Okay, let's get this off the ground!  Here are the basics:

Race: Silicoids
Difficulty: Impossible
Galaxy Size: Medium
Opponents: Five
Color: Purple
Map Generation: Random - I just took the first map rolled and ran with it!
Events: On
Game Version: Kyrub's 1.40M patch  (Since 1oom apparently doesn't have a Mac version...)
Variant:  None; just avoid the known exploits - although some of them (like infinitely recharging specials) are fortunately fixed and no longer concerns in 1.40M.

Our Start:



When I saw this group of opponents on the first map I rolled, I decided to start playing it out.  Then I played the first few turns and knew it was a keeper.  This one could get interesting - hold onto your stalactites!

Scenario/Introduction:

One of my Christmas presents was Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection for the PS3.  I'll post my impressions of the games in this topic.


Super Thunder Blade:  A forward-scrolling shooter that reminds me of Star Fox 1, but with a more realistic setting.  You control a helicopter, and the enemies tend to be aircraft and tanks.  Unfortunately, the main reason to play this is to unlock Space Harrier.  It suffers from frame rate issues like Star Fox 1, and you die in one hit.


Space Harrier:  This is a much better forward-scrolling shooter than Super Thunder Blade.  You still die in one hit, but you can make up for it with the "rich kid in the arcade" credit system.  The perspective can make it hard to deal with incoming obstacles such as pillars.  The fast pace and unique setting make you want to see what happens next even with the quarter-munching difficulty.


Golden Axe:  A medieval European fantasy brawler is different from the Final Fight style.  Each of the three characters has different stats for speed, melee power, and magic.  I picked Gilius the dwarf, who has the weakest magic and strongest melee.  It may take time to get used to the movement if you're used to faster brawlers.  If you see bottomless pits, be sure to knock enemies into them for an instant kill.  Watch out when the game expects you to cross them with its questionable jumping mechanics, though.  Unlike the arcade version, there are limited continues and an extra stage.  I managed to get to the final boss right before getting a Game Over.

Well that is new. I had a semi-decent game as Indonesia. Not enough strategic ressources so I had to push against an India which forward settled me north of Agra (also Indian) with archers and chariots only against Varus. Which was nasty to say the least. In a bid to catch up with the runaway AI which turned out to be Shaka of all things I dowed Ghandi with my knight/xbow army and Harald with my new Jongs to get enough land to compete. But holeymoley. 238 science.

My cities are underdeveloped compared to be starts I had, and it is only immortal. Be warned smoother difficulty is also in effect (which means less settlers but more boni on everything which results in a smoother start but tougher endgame.)

Needless to say I am having a blast.

   

Unfortunately I did not do a turn 1 save.

I do however have a turn 83 save before I started on a mass build of an army to engage India for much needed land (end of session 1)

All in all, if you get lucky the AI might actually pose a challenge.

Attached Files

  GITARJA 83 825 BC.Civ6Save (Size: 1.37 MB / Downloads: 0)
  GITARJA 147 720 AD.Civ6Save (Size: 1.91 MB / Downloads: 0)

Regardless of the outcome of the garrison thread, even ignoring the fact of players not using enough garrisons, the -1 unrest/2 units mechanic is not very well designed no matter what.

I believe we should make the bonus dependent of actual quality of garrisons using the following rule :

If total cost of normal units + total cost of fantastic units*2...

is 50 or higher, 1 unrest is reduced,
is 200 or higher, 2 unrest is reduced, 
is 450 or higher, 3 unrest is reduced,
is 720 or higher, 4 unrest is reduced,
finally if it's 1300 or higher, 5 unrest is reduced.

I also believe the tax tables are too forgiving for having no garrisons, giving a full 1 gold with only 1% unrest, but as unrest can and mostly is reduced by buildings, it might not really make a difference - you can expect to have no rebels at even medium tax rates for building only a shrine and parthenon and having the minimal 50 value of units. (enough to claim unrest up to 39% total on a pop 10 city.)
Changing the tax tables will only make those buildings more necessary and they already have the best ROI if they actually reduce a point of unrest so such a change would make them nearly mandatory to build early without any influence on garrisoning (Shrine for 120 or 200 worth of units? Guess which is better... ) as well as hindering the AI slightly as they are bad at micromanaging their tax rates, garrisons and unrest buildings.

