the highest "playable" difficulty

[cgrecu77]

Just curious, what is the highest "playable" difficulty in your opinion. My definition of playable is a game where you win most of the time but most of the games are challenging. You should be able to win almost regardless of starting conditions. I usually disable the space victory because it makes the game too boring.

I'm having serious difficulties winning the Monarch, with Space Race enable I usually lose and with Space Race disabled I usually win by score - or very rarely by Culture, when starting conditions are very favorable.

So I would say that my best games so far were on Prince, I almost never lose and games are usually tough, I can make a mistake here and there, but not too many though.

[Hauptman]

Prince seems to be my good game level. I prefer to be slightly ahead in tech and dont want to HAVE to do something in particular most of the time. But lately I have been playing "Monarch with a plan" and absolutely tearing the AI's up in the long run. Emporer coming shortly i forsee.

Its just at the higher levels you have to have a plan and stick to it. The ai is easy to outsmart and use against its self. I find at monarch my techs come sooner since Now im trading instead of researching for myself to stay ahead.

At "prince without a set plan" just making general cities with general improvements learning the general techs, by late game the AI's pass me tech wise and they still are a challange. but its much more of a relaxed game. Monarch beelining for certain techs to lever into bonuses in trading and early wonders is more tense. Knowing that the AI can probably build a wonder in half the time, has twice as many units and tends to be more agressive it gets quite tense.

i think on emporer i'd have to focus mostly on staying alive and slowly expanding through conquest. Forgetting wonders and extra things.

[cgrecu77]

that's my point, for a casual game where a mistake here and there won't kill you, the Prince seems to be the best choice. Moving higher means you need to play a strategy and stick to it and it feels to mechanical ...

[Diadem]

I often play OCC games. I guess I have enough practice by now to usually win those on monarch. I haven't played a lot of games on emperor yet, but I have a decent enough score there too. I must admit that I only accept good starting positions. When I get a bad one I restart. An OCC game with a bad starting position is just torture, but perhaps oneday I'll try a bad one just to see what I can do.

For me, the normal game is quite boring on monarch. I usually even win the games where I try an experimental strategy.

I usually micromanage a lot though. For a quick game where you don't want to bother too much about micromanagement, and don't want to think too much about strategy, monarch is a good difficulty.

If you do want a more intense game, emperor is a good difficulty.

[ghen]

In prince I can play just to have fun, start wars without caring about diplomacy or for stupid reasons.. Monarch I definitely need a gameplan. Haven't played above that yet.

[Janster]

Hehe, was wondering, a lot of the strategies here are for simpler difficulties

I will beat the computer on Monarch with some sweat most of the time, however my friend who I must admit is rather good at this ,will do the level above with some sweat, but basically he beats the level pretty ofen now.

Seemingly winning on harder, does involve mostly wars, if too much peaceful expansion is done, the AI will beat you, however on the battelfield you will have HUGE advantages as its not very good at it

Janster

[Rocksteady]

The problem I have with the higher difficulty levels is that at a certain point it becomes impossible to outbuild the AI and games become more about manipulating the AI's than actual building/wars.

[Diadem]

Recently I played an OCC game on a duel map against 1 AI. The AIs expansion is insane, and you can't expand at all. In fact you need to be careful not to have your borders pushed back by him

I was going to rush him, but needless to say he had easily 10x my military by the time I was ready for war. I still won. Against a human opponent I would have been dead in 5 turns, but the AI is horribly bad at warfare.

When I get attacked by the AI I usually manage a 2:1 kill ratio, if we have about the same units. Mainly because I'm better in using siege weapons, and because the defender always has an edge (usuage of roads, etc).

When I attack the AI however.. They are just so horribly bad at defending. The above game I described, the war dragged on forever. I had only 9 keshiks at the start, and I built maybe 5 more during the war. I lost 5 of them while attacking cities (but razed his 2 biggest ones) and I lost 1 out in the open. In the meantime I pillaged every resource he had and killed easily over 20 units.

And that's not because I used some difficult or obscure strategy. I just pillaged and took out isolated units, retreating my wounded wants for healing. Hardly something that's impossible to defend against if you have overwhelming numbers.

