Civilization 5 Announced

[Serdoa]

uberfish, you can't put in diplomatic effort because it simply does not work in Civ5. They will still declare on you sooner then later for no reason - even looking at it from a human perspective more often then not it did not make sense when the AIs attacked me.

And I would agree with Sullla, I also don't think it is fun if every time all AIs will declare war on you sooner then later. It has not even to do with having a challenge because also for that the Civ5 AI is too bad. But no matter if the AI can handle it or not, I really cannot see how that would be fun for more then some games. If I basically know that the AIs will declare on me anyway, then why should I put any effort in diplomacy (if it would work that is)? Asking for an AI which will play to win is asking to take away at least 33% (diplomacy, parts of empire building) of what is Civ (imo of course).

And if Firaxis really stays with those "AIs playing to win" instead of "AIs playing to challenge the player" (which is a big difference) then they should have programmed the war game Shafer seemed to have in mind (Panzer General 2010...) instead of using the Civ-franchise and stripping it of most of its parts.

[Adlain]

I just won a game (admitidly on Prince) with China on contanents without the AI war decing me once - they feared my army for 3/4 of the game (after i got the cho-kun-no`s or whatever they are called) knocked out my neibour (ottomans) early, got invited into a war with the Native by England on my island but seperated by a land bridge, pluged the land bridge and teched my way to a space win (and led by a whole era in tech).

it was rather amusing considering i normaly get war dec'd early on and stay in a state of war one way or another for most of the game.

[Birdman]

uberfish, you can't put in diplomatic effort because it simply does not work in Civ5. They will still declare on you sooner then later for no reason - even looking at it from a human perspective more often then not it did not make sense when the AIs attacked me.

Amen. Just finished a game where the Greeks asked me to join in a war against my neighbor, the Iroquois. I marched up, took their capital, eliminating them, then the Greeks were hostile toward me the rest of the game. Calling me bloodthirsty, instead of being pleased that I helped them in a war. Made no sense.

Of course they got theirs a little later on.

[antisocialmunky]

Amen. Just finished a game where the Greeks asked me to join in a war against my neighbor, the Iroquois. I marched up, took their capital, eliminating them, then the Greeks were hostile toward me the rest of the game. Calling me bloodthirsty, instead of being pleased that I helped them in a war. Made no sense.

Of course they got theirs a little later on.

Maybe they were pissed at you for rolling over Iroquis instead of engaging in a long idiotic war of attrition the AI does. That way they couldn't weaken both of you and kill everyone later on. But that is abit too optimistic isn't it.

[uberfish]

My post describes how I think it should work rather than how it actually works, at least firaxis admits the diplomatic system needs improvement

[Birdman]

Maybe they were pissed at you for rolling over Iroquis instead of engaging in a long idiotic war of attrition the AI does. That way they couldn't weaken both of you and kill everyone later on. But that is abit too optimistic isn't it.

Could be. It was pretty early in the game. They had send an archer and warrior to siege their second city and would take damage - retreat - heal - repeat. I had to send in a Jag and horseman to finish the job they couldn't handle.

[Krill]

FWIW, I put in a hell of a lot of effort into the diplomacy for the RB MP games. Putting even 10% of that energy into an SP game, well, I'd never player more than 10 games a year, normal speed.

[Sirian]

A poster named alpaca has done a nice writeup on the ICS strat using Rome over at CivFanatics. I recommend reading it for anyone who doesn't understand how powerful this kind of style can be: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=390302

One image says it all (click because of giant size): http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/487/c...en0059.jpg

Someone playing the "standard" way will never come anywhere even remotely close to someone playing this way.

A result of this type depends on a handful of unbalanced game mechanics. Civ3's early days were rife with this sort of image, too. Don't you remember?

A few simple rules changes can close out the ICS issue. For instance, capping maritime food to your biggest X number of cities, perhaps with X scaling to map size and expanding slightly as the tech tree progresses. No free food for cities past your sixth city? No more ICS of this type. And that's just ONE rule change. A dozen well-targetted adjustments could do wonders for the game's balance.

The issue is that so many of this type of balance adjustment are needed, it will take a good bit of time to sort out. Multiple iterations. Whether a final fix comes from Firaxis or from mods, it is going to take a while to bring out Civ5's full potential, from the standpoint of veteran Civ players.

All the focus on the game's presentation, smoothness, accessibility to new players, and so forth, is paying off, though. Sales are plenty robust enough to guarantee that there will be a Civ6, I believe. Players who have never played Civ before, and pick up Civ5, are having a fairly positive reaction to the game, on the whole. And certainly RB -could- get to a great environment for Civ5 activity, even if it ends up requiring a combination of waiting things out, patches, mods, and discipline-oriented rules such as avoiding some loophole that cannot be properly closed any other way.

Think about what my one rules change suggestion above would do for the current state of the game. With the right updates, the future could be very bright for Civ5, even for some of its worst critics.


- Sirian

[Cyneheard]

A few simple rules changes can close out the ICS issue. For instance, capping maritime food to your biggest X number of cities, perhaps with X scaling to map size and expanding slightly as the tech tree progresses. No free food for cities past your sixth city? No more ICS of this type.

Agreed that this would be a welcome change. I'm not sure what can be done about the military AI in the near- or medium-term, though.

The issue is that so many of this type of balance adjustment are needed, it will take a good bit of time to sort out. Multiple iterations. Whether a final fix comes from Firaxis or from mods, it is going to take a while to bring out Civ5's full potential, from the standpoint of veteran Civ players.

And so I'm going to wait at least 6 months before thinking about buying Civ5.

[antisocialmunky]

I too would like to hear about solutions for the military/diplo AI. Broken mechanics can be house ruled out temporarily, its harder to ignore the AI's silliness.