The multiplier on fantastic units ensures undead stay efficient at removing unrest, and also helps AI (and players who take this seriously and actually want a garrison that can defend the city) while accounting for these units being more expensive to create and maintain.
Do note there is one downside, which is transparency. While the player can easily calculate how many units they need in the old system, in the new one this is far from trivial, especially as the "cost" of fantastic units isn't the cost of casting their respective summoning spells, it's the "cost" used for experience gains and AI doomstack building priority. It's roughly the same tier as the actual cost, but not the exact amount (for example Skeletons cost 25 but are worth 40). Considering this is the same number used for experience, it is however a fairly accurate representation of how effective the unit is in combat, which should be proportional to how effective it is at discouraging rebellions, so there is no problem with using the numbers themselves, the problem is the lack of transparency for the human. (if we are somehow able to display this number on each unit that could solve it.)

Is anyone up for a new SG starting between Christmas and New Year?

My proposal:

Version: 1oom 1.0 with fixbugs.pbx, uiextra and AI:Classic+ (should be roughly equivalent to kyrub's patch)
Difficulty: Impossible
Race: Silicoids (?)
Variants: ?

I still have not beaten impossible with the Silicoids, so no variant would be challenging enough for me. Depending on what mix of players we get, we might want to add one. If you want to play another race, or prefer the Dos version, I'm up for that as well.

So, as we concluded changing the AI or their advantages isn't going to be the correct solution for the "all offense not using garrisons" early game problem, we should discuss the actions to take here.

I believe we specifically need to address this problem for the early game - in the late game, either Plane Shift and the massive hordes of units works well enough at forcing the player to defend cities, or the player is fighting against an enemy where defending is not viable anyway (Chaos).
So I would draw the line between the uncommon and rare phases, around 1412. After that the AI definitely has enough stacks that undefended cities are no longer viable, or if the human has beaten the Arcanus opponent already, then it becomes a tower blocking/plane shift issue which I believe we discussed enough and are happy with the current solution. The only "loophole" I see is the AI not researching Plane Shift in reaction to breaching towers early, so tower blocking is still doable, for a limited amount of time, rewarding those who clear out Arcanus very quickly (and likely have enough economy to crush the Myrran wizard regardless).

So we need to discuss the following features :

1. Guardian
I think this is working as intended - it requires garrisons to be effective and is a fairly powerful effect, while the AI will pick it more often on Lunatic difficulty. Unfortunately at a 2 pick cost it is still a marginal influence as we can't afford forcing it on the AI for lower difficulties where they don't have extra picks.

2. Wall of Fire
This acts as a very powerful deterring factor against offensive play, while also requiring units to be effective as a defensive measure...in theory.
In practice, it's way too easy to get around it.
Ranged attacks are obvious, but ranged units are generally not that great to use for offense, so that's acceptable - ranged attackers only work if the defenders are not ranged.
Flying also works, but flying is a higher tier, so getting it will usually mean a significant delay. The only early unit that is a decent flying melee creature is Gargoyles, and I don't think we need to worry about that conquering the entire world on Lunatic. They are good, but not that good.
Where I do see problems is, two common spells, Bless and Resist Elements both add enough defense to counter wall of fire - almost entirely on higher defense melee units, and somewhat on lower defense ones. I'm not sure what can be done about that, unless we rebrand the spell to not do Chaos damage, even then Resist Elements will apply to it. The other options are raising the attack strength which might be excessive (I'm already burning away entire stacks of AI creatures with it easily) or making it armor piercing (bad for flavor, Lighting attacks should have that trait, not fire). So I don't know what to do for this but it seems a problem.
Finally, Fire Immunity, is generally not available in the early game, and the units that do have it are not powerful enough to be a game balance threat, and aren't even melee in most cases.

Oh, and Noncoroporeal doesn't protect from this spell, so that's already covered.

3. Heavenly Light
I think this already offers a fairly good boost, especially now that it applies to ranged. One interesting way to improve it that becomes obsolete later is adding "and they gain magical weapons" to the effect, which makes garrisons with normal weapons effective, saving the price of an Alchemist Guild and putting a gap in resource cost between the same unit used for defense vs offense. Unfortunately, most offense strategies pick Alchemy and don't care.

