Poll: Difficulty

[A Space Ostrich]

Which difficulty should we play on?

[regexcellent]

Mercury is the difficulty where neither you nor the AI is handicapped. Playing on higher difficulties means we have artificially less health and food in cities and whatnot; it'll make expansion slower and thus cripple the demogame's main purpose. We won't be able to expand participation very well on Apollo.

[A Space Ostrich]

But on the flip side. I'm mediocre and I can devastate the AI on Vostok.

[A Space Ostrich]

Then again. Role play and distributed decisions make their own challenges.

[Guynemer]

Mercury is the difficulty where neither you nor the AI is handicapped. Playing on higher difficulties means we have artificially less health and food in cities and whatnot; it'll make expansion slower and thus cripple the demogame's main purpose. We won't be able to expand participation very well on Apollo.

Really? Mercury is the "equality" level? Huh, I would've expected it to be Gemini or Vostok.

[Donegeal]

If the difficulty is similar to past civ titles, I would say we play this game at a minimum of Vostok. Apollo would be equivelent to Diety, which we may accomplish someday (especially with Aeson helping). I'd normally go with Soyuz (Emperor), but seeing as the game just came out and we are all just learning the nuances of the game we could concievably kill ourselves by making a mistake early in the game that we just don't know about that is unrecoverable at this level. Maybe use this level if we play a second demogame. In Vostok, we should be able to recover from any mistake.

And as usual, this leads me to ask about what size planet are we colonizing? Remember, the small the planet, the quicker the game. And for all you demogame virgins, these games take a VERY long time. As an example, the CivIII Apolyton MP Demogame I boast about in my signature was played on a standard sized mad and took 2 1/2-3 years. My initial demo game was played on a huge civ3 map and too about a year.

[Aeson]

Apollo feels more like Emperor (maybe even Monarch) in III or IV, and Immortal in V. (Though the difficulty in V was if you did something the game didn't want you to do in regards to expansion.)

While we won't be always doing optimal things due to the nature of the decision making processes, I do think we should shoot for one of the higher difficulty levels so that there is some AI resistance.

This is assuming we will cheese Trade Routes. If we put limits on Trade Routes (which might be a good idea) then I could see taking a lower difficulty level.

[A Space Ostrich]

We should not take the trade route immunity. Make the trade routes something we have to protect.

[regexcellent]

We'll be playing an unmodified version of the game for simplicity.