Adventure 4 - Arathorn's report...

[Arathorn]

Arathorn I have read your reports for while at Civfanatics and have always wondered who is you avatar?

It's my son. It's an old picture, sorta. He'll be seven soon. Already a Civ-player, though he lost interest after 2-3 games.

But someday, when you feel like playing again, don't hesitate to do it just because you told people you didn't like it.

I won't. And I have tried to be careful to NOT say I'll never play again -- just that I don't see it happening at this point.

Arathorn

[Rowain]

The problem of the AIs being too peaceful seems to be recognized by Firaxis, so hopefully that will somehow be addressed in a future patch. It's strange, but during my first games I hadn't run into the WFYABTA issue much, or in the no-AI-vs-AI-wars issue, and couldn't fully understand what you were so frustrated about. Now I seem to play differently somehow without really knowing how and why, because I no longer see any AI-vs-AI wars in my games as well, and run into the WFYABTA wall at the most frustrating moments.

Uhm I hope that this patch doesn't mean a return to the 'AIs kills themself and let the players easily cruise to victory'-syndrom from Civ3

I for one still see alot of AI-wars in my games.
Perhaps the AI is less likly to fight each other if the player is dominating the score?

I still have a lot of fun with the game, but find it a bit alarming that I have to play extreme variants already to enjoy it. "Normal" games are no longer fun for me. I know I played private Civ 3 games for a much longer time before the RB events became the only games I played. Now, I only start CIV outside SGs or RB events to play an extreme variant game like my no-military game, or (right now) a no-research game - but not very often. I'm still looking very much forward to the next RB Epic, but only because these are variant games as well, and I love to read reports. But normal games? There even are some map scripts like the great plains I haven't looked at, and yet I have not much desire to play a non-variant game on them.

I find it hard to put a finger on the reasons for this; maybe it's a carry-over from C3C burnout. *shrug*

That is for sure a reason. We had ~5years to cool down from Civ2 (neither CtP nor SMAC ever felt like Civ to me) but we had no rest from Civ since the release of Civ3. Just look at the epics going on since June 2002(!). If you take the SG's into account we look at 4 years of heavy Civing without any major break.