CIV IV makes me sad

[ChITty]

Originally posted by Blake
ChITty, it's simple, the Noble AI's are better players than you!

If you want a quick hint:
In the city screen, there's these 5 maximize buttons. You want to set EVERY city to "Maximize Food, Maximise Production, Maximize Commerce". This doesn't do anything magical, but it does force the governor to assign the workforce to the best tiles - you might think that would be his default behaivour, but no, it isn't. Basically by default he's a moron and doesn't care if the city doesn't grow, he'll be happy to let a city with a happy cap of 8 to stay at size 3, growth in 20 turns... "Maximize Everything" forces him to emphasize growth, so cities will QUICKLY grow to their caps and thus be like twice as productive. You'll have to adapt to the faster growth - more workers to improve tiles, more whipping to kill off surplus population, more assigning of specialists. If you can then balance your (maximized productivity) empire to have most worked tiles improved at all times and very little unhappyness then you'll be well on the way to economic mastery. The AI can NOT do this, it uses default moron governor settings and it can barely improve its terrain.

This is helpful, thank you. Why isn't it the default behaviour? See, this is what I'm talking about... I don't remember past Civs needing these sorts of weird "do this otherwise your city will be retarded". Of course, you had to do more of that manually in the past, but with all the new tile improvements it's more of a chore now.

Maybe as time has progressed and I've gone from having a ton of free time to tinker with every tile and city in previous Civs, to having much less gaming time and needed patience to tinker around in an ever increasing micro-management game.

Even with that though, giving AI's the ability to make massive armies to make them challenging seems like lazy AI game design.

[Solver]

The Noble AI gets no extra help to make "massive armies". Its units costs as much as your units cost.

And you have to understand that the task of designing an AI is immensely complex. Creating a proper AI is harder than creating the rest of the core game. The Civ4 AI is very solid, but it does use individual units worse than humans can - which is nothing surprising.

[ChITty]

So if it's not unit cost, is it on the production side?

I don't have the time to test, but if you put a Human and an AI city side by side, and watched it over time, I'm betting they produce more units, all else being equal.

As everyone has been saying, the AI is stupid (it's too bad they didn't spend the 3d graphics budget on the AI), so how do they maintain tech and production if all their workers are so pathetic and their cities are being managed poorly?

[]LoL[Harm]

They actually don't maintain tech, they trade. Once a few AI's have alphabet they trade all of their techs to fill in their missing ones. This is why you will often find, when trading with the AI, that they mostly all have the same techs to trade you. It is also why many players refuse to give any AI's, alphabet in any tech trade.

But, believe me, all you are running into is what we all run into when we jump up a level in difficulty. I remember when I struggled on Noble. And now I'm struggling on Monarch. Just last night, as I pop rushed my 4th axeman and settled my fourth city with those 4 axemen as defenders, Monty declares war and bam, a stack of 6 axeman and 1 archer appears next to it and I successfully defend once, thats 4 losses to 1 win (given each of his axeman had an automatic Combat I, and many had Combat II, probably from a barracks he threw up). But it's not the AI's bonuses, it was just bad luck. And I blame myself for failing to have further defense ready when I knew I bordered Monty.

[padillah]

Originally posted by ChITty

As everyone has been saying, the AI is stupid (it's too bad they didn't spend the 3d graphics budget on the AI)

http://www.apolyton.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=154450&highlight=AI+cheats

http://www.apolyton.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=154000&highlight=AI+cheats

http://www.apolyton.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=150198&highlight=AI+cheats

Let's not do this again, please.

Suffice it to say the AI is as good as it's gonna get for a while. Stop worrying about it "cheating" or you'll drive yourself over the edge.

Maybe you just don't like the game. Sounds odd I kow but it's possible. I spent years looking for a turkey I liked until it occured to me: I don't like turkey.

Tom P.

[Qwertqwert]

I've lost with 99.8% odds multipul times, just extreemally annoying.

[Will9]

I once won a battle at 0.3%. The AI gets no combat bonus. The AI can win at 0.3% so can I.

[Thedrin]

Originally posted by ]LoL[Harm
They actually don't maintain tech, they trade. Once a few AI's have alphabet they trade all of their techs to fill in their missing ones. This is why you will often find, when trading with the AI, that they mostly all have the same techs to trade you. It is also why many players refuse to give any AI's, alphabet in any tech trade.

This is a good point. The AI seem to preference trading technologies between them over trading them with the human. A consequence is that the AI seem to be able to do as much research as you and afford a larger army.

Play a game with technology trading switched off. Assuming you're not doing so already, it'll probably make a big difference.

[padillah]

Originally posted by Will9
I once won a battle at 0.3%. The AI gets no combat bonus. The AI can win at 0.3% so can I.

Me too! I just sat stunned. I didn't know what to do next.

I got all anthropomorphic and started treating them like they were special.

I do the same thing with pop rush. I feel bad about doing it. Stupid, I know, but I can't help it.

Tom P.

