Marathon versus Ephic

[Angel Gonzalez]

Which are the difference bettewen these two speeds thanks

[Aro]

Techs are more expensive and you will spend more turns researching, building times are bigger and games are longer in Marathon games. The main goal is allow the player to play along with new units... You can start a war with Macemen and, ten turns later, Macemen still the ultimate unit. In normal games You can't. You'll have Muskets by the time you reach your target... A little annoying.
I like Marathon games. In fact, it's almost like Civ III.

[djpsychonaut]

Excellent! I haven't tried the new Marathon speed, but I know what you mean about Macemen being the top unit and then Musketmen being state of the art by the time you get to the city to invade.

[Free888]

I started a Marathon game a few games ago ... I'm still researching Gunpowder

[Willem]

Anyone know how many turns are in a Marathon game? It's not listed in the readme.

[zurichuk]

1200

[Axxaer]

Originally posted by zurichuk
1200

*Settles down for a very long Civ session*

[pauli]

but did they fix the build time balance? having 500 turns of macemen is meaningless if it takes 400 to build them.

[Proteus_MST]

The Balance is great as far as I can say.

I had a 100-150 turns against my neighbor Elizabeth. It started some turns after I got the tech to build cossacks (of course I had to build enough of them first to start the war ) and ended when the last english city was destroyed.
During the whole war the cossacks remained my main offensive force, with no better units available and the only change being, that at the beginning of the war they fought against english pre gunpowder units (mostly longbowmen, knights and pikemen) and at the end of the war they fought against english grenadiers (as Lizzy was able to research the necessary techs during the war).

It´s de facto a great setting to play Civ IV (and is the setting which would deserve to be named epic [instead of the setting which is named epic at the moment ])
Oh and your games last very long, indeed. I started my current game last friday when the patch came out and I´m still busy playing it (with the year 1925 at the moment)

[Destroyer]

I had a prepatch mod which added 200 turns onto Epic, and made the huge world 40% bigger.

I made research 300% and decreased unit built time to 80%.

I have had a couple of nice games lasting well over a week each on Prince level.

One thing I worry about is that playing against 4 ai Civs, one is always very powerful - the nearest to me, and the first to fight me (and loose), by this time the game is not worth playing as the remaining civs are so far behind.

What would be good is for a scalable AI difficulty level that will adjust if you get too far ahead. Its annoying to play for 30 hours to discover you are halfway through the game and already won.

Is there something that can be modded to determine how many cities ai civs build, as they tend to stop expanding for no reason, allowing me to shoot past.

[Enigma_Nova]

Scalable AI Difficulty was one of the things that annoyed me in earlier video games that I played: You were winning with great winningness, but then the AI gets boosted and you are only winning with slight winningness.
The tradeoff, being that the AI doesn't weaken when you do, is fine by me.

[Destroyer]

The idea of Scalable AI Difficulty would be to have an option to either:

Have it turned off
Have it set to automatic, so you dont know if it changes
Have a manual button which you can crank up yourself.

Thats way, everyones happy.

[vee4473]

Originally posted by zurichuk
1200

are you ****tin' me?

[Shaka II]

Originally posted by Axxaer

Originally posted by zurichuk
1200

*Settles down for a very long Civ session*

I envision a nice midwinter game on huge/marathon 15 civs. What more could a Civer want?

[Axxaer]

Well, look closely at where I'm from and you may notice it ain't midwinter down here...