Damn You Blake!

[Dactyl]

I don't feel that those who responded to my post really read it carefully enough. I didn't say you couldn't win. I said that I didn't think you could win at Monarch without being constantly being at war. The Civ games have always been more difficult for builders. This patch just exasperates that situation when one of the purposes of Civ4 was to make the game more playable as a builder. If anyone wants to dispute that, please give me an example of a game played with the new patch that illustrates the point.

Secondly, I have no problem with Deity being virtually unbeatable, but there should be a gradual decline in difficulty below that. It seems that this new patch has broken this progression.

[binTravkin]

Dactyl, I've been playing monarch and emperor, though I must admit Im playing vanilla 1.61 plus blakes last modifications (which are also the ones in patch), not warlords.

If you're constantly being attacked, means you look as a prey.
Probably that gives you an idea what are you doing wrong.
It is not at all impossible to win a 'builder' victory on monarch.

Historically there has been no 'builder' civ which has built a warrior per city and survived..
Not that there have been many builder civs, but still..

And yes, the game is biased towards military solutions, but look around, that's just plain realistic.

Secondly, I have no problem with Deity being virtually unbeatable, but there should be a gradual decline in difficulty below that. It seems that this new patch has broken this progression.

It looks to me you haven't tried deity yet..

[Thedrin]

I didn't say you couldn't win. I said that I didn't think you could win at Monarch without being constantly being at war.

The old difficulty levels were designed with the old AI. You're not supposed to be able to win Monarchy with the new AI; not because you can't but because Monarch wasn't developed with the new AI in mind. There would be greater cause for concern if you were playing at Noble.

The Civ games have always been more difficult for builders. This patch just exasperates that situation when one of the purposes of Civ4 was to make the game more playable as a builder.

Pure builder strategies (and pure warmonger strategies) are only possible due to the inadequacies of the AI. Improved AI make both strategies less viable.

[Senethro]

Uh oh Blake, you've hurt someones feelings!

Excellent!

Now, perhaps with a ruthless strategic layer AI for identifying victims and declaring war and a focused tactical layer that makes the AI zoom to cities with stacks capable of taking them...

...I can hear the screams of the builders already.

[Swiss Pauli]

Originally posted by Dactyl
I don't feel that those who responded to my post really read it carefully enough. I didn't say you couldn't win. I said that I didn't think you could win at Monarch without being constantly being at war.

I played one 2.08 game so far and didn't have a single war and won by Spacerace on Monarch. I used the old trick of bribing the AI to war each other in the endgame.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Swiss Pauli

I played one 2.08 game so far and didn't have a single war and won by Spacerace on Monarch. I used the old trick of bribing the AI to war each other in the endgame.

I must be doing something wrong. I can never get the ai to go to war with each other. it's always redded out.

[fed1943]

Please, is it just the AI civs, or also the barbs who profit with

Blake'improves?

Not sure yet, but it looks to me barbs now know better where to

fight.

Best regards,

[Dr. A. Cula]

Re: Damn You Blake!

Originally posted by Rancidlunchmeat

On the bright side, my Jaguars who are running around doing Barb defense have five and six promotions from all the combat they've encountered.

5 - 6 promotions!? Are you playing a mod or something? I'm playing without any mods and my troops never get past level 4 (10 XP) fighting only barbarians.

[Dr. A. Cula]

Originally posted by fed1943
Please, is it just the AI civs, or also the barbs who profit with

Blake'improves?

Not sure yet, but it looks to me barbs now know better where to

fight.

Best regards,

You are probably right. Usually, barbarians just gang up on me, regardless of how many units I have on border patrol, but this happened to me yesterday: the first game I played after downloading Blake's patch was on the old Earth map from vanilla Civ 4. Despite playing the Chinese, I lost the Great Wall to Louie. After that, I started noticing an almost continuous string of barbarians passing by my north-western border, but only a couple of them actually turned around and attacked me (I had 2 axemen and 2 swordsmen patrolling the northern border - much less than what I normally build). Most of them just came from north-eastern Siberia and vanished into the Gobi desert. The mistery cleared a few turns later when I got a Great Merchant and sent him westwards: it revealed 4 axemen on the outskirts of the Persian capitol. Probably Cirus neglected border patrols in favour of building the insane amount of workers that were busy plowing Mesopotamia at the time my merchant passed by.

