Differences between game speeds:

[Blake]

The differences are basically measured as in "what percentage of a given era, or the game, does it take to perform this activity".

Major Differences between Marathon and Quick:
A major difference is where the factor is constant, like measured absolutely in turns, or a %age per turn.

• Units move faster.
• Units heal faster.
• Barbarians spawn in (far) greater quantities.
• Leaders will be refuse-to-talk for less time, leading to shorter wars.
• Deals can be cancelled after less time (after 10 turns).
• You can change civics more often (every 5 turns).
• Cities come out of resistance quicker.
• Bombarding defenses down takes less time.

Minor Differences:
A minor difference is one introduced by rounding and such, the difference may not actually be minor.

• The ratio of worker working to moving is much better, Indian fast worker are less useful.
• Cities are restricted to 1 build a turn, unit-pump cities can have higher (useful) hammer outputs on Marathon. This is mainly applicable for OCC's.
• Less time is spent in Anarchy when making small civic adjustments. On Marathon the only viable switching tactic is to switch one at a time, on Quick it's only viable to switch multiple civics at once.

Overall, the slower speeds definitely favor a military approach. Faster movement, faster healing, shorter city resistance, shorter wars and cheaper civic changes all reinforce this.

For discussion: Am I WRONG on any count? It's possible.
Are there other noteworthy disparities between game speeds?
Are some of these balance issues?

[drank]

Good analysis. After playing my best game ever on Marathon as Tokugawa, I definitely agree that Marathon favors warmongering.

The reasons that you list are all part of it, but I think the duration of tech advantages is a bigger part. Say you're the first to reach Macemen (e.g., you successfully execute the CS slingshot) and you decide to use them to take out your neighbor. So you build 10 Macemen and declare war.

On standard, you'll roll through the first few cities, but the AI may have been researching Machinery while you built your army. By the time you get close to their capital, they'll field some Crossbows to blunt your assault. So you wait for some re-enforcements, and they build some more units. Ultimately taking their capital becomes a longer and more expensive war than you'd hoped for.

On Marathon, the build time for Macemen (maybe 6 turns in a good city) is trivial compared to the research time for Civil Service and Machinery (maybe 60 turns in a typical civ). The enemy's empire will be nothing but a memory long before they can get any effective counter to your force in the field. Similarly, later in the game, it's possible to get Cavalry + Bombers dozens of turns before the enemy, and smash all opposition for that time period.

Bottom line is that on Marathon, if you can gain a tech advantage, you have LOTS of turns to exploit it to crush your opponents.

[xxFlukexx]

You are correct on all of these things. Which is why people can get fast cultural wins on say quick speed, because there's so few turns and faster production/growth/reseach gives a peaceful cultural approach a much better chance of success since it is easier. Similarly, Domination is probably much faster on Epic and Marathon speeds than it would be on Normal speed.

There's also a slight difference between normal and quick speeds, quick speed gets 70% of the turns of normal, but most of the bonuses (research, building, growth) bonuses are at 67% compared to normal speed so you get a small 3% boost on quick speed.

It's nitpicking a little bit but I say you can't really compare a quick victory to a normal or epic speed victory, especially victory times. I don't think it's a balance problem more of a you can't compare the experiences between the difference game speeds. drank makes a good point, a 20 turn tech lead on normal is big, but a 20 turn tech lead in marathon is small but 20 turns or using Grenadiers or bombers before the enemy? Now that's huge, each tech choice is a big decision and neglecting your military is fatal as it may take 30 turns to research that next military tech.

[gdgrimm]

I think that's a good summary.

I had been running a steady diet of Epic then Marathon games. But recently (after doing the DAR), have went back to the Standard speeds.

I'm learning to worry less about Barbs. At Standard speeds (at least on Prince level), you seldom see barbs or large numbers of barbs that are at or above your tech level. On Epic/Marathon I always had a large war or at least several multi-unit battles with Barbs. On Standard, I haven't seen that yet, even on a very large map with lots of FOG.

Overall though, I'd say that I'm liking Standard better. There's less micromanagement involved since there's fewer turns.

One other note, on the Marathon games, you don't really get more units (their production takes longer), or better tech units (the tech advance is slowed also), you just get more time to use each unit. You don't even get 'more promotions' either, since advanced promotions only come from betting an opponents forces, and he's not making more units than on a Standard game, either. So I don't think there's too much of a balance issue.

[gdgrimm]

Having read Drank's post, I'd like to point out another thing.

