Tips to win at Prince with Better AI Mod?

[AFS]

Hello everyone.

I moved from Warlord to Prince in a couple of months. Good times, indeed. Then I moved up to Monarch, and after a few tries I won (it was a small map, though). So I started to use the Better AI Mod since I heard good things about it, and now I barely survive playing at Prince

It's frustrating, now I don't enjoy the game at all. I need tips, guys.

I play BTS, on Huge (or Standard) sized maps, every setting by default, but with Random Personalities. Also I use a random leader, and most of the time I play on Fractal.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems that the barbarians are more agresive and advanced. Now it's pretty common to encounter Spearmen when I still have Warriors. And also several times I encounter barbarian stacks early near my cities (small ones, like 3 units, but dangerous nevertheless).

Oh, and now I have terrible luck: horrible starting positions, I get bad random events, and a lot of times my archers, who are in a hill with a forest, gets killed by animals, or losing battles with 90%+ odds. Arrrggh, this game hates me.

Any tips?

(I'll add more info later. I don't want to write a wall of text... yet)

Thanks!

 

[Aristos]

First, take it easy. Be happy that you have an engine that gives you a real challenge (as compared to civ0.5, for example). The guys at BetterAI have done a wonderful job! And believe me, it has nothing like cheating, it's just pure better coding, so enjoy it.

My first recomendation would be: get the combo called Better BUG AI by Fuyu, it merges the latest BetterAI with the best mod that does not alter gameplay (thus the BUG name), but presents all information in a clear and better way. THIS is the key for playing, for when you climb the ladder against the BetterAI, you need to really use all the info you have at hands to optimize your decisions.

Get that gem first, then we can talk more. Many here will help you.

enjoy,

rjg

 

[God-Emperor]

The BBAI AIs are, not to surprisingly, better. Because of this they tend to advance in techs a little faster, so that drives the barbarians to advance a little faster. So it sounds like you are just not keeping up in tech with the majority of the AIs.

On larger maps you will get more barbarians from time to time, and they will be present longer too since it takes longer to settle the territory and squeeze them out of having any place to spawn. With more civilizations too the average number of barbarians per civ may be about the same, but random variations can get gruesome. Example: on a smaller map with say 6 civs you might, at some point, have 4 barbs per civ for a total of 24. In addition to the 4 that are your "fair share" you might randomly get the bad luck of, say, 20% of the ones the other civs would normally be dealing with which is an extra 4 for 8 in your general area. Now imagine the same situation on a larger map with 16 civs at 4 barbs per civ: the total is now 64 barbs so if you got the same 20% of the other civ's barbs in your general vicinity it would now amount to an extra 12 for a total of 16. Sounds like trouble - much worse than the 8 that you end up with in your vicinity from the same amount of random variation on the smaller map. Also, if you are near a large open expanse on that nice big map you can expect a lot of barbarians to head your way from time to time. It's even worse of someone else near that open area builds the great wall and all the barbs get fewer choices about who to attack.

Since the AI is better, it doesn't need as much free stuff to do as well as it used to. All the difficulty levels above Noble do is give the AI civs more free stuff - x% more research, y% more production in each city, and so on. It doesn't make them smarter. BBAI makes them smarter, but they are still equally smart on all levels from Noble on up (below noble, the game gives the AI penalties in the areas it gets bonuses when above that level and apparently also adjusts some other things like turning their levels of aggression and desire to expand territory down some, which effectively makes it a bit dumber).

Anyhow, since the AI is smarter, the difficulty level is harder. If you can barely win at some difficulty level without it, it will tend to stomp all over you at the same difficulty level with it. It is at least half a difficulty level harder.

You need to be more careful with what you are doing - there is less room for mistakes. There are many strategy guides, but mainly you need to make sure your economy is doing well enough while you are expanding enough. To do that you may need to adjust what techs you are aiming for - the economic ones are pretty important if you want to keep up (Code of Laws for courthouses, Currency for extra trade routes and other stuff, targeting the techs that match your available resources, Pottery for cottages, writing for libraries and scientist specialists, etc.).

Bad luck is not related. I too have gone through stretches where it was so bad I had to abandon what initially seemed like good starting positions (your first settler is killed by a lion even though it was escorted by a warrior with combat I while on a hill, then some too-close-as-it-turns-out neighbor declares war and shows up with 2 warriors, an archer, and 3 chariots while you are about to finish the replacement settler and your army consists of 3 warriors, including the one that is supposed to escort your settler to the location where you'll be able to get copper, and a scout who is 40 tiles away, for example), or started in really bad places (good luck in that location where you have an area of something like 5 grassland and 7 plains with one crab, one sheep, and no copper or horses all surrounded by ice and tundra everywhere else on your peninsula - and Shaka is on the continent full of good territory with his capital just a couple tiles down the coast from where your 3-4 tile wide 15 tile long icy cold peninsula joins the continent; in cases like that I don't bother spending the time to find out if there is any iron nearby).

Oh, and I agree with ricardojahns that Fuyu's Better BUG AI is a good choice. (It is, of course, slightly smarter than the regular BBAI since he's tweaked it a bit and fixed an issue or two.)

 

[AFS]

First, take it easy. Be happy that you have an engine that gives you a real challenge (as compared to civ0.5, for example). The guys at BetterAI have done a wonderful job! And believe me, it has nothing like cheating, it's just pure better coding, so enjoy it.

Oh, yeah, they did a pretty good job indeed. Civ 5 is a piece of cake in comparison. I'm just a little frustrated, that's all.

About de Bug Mod, probably I'll try that but personally I don't like it. It's awesome, yes, but having much more stuff on the screen feels overwhelming. Also my monitor can't support high resolutions, so the interface eats like half of the screen. With BUG it eats even more.

I don't mind passsing through a few more screens to get the info I need. I'll give the mod a shot someday, though.

(your first settler is killed by a lion even though it was escorted by a warrior with combat I while on a hill, then some too-close-as-it-turns-out neighbor declares war and shows up with 2 warriors, an archer, and 3 chariots while you are about to finish the replacement settler and your army consists of 3 warriors, including the one that is supposed to escort your settler to the location where you'll be able to get copper, and a scout who is 40 tiles away, for example)

Funny, that exact thing happened to me the other day xD

Thanks for the rest of the tips; surely with the mod there's less room for mistakes.

I'm a hard-head, though, so I refuse to lower the difficulty to Noble .

My problem is the military-economic balance. With more than 4 cities my economy starts to suffer, while the AI can have like 8+ cities without a problem. It's tempting to just pop settlers and grab all the land as soon as possible (and solve the barbarian problem as well), but the economic hit is way too much. So I just stay with 4 or 5 cities in the beginning, but of all of them, only my capital is productive enough to build military, but I use that city to build settlers quickly. ¿The result? I get overwhelmed, either from barbarians or from my opportunistic neighbour.

Also, now I find extremely hard the get Copper or Iron. Most of the time I get horses, though, but the barbarians seems to LOVE spearmen.

Oh, well...

Thanks to both of you.