4. City Walls
This unfortunately won't be helpful, even if buffed. Extra armor won't help defending ranged units, while melee units are vulnerable to ranged and need to go outside to fight. So the wall is not particularly relevant for both of those cases - it only matters if both the attacker and the defender (at least in the gate) uses melee units. Unfortunate, as encouraging using the slow, but reasonably cheap to build and powerful Catapults would be nice, although the most offense oriented races can't even build any. Odd, as this makes it a purely defensive unit while in most games it tends to be one for siege.

5. Wall of Shadows
A highly situational spell, that is absolutely devastating if the attacker uses ranged units. Unfortunately countered by the also uncommon True Sight and illusion immunity in general (Shadow Demons), but as those are fairly expensive, I feel it's not an issue. If ranged units are involved, this will do the job of slowing the attacker down.

6. Rampaging monsters and Raiders

Spawning more of these, earlier, and as stronger stacks, can and should help forcing the player on defense. We probably also need to make sure they avoid spawning on AI continents or at least do so much less frequently.

Altering the odds of the monsters razing the city vs only damaging it is another thing we should consider.

Currently, for Lunatic difficulty :

-Rampaging Monsters spawn every 4-20 turns (overall, not per plane), Can't spawn before turn 40, and have a 3-5x multiplier around the base amount, which is the turn count. Strength is halved if the location is on the AI's fortress continent, with no player fortress and Monsters Gone Wild is off. There is a 2/3 chance the spawn happens on the human player's starting plane, 1/3 on the other one.

-Raiders spawn once every 5-30 turns, have a 4x quantity multiplier, and the quantity scales up based on turns. Units generated don't have a budget, only a quantity from 1 to 9, and are of whichever unit is in the garrison of the neutral city, so it might as well be pretty powerful units. I believe we made sure neutrals at least don't start with armorer's guild tier units, but units like priests, halberdiers, or equivalent  can be expected. Quantity is decreased by 1/3 if an AI fortress is present on the continent.

-At movement, both of them prioritize the closest city, with the fewest defending units, with a small bias towards the human player starting at Advanced, and increasing once at Master difficulty. The bias of +7 on Lunatic is equivalent to a distance difference of 7 tiles, or unit count of 3.5 units. Basically they pick the target where (2*unit count+distance) is lowest, and subtract 7 for the human.


The frequency of both of these definitely needs to be massively increased, and should be made more consistent (4-7 turns is ok, 4-20 isn't!).
The budget on monsters starts horribly low - On turn 40 we get a budget of 120-200 for Lunatic which buys...3 to 5 hell hounds, or a single uncommon creature.
Turn 40 itself is probably too late - 25 or 30 might be more reasonable.
We probably shouldn't mess with the quantity of raiders in a stack due to them being potentially higher tier units. We probably want to alter the rule about the AI fortresses to make them spawn less frequently there, if and only if a human fortress isn't present.

Hey everyone,

I've had a couple of games recently with kyrub's patch where the AIs get Controlled Radiated, and aren't able to use their Colony Ships to colonize a Radiated world. I've attached a save where I'm seeing this. The Darloks are the example - they've chased my scout away a couple of times, with a Colony Ship in store, and not taken it over.

I thought AI ships automatically had the highest possible level of planetary tech available to them.

Attached Files

  SAVE2.GAM (Size: 57.65 KB / Downloads: 1)

EitB 52 players, begone!



In the game's back story, the Bannor civ spent a long time in Hell, finally fighting their way out and back to the physical world. They are, as a consequence, not big fans of demons.

Is the werewolves strategy overpowered, as implied in the other post? 
Maybe a comparison to the other books would help. 


The basic underpinnings are: Halflings, 8 books, spellweaver/specialist/sage master. The problem: werwolves are no summon, so they do not require conjurer - (if you combine these and spellweaver, you are not getting the researchable uncommon).

So probably you need to drop specialist in order to advance - research slower. 

Then, lets look at the options: 

Nature: Spiders - good but by no means op. Lizard too expensive. In a good setting you can go for fast lizards, but even then, casting costs too much (maybe drop spellweaver, pick archmage instead). 
Chaos: Fire Giant or Gargoyles. Nothing to write home about. Gargoyles require immolation, Fire Giant unimpressive.
Sorcery: You might start with Nagas plus Focus Magic - but that is expensive and underwhelming. Then, I do not know how good water elementals are.
Life: Unicorns not seriously worth it. Of course you might try prayer. That is good, but certainly not op.

In short, I may be missing something, but death just seems to be clearly the best option.

We will see.