at all - play HoM5 if you want to see a truly dumb AI).

Don't get me wrong - from a perfect world POV the game is crap, but from the reality of what's released on the market, the fact we're talking about a game launched 5 years ago(or more?) means we don't have many alternatives That being said, I didn't buy Col 2 since everyone said it's junk...