Marathon versus Ephic

[Enigma_Nova]

Yeah, and apparently long games of 18 civs on Marathon on Huge aren't quite as fun in the summoer.

OT: Well, indeed they aren't if you have to OC your Processor to handle huge maps. =]

[zurichuk]

Originally posted by vee4473



are you ****tin' me?

nice choice of words. and no I'm not


actually currently 700 turns into my game (15 hrs) and wiping the floor with redcoats, cannon and grenadiers, good chance on this speed to up the level and have a genuine modern war imo and have chance to target space building civs

[Dauphin]

Playing Marathon with raging barbarians is insane. Fun, but insane!

The time it takes to build defensive units being several turns at best vs a new barb unit appearing on your borders on average every turn.

[Gray_Lensman]

Marathon would be fun, as would Epic, but both of them up the time proportionately for the build time for the units, negating the point of increasing the time frame.

as of v1.52 they have not fixed this yet, neither can you change the default number of civilizations. Of course if you mod the .xml files this can be accomplished, but this really ought to be selectable under the custom game options

[sovietwaffle]

No, the upped build time of units doesn't change what they were trying to accomplish. The issue was that early game if you tried to invade, your army would be at the brink of uselessness by the time it got there. Even if they up the build times, it still allows you to make more movements with units before they obsolete.

[Gray_Lensman]

Originally posted by sovietwaffle
No, the upped build time of units doesn't change what they were trying to accomplish. The issue was that early game if you tried to invade, your army would be at the brink of uselessness by the time it got there. Even if they up the build times, it still allows you to make more movements with units before they obsolete.

That makes absolutely no sense! If it takes you 3 times longer to build an army, then it'll be 3 times longer before you get them all together for an assault on an enemy city, and in that (3 times longer time frame) you will research the next technology (which takes 3 times longer). At that point your units are again relatively obsolete!

[sovietwaffle]

If it's taking you long enough to build an army that it's obsolete, then you may have a problem there. I tend to do fine with medium-sized but balanced groups. You could always upgrade them later anyways :P

[Gray_Lensman]

I think they (the developers) would have done better to not increase the unit build time at the same proportional rate as everything else. This would give more of a "marathon" feel to the game, versus everything just taking longer to do.

[Enigma_Nova]

Marathon would work better if everything had the same build time as Normal, but the techs just took 3 times as long to reserach, and the game had 3 times the amount of turns.

[astrologix]

Originally posted by Enigma_Nova
Marathon would work better if everything had the same build time as Normal, but the techs just took 3 times as long to reserach, and the game had 3 times the amount of turns.

Agree

[Willem]

I don't, I think it's fine the way it is. With build times being normal, there's be tons of units on the map and in no time I'd have a hard time finding something to build in my cities. I think they've balanced quite well.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Enigma_Nova
Marathon would work better if everything had the same build time as Normal, but the techs just took 3 times as long to reserach, and the game had 3 times the amount of turns.

The scaling would have to be just right, or all you do is lengthen the early game and the later game less so.

This is because your empire will be more mature (more city improvements, number of cities, tile improvements etc) by the time you get to certain tech levels, and a more mature empire will take less time to research a tech. So tripling all tech costs may triple research times in the ancient era, but only double it in the medieval/industrial, and only increase by half in the modern era.

Tech cost scaling needs to be more exponential than linear is my point I suppose.

[Mujadaddy]

Screw it. I'm just going to cut out all the techs later than Classical

[Gray_Lensman]

I do have to make a slight correction to myself here... After examining the associated .XML file I have observed that the unit build (training) cost is only twice as much, not three times as much as is the case with everything else in Marathon mode, which means that we do have a little bit of unit building speedup relatively speaking.

[Deathmerchant]

Originally posted by Shaka II

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

Yeah I'm busy playing a marathon game, huge map, noble diffuculty, 15 computer civs. It's like there are several seperate ages.. you have time to build an entire army and have an entire war in one age, before slowly transitioning to the next. I think I either had a good start, or noble is a tad easy. I managed to box the Arabs into a small section of continent right at the beginning of the game (well, probablly 50 or so turns in anyway, which is really just the very beginning of the game) So the entire game I had a huge landmass to myself to expand into. This was in the warrior/archer era. The only thing that kept me from expanding was city maintanence, which does a pretty good job of reeling in overexpansion. If I built a single city, my treasury surplus would turn into a deep debt, forcing me to lower my science rate. I overexpanded a bit in the beginning and I was behind in techs for the first portion of the game.

After the initial part of the game my economy grew pretty steadily untill I could afford to expand a bit more. This was kinda the swordsman/horse archer era, and I comtemplated going to war with the Arabs and taking their cities, but taking over his 5 or 6 cities would have messed with my economy pretty bad (from city maintanence), so I waited untill I was in the maceman/longbowman era, built an advanced army over a good 40 turns or so, upgraded old units where I could afford it, made sure my economy and science funding wern't gonna collapse under the pressure of a war, and attacked the arabs pretty overwhelmingly. As soon as I captured his capital I built the forbidden palace so the maintanence wasn't crushing my science rate.

After that I built up, expanded to the rest of my continent, and met some of my 14 other neighbors, as I had just learned optics, giving me a ship that could travel over ocean. I was shocked to learn that the Americans and French had allied together and were beating me in tech advances (only by a hair). This is about where I am now in my game.. I've got 28 turns left on my gunpowder research, planning on building a few boat loads of musketmen to ship over to the American and French capitals, raze the cities, and move on. After that I'm not quite sure what road I should take, I might make a reach for the Russian UU, Cossacks, with 18 strength they would be the strongest unit on the map by far. I'll probablly invade my neighbors on a continent below me, the Spanish and the Egyptians, as they are still behind in the swordsman era, just leaning into longbowmen and macemen.

But yeah.. very addicting.. can't wait untill the modern age, when I try a grand scale invasion of the large middle continent. But basically I need to try this on prince, because I'm leading every civ by at least five hundred points or so, and at least a few advances, it's really just gonna be a cleanup, the AI's aren't too bright when it comes to large invasions and such.