Perhaps it's very hard to program an AI properly. But it's a shame, because war is really lobsided this way. It's almost a no-brainer against AIs. You almost can't loose.

[Janster]

Yepp, once you get into the nitty gritty of it, the AI will simply hole up into its city IF you declare on him, and then you can just run rampant trough his lands.

So for me it seems that IF you let the AI just build and grow his civilisation, even monarch level can be tough, but if you go right for the throat, you can win at much higher difficulty levels

Janster

[gentle]

I play only Noble or Deity.
Deity for the feel of beating the highest dif and because it is the traditional dif to play civ games on (though a little annoying in 4 imho).
Noble because all have the same conditions.
I would really like to have a difficulty like noble without health boni etc, that would become my favourite one.

[Drachasor]

I can handle emperor fairly easily these days. Often I'll be in a dominant position within the first hundred years of AD, if not before.

I haven't tried harder difficulties yet, however.

-Drachasor

[Calvin Vu]

I've only played on Emperor twice and won both. The first time was very easy since I had a good starting location. The second time, the starting location was terrible: penninsula-like, no iron, no horse, no marble, no stone, few trees, lots of jungles and blocked at the exit by two militarilistic civs: Greek and Rome.

The only copper resource was 4 squares away from the Greek capitol. In landing a settler there to get the copper, I had to fill in the area in between so the outlying city wouldn't be isolated and flip. That brought my research rate down to 10% due to the maintenance. I won by SS in 1950, mostly thanks to diplomacy to get Alexander to be friendly with me and become my military protector for 85% of the game. Even in the end when my modern armors were taking most of the Roman cities and some Indian cities, my military ranking was still 7th place and some of my own big cities were still protected by a single warrior/axeman [If you give Alexander enough techs then he's a good military protector ]. For the whole game, I only got one road in an unused square pillaged by the Roman (at the time Alexander just signed a ceasefire and could not go back to war against Rome again for 10 turns).

Anyway, the true difficulty would heavily depend upon the starting locations. Therefore, if one restarts with a bad location then his true level should be a notch or two lower. Similarly for one-on-one games (which are more like RTS war games than true Civ games since you can win by just screwing up your one and only opponent, not by rising above all the rest, no matter whether you can attack them or not), or games in which SS is turned off which force the AI civs to sit around and wait for the attack from the human civ., especially if you have good diplomacy.

A true Civ game would require you to rise above all the rest. That means you always have a virtual economic war with all the civs all the time plus optional, well-timed militarilistic wars against your neighbors. If you can't balance your priorities and plunge into constant slugfests with your neighbors such that another civ can get a SS before you then you lose fair and square, IMO.

However, if you play on continent map thens the pure luck in the starting position is simply way too much for the result of the game to mean anything. What I said above applies more to pangae-like maps where every civ starts out roughly on equal footing and all can trade with each others. Tech-trading is a non-dispensible part of the early strategy and continent maps simply affect this too much.

[Dominae]

Re: the highest "playable" difficulty

Originally posted by cgrecu77
Just curious, what is the highest "playable" difficulty in your opinion. My definition of playable is a game where you win most of the time but most of the games are challenging. You should be able to win almost regardless of starting conditions.

Immortal. With any given starting location, I can beat it (slightly) more than half the time.

I like my games tough though. Emperor is still a challenge, but I'm reasonably confident I can beat almost all the time on a non-dud start (and there are few true duds in Civ4.).

I usually disable the space victory because it makes the game too boring.

Disabling Spaceship actually makes for an easier game, as it's the AI's favorite victory condition (the one it's best at).

If not for the threat of some distant AI pulling ahead of the pack through countless super-charged Towns, I would play Immortal a lot differently, and win more often.

[Sir Og]

When determining playable difficulty do you assume that you never reload from a previous save game if you mess something up.

[billones]

If you reload, you lost. You're just starting your next game from something other than turn 1. (Heck, Civ4 lets you do that even without a save game )

I'm only on my second Civ4 game, though, so I haven't risen to my level of incompetence just yet.