Civ V adventure?

[Tasunke]

Interesting.

I never thought of Baiting or Puppet Strings as an exploit.

At least in Civ IV ... was it really that bad in Civ III? Or is baiting one worker(or scout/warrior/etc) for a unit or two still considered an exploit in Civ IV?

[Sullla]

These issues were somewhat different in Civ3, where workers were significantly cheaper and less valuable than in later Civ games. (It was not at all unusual to be running around with 100+ workers in the later stages of a Civ3 game.) It was incredibly easy to bait even gigantic stacks of AI units in Civ3 into chasing after completely useless workers... I mean, if you didn't play Civ3, you have no idea the tortured, convoluted paths that the AI would take just to kill a single worker. This one was ultimately pretty minor.

"Puppet strings" was a different and more serious exploit. The Civ3 AI didn't play with the fog of war enabled - they could always see the entire map at all times. The AI was also programmed to beeline for "soft" targets on an individual scale, wherever on the map they might be. As a community, we discovered that this could be extremely exploitable. Move units out of a backline city to leave it empty, and the entire AI stack would start moving towards it. Cover that city and leave another one empty, and the whole AI stack would shift again towards the new target. When abused properly, you could tie up overwhelming numbers of AI units indefinitely, pulling their "puppet strings" and having them dance between unguarded targets in the backline. Kind of funny to watch, but horribly exploitable and broken.

The AI in Civ4 is significantly better; nowhere remotely close to a human, but much better nonetheless. I honestly don't know about the Civ5 AI; it was pretty sad when I played the game. Not sure if that was due to One Unit Per Tile restriction or whatever.

[waterbat]

I was comment about Civ3: I did not recall using the puppet strings with a worker - but I definitely used it with emptying my capital (or other backline city) and baiting out units from the AI.

In Civ5 the AI just seems a lot more random - who knows why its doing what it is doing! This is preferable to puppet string behavior, but perhaps just as ineffective. I haven't really played enough games to tell.

[Rowain]

The AI in Civ4 is significantly better; nowhere remotely close to a human, but much better nonetheless.

Absolute agreed. CiV-AI was better right from the start and and quite good after Blake got his hands on it.

I honestly don't know about the Civ5 AI; it was pretty sad when I played the game. Not sure if that was due to One Unit Per Tile restriction or whatever.

Depending on the dice they roill at the beginning you can still get complete thuds. OTOH every now and then you get an AI that knows what it is doing and manages to field combined Arms in an effective way.

The Diplo-side is still bogus.

[SevenSpirits]

Well it only took another dozen tries to get a decent map. I've emailed my scenario proposal to T-hawk.