Military build-up through upgrades may be MUCH more important in Marathon games. Remember, building that 'Maceman' army is going to take longer in Marathon, just like it takes longer for your opponent to come up with a counter.

But cash upgrades still only take one turn. And I'm not sure if they really cost any more (in my experience, one upgrade costs 200-300 per unit, on Prince, regardless of whether I was playing Marathon or Standard, but perhaps I should test that). Of course, with more turns, you can make a +3/turn surplus fund more upgrades to immediately use whatever military tech advantage exists.

I guess the AI has that ability, too, so maybe it's not quite such a huge thing.

[drank]

Originally posted by gdgrimm
Having read Drank's post, I'd like to point out another thing.

Military build-up through upgrades may be MUCH more important in Marathon games. Remember, building that 'Maceman' army is going to take longer in Marathon, just like it takes longer for your opponent to come up with a counter.

I agree that cash upgrading your units can help, but you also are not penalized as heavily in Marathon for the production of military units. According to CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml, most things in Marathon cost 300% normal, but training military units is only 200% normal. I have no idea if that's just a typo, or if it was a design decision for the new game speed.

[Blake]

One other note, on the Marathon games, you don't really get more units (their production takes longer), or better tech units (the tech advance is slowed also), you just get more time to use each unit. You don't even get 'more promotions' either, since advanced promotions only come from betting an opponents forces, and he's not making more units than on a Standard game, either. So I don't think there's too much of a balance issue.

You're partly wrong in your reasoning here. Altough you don't get more units, they DO heal much faster. This means a unit can indeed fight many more times during a given era. Of course it still needs to actually survive, but this isn't a large issue.

The healing thing is a pretty large effect. On Quick it takes about the same time to build a unit (in an average city) as to heal a nearly dead unit, while good cities will be pumping out a unit a turn. On Marathon there's simply no contest, only the very best cities can train units faster than the sick ones heal.
This in particular changes the dynamics of sieging a city, you can afford to take your time because you don't have to worry about reinforcements being trained to such a degree. On quick it's worth doing things like throwing catapults at invading stacks just to force them to stop and heal while you build new defenders. On Marathon that wont gain you anything at all, it's only worthwhile entirely destroying stacks, trying to slow them down with kamakizi siege just hurts you, by the loss of the siege units.

[Velociryx]

It should also be noted that the flip side of the combat coin holds true.

As has been pointed out, on Marathon, if you're ahead in tech, you can really burn your rivals for extended periods of time with some fancy new unit-type. Or, if you're slightly behind in tech, you can still make war effectively, given that you can achieve the "hallmark" unit(s) of the age, and feel confident that even tho you were behind the curve, tech-wise, your units will still have enough shelf life to hold thier own.

-=Vel=-

[Golden Bear]

Interesting thought this. I stopped playing Normal and went to Epic because I think that it is more fun and also because I thought that it forced me to be better with my tech tree. A player is less able to recover from poor tech research choices.

However, it is a good point that once I have a unit capability edge, I can just hammer the AI for a long, long time. Getting to cavalry (skipping knights even, maybe) ahead of the AI allows me to just wipe up on the AI civs. The only limit is keeping up with garrisons for all the towns I capture.

Presumably I could not do this as effectively on Normal speed. Hmm. I'll have to go try it again. The only problem is that I like the pacing of Epic better.

[joncnunn]

Myself, I found on normal speed that my worse enemy wasn't my oppoenent but was instead WW. Perhaps my Pacifism civic choice had something to do with it.

But does WW increase on Marathon in the same percentage or the same number of turns?

Originally posted by Golden Bear
Interesting thought this. I stopped playing Normal and went to Epic because I think that it is more fun and also because I thought that it forced me to be better with my tech tree. A player is less able to recover from poor tech research choices.

However, it is a good point that once I have a unit capability edge, I can just hammer the AI for a long, long time. Getting to cavalry (skipping knights even, maybe) ahead of the AI allows me to just wipe up on the AI civs. The only limit is keeping up with garrisons for all the towns I capture.

Presumably I could not do this as effectively on Normal speed. Hmm. I'll have to go try it again. The only problem is that I like the pacing of Epic better.

[Hauptman]

One thing about marathon though... the tech costs dont match the year's per turn. In standard or epic I'd have tanks around 1900. on marathon its around 1600.

The slower the speed the more time you have for combat and movement, so if you want an agresive warlike game by all means play marathon... but if you want to play an occ space race. you might wanna go something faster... except in this last occ (marathon) game I have cannons and redcoats at 1150ad so time will NOT be a factor in finishing a spaceship.