sooooo Wrote:I have a few comments/questions about your game. Firstly, did you have a plan for the final wars, what with the defensive pacts making things really difficult? I guess one option would be to convert away from Islam and make some arrogant demands, hoping that someone would declare on you. But I'm curious as to what you planned to do. I don't think they would have expired on their own.
Good question! I think that I'm usually pretty good at diplomacy, but I did not see much of a solution here. The slim chance was that I could get a war going between Huayna/Caesar (the only AI relationship that was NOT Friendly), but that seemed kind of unlikely. I suppose that the last resort would have been to issue the demands sooooo suggested above, in the hopes of getting one of the AIs to declare, but that would also be supremely non-optimal (not being able to control the timing of the war). It was a bad situation, to be sure.
Quote:Secondly, I'm impressed with your tech rate and keeping up with the AIs with tech trading.
It helps to have played a lot of Civ3 Deity games!
In all honesty though, I would have been better served by founding more early cities, having a weaker early economy (thus knocking me out of the loop for tech trading), and then having a stronger long-term production base. I was trying to play for the long term as much as possible in my game, but it still could have been done better.
Quote:Thirdly I agree with making most of the extreme games emperor or immortal, not deity. In reply to sunrise and as uberfish pointed out, it's the extra settler which is really broken. Turns games/events into a lottery of whether you get declared on early. This event was quite unusual in that there were no really early declarations on the player, so it played out OK and most could survive until after 1000AD. But on an average, more cramped start then it's not a fun game.
Yeah, the extra settler is where things break down. Cities are so much more valuable in Civ4 than in Civ3; the extra settler in that game was still huge, but not nearly as much as in this one. We may explore a Deity variant in the future where the AI does NOT get the bonus settler. Or, I also like this idea:
mostly_harmless Wrote:Maybe that could be offset by giving the human player also an additional settler?
Could be worth a try, right?
I'll definitely think more on these ideas, and possibly run some test games.
uberfish Wrote:OK, deity might be at the intended difficulty level in terms of expert player win rates, but it doesn't achieve this in a fun way at present. For a start, if the AI decides to rush you early you may as well just resign. With the crazy AI expansion rate provided by 2 settlers, if you don't have a neighbour that can be rushed and crippled early to secure good land the chances of winning anything but the asymmetric victory conditions (Culture and Diplo) go way down.
And another very insightful post from uberfish. I agree: Deity difficulty achieves its goal of being virtually impossible to beat, but it's not particularly fun in non-variant or "I expect to lose, so let's see how far I can get" situations. Every Deity win I see reported at CivFanatics relies on either gaming the map to some kind of ridiculous degree, or insanely risky ultra-early rush strats (inevitably with Inca or Persia) which are themselves borderline broken. When the only way to compete is to sucker-punch the AI... ugh. That's not really the direction I want to take the Epics.
darrelljs Wrote:Of course you can't judge the difficulty of an event just by the level, but I do think more games at Emperor level would be a good idea.
That list was a big help darrell, thanks! Some more variants at Emperor level seem like a good idea. (I can't believe we've only had a single game there so far! That is, not counting the Adventures.) That's not to say that we won't still break out Deity on special occasions, but I don't think it should be a mainstay in the rotation.