[Thedrin]

5 - 6 promotions!? Are you playing a mod or something? I'm playing without any mods and my troops never get past level 4 (10 XP) fighting only barbarians.

Jaguars start with two free promotions - combat I and woodsman I - so level 4 would mean having five promotions.

[Swiss Pauli]

Originally posted by Dis
I must be doing something wrong. I can never get the ai to go to war with each other. it's always redded out.

It shouldn't be that hard if you suck up to the Big Dog. He'll likely be quite happy to attack someone he doesn't get on with.

[Quillan]

It may also be a religious thing. I've played one game with the 2.08 patch as well, and in that game, Buddhism/Hinduism/Judaism/Confucianism were all founded on my continent. When Christianity was founded on the other continent, they all converted, so you had this great big 6-civ "We love our brothers and sisters of the faith" bloc going there. It took me a long time (and a lot of missionaries) dedicated to spreading Judaism in Alexander's lands to get him to convert. Once that happened, warfare broke out quickly. Alex got Judaism, Brennus founded Taoism (so he converted there), I later spread Judaism to Bismark, and left Saladin/Shaka/Tokugawa as Christian. They fought off and on for the remainder of the game. It's much easier if you can foster religious differences.

On a side note, the AI seems much more likely to use missionaries now. Ghandi was spreading Buddhism and Louis was spreading Judaism by missionary like crazy. I saw a lot of Hindu missionaries too, at least in my lands.

[Rancidlunchmeat]

Dracule: Therin has it right, they were Jags so they started with two promotions already. Its funny seeing ancient era warriors with that many promotions already.

Dactyl: Blake's AI improvements didn't break anything. You have to realize that AI integration is sloppy. Not only in Civ, but in everything. Take FPS's for example. You can play them on different difficulty levels. But moving up in difficulty levels doesn't make the AI any smarter. Usually all it means is that instead of having 2 enemies, you'll have 4, or 6, or whatever.

In Civ, its the same thing. Except instead of giving you more opponents, the game either gives the player bonuses or gives the AI bonuses, or gives the player penalties and the AI bonuses, etc.. The AI 'intelligence' routines don't change when you go from Warlord to Noble to Monarch to Diety, etc.

What Blake actually did was change their routines so they make better decisions. Blake actually made the AI more intelligent. This happens now in addition to the bonus and penalty structure that is normally in place.

What would really be great is if we didn't have the bonus/penalty structure and instead used the old 'dumb' AI routines for below Noble. Then on Noble, the AI switches to use Blake's routines (no bonuses or penalties) and then as you get above Noble (or neutral as I like to think about it), then the computer has to 'cheat' by giving invoking the bonus/penalty structure in addition to the 'more intelligent' routines developed by Blake.

This would make the lower level AI's actually 'dumb' and as you increased in difficulty level, the AI would actually get SMARTER! Because they would make better decisions. Since they can never make as good of decisions as a human can (simply because the routines would be too complicated), after that you have to start giving using the bonus/penalty structure in order to compensate for the fact that the AI can't process as much information or as many scenarios as a human can.

However, since its really complicated to make the difficulty levels tied to TWO different sets of AI routines, the better routine is applied to everything. If you can't beat the AI at one level, move down so you either get more bonuses or less penalities or so they get less bonuses.

Blake didn't break anything, and I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought he had with the title of this thread which was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

[Maniac]

Is Blake's mod only for unmodded Warlords, or would it work as well with for example the Chinese Unification scenario?

[Kataphraktoi]

Originally posted by binTravkin

Historically there has been no 'builder' civ which has built a warrior per city and survived..

Iceland