[DrSpike]

Re: CIV IV makes me sad

Originally posted by ChITty
I'm so tired of full power superior units being killed by units two notches below them only because their AI controlled units. Why even bother with the percentages? I play on Noble and when it says 70% combat odds, that seems more like 30% odds of my unit winning... just retarded. I understand that there's a good possibility of loss... but after seeing unit after unit be destroyed by a weaker unit I just want to puke.

I stopped playing CIV IV for a long while because of the crazy AI advantages (until I got warlords tonight) and again I'm reminded why it makes me want to do a zidane to my monitor after playing. Noble is balanced my ass. Somehow the AI can build up gigantico stagnant armies while remaining technically advanced. Meanwhile players are redlining their treasuries to keep their tech up to speed.

Obviously I'm going to roll the difficulty down because I'm not interested in gimmicing the game and shoe-horning the game style into a A -> B -> C rinse and repeat strat. My point is that the medium difficulty shouldn't rely on giving AI advantages, it seems very cheap to me for what tries to be such a heady game.

You make me sad.

It has been proven time and again there are no AI combat bonuses. As for wider advantages the AI needs them, and you should easily be able to keep up in production and tech with a little practice. Keep trying.

[Badtz Maru]

Originally posted by Thedrin Lots of people enjoy playing below Noble difficulty level with no intention of trying more difficult settings. Good for them. If you don't want to learn how to play at noble then just stick with a lower difficulty level.

I was one of the people who never really cared to try higher difficulty levels. I don't think I ever did more than the 1st or 2nd difficulty level in any of the previous Civ games, except maybe for Civ3 - I seem to recall playing Warlord on that one.

With Civ4, I tried Settler and saw it was a non-challenge immediately...the AI is absolutely crippled on that difficulty level, and I can think of little reason to play it as it's possible to play with no AIs on a difficulty that doesn't give the player huge bonuses and get the sandbox/builder's playground while still having reasons to buy health buildings. I skipped Chieftan and went straight to Warlord, and played there for quite a while before feeling compelled to move to Noble, where at first I struggled, then felt 'competent', then got to the point where I would always win, no matter what map I played or with what starting conditions. I only recently started playing Prince, and I'm experiencing a game much like Noble was when I first tried it, except I know more of the ins and outs of the game now so I know what I need to do better.

So even a casual player, with a little practice, can get to the point where Noble is no challenge.

[ChITty]

Originally posted by ]LoL[Harm
They actually don't maintain tech, they trade. Once a few AI's have alphabet they trade all of their techs to fill in their missing ones. This is why you will often find, when trading with the AI, that they mostly all have the same techs to trade you. It is also why many players refuse to give any AI's, alphabet in any tech trade.

But, believe me, all you are running into is what we all run into when we jump up a level in difficulty. I remember when I struggled on Noble. And now I'm struggling on Monarch. Just last night, as I pop rushed my 4th axeman and settled my fourth city with those 4 axemen as defenders, Monty declares war and bam, a stack of 6 axeman and 1 archer appears next to it and I successfully defend once, thats 4 losses to 1 win (given each of his axeman had an automatic Combat I, and many had Combat II, probably from a barracks he threw up). But it's not the AI's bonuses, it was just bad luck. And I blame myself for failing to have further defense ready when I knew I bordered Monty.

Being I turn tech trading off because I found it lame how much the AI traded between them I know that's not why they're keeping up in my most recent game.

Again. I'm not jumping difficulty... I haven't played any other level since I got CIV IV the day it was released. I've had moderate success on Noble without doing my own tiling and modest (by this forum's standards) city management. The problem is, and why I stopped playing, is because it's not fun try to play a fairly quick game and have a huge AI army appear at your doorstep while I'm doing everything I can to keep my economy and tech rolling along (again, save the micromanagement).

In order to get a leg up over this advantage I have to shoot down the tech tree and if something goes wrong the whole game is shot (especially now with AI vasselage) or micro manage the snot out of the game to keep up with their production.

This does not strike me as fun and hence that is why CIV IV makes me sad.

As I said, I'll roll the difficulty down (because play time is the static variable at this point), but from what I was looking at it appears that there's no truly balanced AI setting because it appears the player gets advantages the next setting down.

End story: bonuses at the medium difficulty for either AI or player is retarded and is only used to hide AI deficiencies. I'd take fun over graphics anyday and unfortunately CIV IV development was focused too much heavily in the graphics department.

[Solver]

This game has an open source client DLL. Open it and check for the presence of any bonuses yourself .

At Noble, it's even. You produce units at the same speed that the AI does. If the AI overwhelms you with units, you're a poor player. When playing on Noble, I can easily create an army that will absolutely overwhelm the AI.

[ChITty]

Poor player because I don't micromanage the hell out of the game? Then yes.

Bonuses?

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=148571

[Solver]

You don't need to micromanage to overwhelm them on Noble or Prince.

As you can clearly see from the thread you link to, on Noble, AI pays the same price as you do for research, units, buildings, tile improvements and other stuff. The only bonus of any significance is cheaper upgrades, which is required to compensate for certain problems with tactical coding.