What difficulty do you suggest for me to play?

[God-Emperor]

RoM:AND includes Better BTS AI.
And about a billion other things.

 

[bestrfcplayer]

Noble??????????

 

[mariogreymist]

It really depends on how good you generally are at 4x/resource management games. If you just thought "what the hell is a 4x/resource management game" then you should start at or below Noble. If you're good at these kinds of games, then prince is probably where to start, but the warrior rush makes it easy once you learn how to manage a post-rush economy. If you're really good at these kinds of games, and brave as hell, try monarch.

Some of this is speed dependent too. Playing a marathon/monarch game is as easy as a standard/prince game. If you like to make a lot of war, slower speeds help, and the AI bonuses don't get silly enough to make the AI's really nasty until you hit emperor and above.

 

[Czacki]

I've played a bit RoM. It's really a huge mod. Disabled the revolution component though, I'm not really a fan of the features that are more of a nuisance than fun

 

[confused713]

I play Noble, it's a level A.I. doesn't get any help and for me it gives plenty of challenge, sometimes I go for Prince but it hasn't gone well for me..

If I try something totally new and try to learn I have no problem choosing Chieftain level as it's more forgiving for the human player.

My playstyle is also kind of enjoying the ride and getting the full immersion of creating a history with it's events and triumphs(something Civ V doesn't give to me sadly) so I'm not really a "high score" type of player who tries to get to Immortal asap.

I'd recommend Noble for you, and if it starts feeling too easy try Prince.

Wow just the person I need for my problem. I have not played at the noble level and so set up a world with 5 players including me. Made it huge. No problem so far. And in the choice column I left he "raging barbarians" unchecked. I choose to play as Washington. The victory conditions is set at TIME only.

I thought this would be the easiest. Well, before I even reach the Classical Era I am being overwhelmed by barbarians. Not just one or two at a time but 4 or 5 and they are ahead of me technologically.

Is this normal or am I doing something wrong? Can you (or anyone reading this) help?

I am an old geezer and am not very good at deducing things like this. We didn't have great games like this when I was growing up

Thanks ahead of time.

 

[God-Emperor]

Reducing the number of civilizations on a map increases the number of barbarians (slightly at first, more later since the fewer civs generally don't fill the map anywhere near as fast). There is a target number for the barbarians that is proportional to the number of unowned tiles. Fewer civs = more unowned tiles. It also gives them fewer civs to attack. So instead of perhaps 52 barbs (a made up number) attacking 10 civs (or whatever), you've got 55 barbs attacking 5 civs - in this example that means that instead of 5.2 per civ you've got 11 per civ.

If the barbs are ahead of you in tech, that means most (or all) of the AI civs are too. The barb tech increases in a way that depends on the overall tech of the civs (I don't know exactly how - it's probably something like they get a tech after 75% of the civs have it, or something along those lines). You should keep in mind, however, that it could just mean they have access to resources that you don't (copper/iron/horses) allowing them to build better units without actually being ahead in tech. This is only the case if you have the tech to build these units too, but not the resources.

 

[confused713]

I appreciate the info from you two. I will increase the number of ai players and see if that helps (as I am sure it will).

Thanks muchly

Jim

 

[Czacki]

Build great wall if you're playing a big map with few AI players

 

[Czacki]

Actually...RoM: AnD is easy. Much easier than vanilla game

 

[AdMech]

Unfortunately, I don't know the mod. That said:

1. You can keep up with the AI on Immortal with entirely fair/natural play and surpass them reasonably quickly unless they got a much better start.

Can you expand on this a little? What do you mean by entirely natural play, for instance? To hear someone say this about Immortal is pretty interesting. I play on Noble, and even so I find myself computing hammers and overflow from whipping, counting food and relating that to tiles worked and eventual city size, etc. These are pretty simple calculations, true, but I was sure the few times I have to delve into game mechanics now would surely turn into many times on any higher difficulty.

If that makes any sense.

I usually play on Noble myself because, like you, I'm more interested in playing out an enjoyable and somewhat realistic alternate history than in beating a computer game. We're probably what would be considered "narrative" players in Soren Johnson's typology.

Hey, cool. I didn't know players could be categorized in that way, although I can only find a single rundown of the types of players Johnson delineates (and it's in another post on these forums). Definitely a narrative player here... if I'm not constructing an alternate history dialogue in my head, I'm actually writing one up (or down, I s'pose).

 

[gilmore606]

This whole thread depresses me, because I've been playing for months and have almost 1000 hours in this game and I still can't do any better than Monarch.

 

[s.bernbaum]

This whole thread depresses me, because I've been playing for months and have almost 1000 hours in this game and I still can't do any better than Monarch.

Hey, don't feel bad. I've been playing since 2006 and am only at Noble. I play a level until I find it boring before moving up. Since I play loooong games at marathon and like to use different types of maps, it takes quite a while before I have exhausted a level. The idea is to enjoy the game, not compete with other posters to see who is playing at the higher level and how early they can win a game (unless you are playing multi-player ).

 

[Iranon]

@ AdMech: Sure! I did mean playing it without paying much attention to specific instances like the ones you mentioned... although it's definitely useful to have a feel for how these work in general terms: how long marginal tiles take to recoup an investment in cap raisers, under which circumstances whipping tends to outperform normal production etc.

Something you also don't have to do is punish AI quirks (choking, worker farming, making AI stacks run in circles, make them commit suicide, working tech trades by staying clear of things you know the AI likes to research etc) or cookie-cutter sequences like 'beeline a, oracle b, trade for c which will be available by now, bulb d for enough trade fodder until after you competed Liberalism for e'.

By 'keep up and surpass', I don't necessarily mean every single aspect of the game at the same time. Hogging all useful wonders, outexpanding all AIs, establishing an early tech lead and having military superiority at the same time is a tall order. Achieving one of them without falling too far behind in the others is enough.

I refused to strip down my playstyle for a long time and did exactly what I'm claiming isn't necessary - use my knowledge of the mechanics and careful execution to get away with it which brings me to the last point:
Being able to do something doesn't imply that you should do it. By the time you feel comfortable with taking Immortal in a non-gamey way you may prefer to play as hard as you can and give Deity a shot. Which I still can't beat reliably on my preferred settings, even using every trick I'm aware of.

 

[babar]

I play pretty badly at immortal. I don't do any gamey tricks that I can think of.

The only exception to this might be tech brokering. Unless you turn it off, you need to learn what techs the AI prioritizes and studiously avoid them in favor of an often quite useless tech. Then you carefully trade it around along with the techs you get from the AI, to gain some kind of parity. Then you repeat the process... This feels quite gamey and unenjoyable to me, so I much prefer "no tech brokering" (which I only recently tried), although it does seem to make the game a bit easier.