A pause for thought - What I've noticed about BTS

[Jvstin]

Originally posted by Kekkonen


Yeah, the Privateer is an outlaw who can only hide in cities. I was putting a couple of them on my water tiles to protect the workboats, but my good pal Asoka sailed in and blasted them to smithereens.

Asoka thought he was doing you a *favor*

[JimMac]

Has anyone seen an A.I. Privateer yet?

I am only on my third game but I haven't seen one yet.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Something I forgot to mention, but I have had a few random events so far - volcanic eruptions, discovery of precious precious jade (or something) in a gold mine, meaning even MORE gold from said tile...but certain cities of certain AIs get a lot more. Multiple mine collapses killing hundreds in the same AI city, usually.

• I completed a quest some time ago too. I was about to go for the Renaissance techs when I got a quest to make 9 Triremes before I got to the Renaissance age. It was a pain to put my tech off a bit, especially since I didn't WANT these Triremes, but I completed it. And got the nice option of my reward - upgrade all those Triremes to Combat 1, OR +2 gold for every Harbor I build. Nice to have the choice.

[Gibsie]

Not every harbour gets the benefit though... if you build more cities later on I don't think they'll get the extra harbour gold.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Well I didn't have ANY Harbors at that point, and they're still granting me the gold after, oh, however many turns 5 hours playing corresponds to. I'll look out for when/if that changes.

[jbp26]

Originally posted by Gibsie
Not every harbour gets the benefit though... if you build more cities later on I don't think they'll get the extra harbour gold.

i couldnt figure this out either. i got the same quest and some of the harbors i built afterwards got the bonus, some didn't.

[Jaybe]

Galleys & Triremes are now limited to coastal tiles -- they can no longer enter ocean tiles within cultural borders! Makes defense easier, but potentially quite limiting.

EDIT: Perhaps they can enter ocean tiles within cultural borders if they are YOUR OWN, but not if they belong to an Open Border or to a civ you are at war with.

[Jonny]

This is sort of a random point, but this seems like a good enough thread to put it in -- does anyone else think that the new modern road graphics look fairly hideous?

[Jaybe]

The what-to-build-next queue that pops up can be moved! If you could with Warlords, then

With vanilla, the event log could be extended in height. With Warlords (or somewhere in there), mine could only be extended in width. With BtS, it's still just in width.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Originally posted by Jonny
This is sort of a random point, but this seems like a good enough thread to put it in -- does anyone else think that the new modern road graphics look fairly hideous?

I actually like them better than the scrappy looking nest it used to be.

• Thanks to the ability to see techs being researched by the AI, I saw one change techs partway! I noticed my closest competitor was heading towards Scientific Method - damn, when did he get Physics? I was delaying that because of my Monasteries, Great Library, Parthenon etc. I quickly switched, and once I'd got it in a few turns (middle of a GA ), they switched to Constitution instead! Smart, or just very indecisive? You decide...
• My observation about my voluntary vassal - the Khmers - being considered by the game as my colony, is confirmed. My three off-continent cities (mid-ocean islands) that are as far from the Khmers as I am from Godzone, keep asking to join their 'countrymen'. Believable, if the Swiss canton I live in started to demand to join New Zealand...
• And that's not all that's weird. I have a city that's pretty close to the Khmers. Not near the border, but still, I get them asking to join their countrymen in the Khmer nation. With 0 cultural influence in the city, 4 cultural tiles from the boundary - and the closest Khmer city is on the verge of rebelling to join MY nation. The colony/rebellion thing DEFINITELY needs a bit of tweaking. Should I add this to the bug lists here and at CFC?
• Finally, with my opposition building Galleons now, I'm still having loads of fun with Privateers. I have one up to Exp 17 now, and with Drill IV. The +10% vs Mounted units is a bit silly, but it reassures me, in case I encounter Sea Horses. The ships seems to queue up in cities, 4 or 5 Galleons/Caravels at a time, then they come out in 2s to get slaughtered. With superior movement (as I mentioned in a previous post), enough Espionage to see which cities have which ship units and what their movement rates are, as well as a little effort to keep the Privateers out of range, it's easy to wait for them to come to you.

[Willem]

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt
And when I do click on that button, I only have the option of 'liberating' these cities to the Khmer, who recently voluntarily became my vassals. So perhaps you can't create a new colony civ if you already have a vassal?

I just read a thread where some of the civs being created by colonies are the same nationalities as the ones who created them. So it's possible to have two Americas or Englands in the game at once. Definitely a bug that needs fixing.

[MrWhereItsAt]

• In case there was any doubt, Airships are like any other plane with movement, rebasing etc. A shame. I'd have liked to have launched an invasion with many Airships blotting out the sky near my unfortunate target - very Red Alert 2.
• There's an odd message in amongst the causes for unhappiness in a Khmer city DEEP in my territory, and under considerable siege from my vastly superior Holy Roman culture. So there's the "It's too crowded" and "We yearn to join our Motherland" due to my cultural infiltration, as well as "We demand Emancipation". But there's a +1 unhappy from "Down foreign influence". A somewhat incomplete reason, to say the least. I did the Spy "Spread culture" ages ago in that city, expecting to see something happen, like a change in cultural boundaries. Instead, apparently, all it did was remove the points from my Espionage towards them, and I lost the ability to do much against them for a few hundred years. Perhaps this is the remnant of that.

[Blaupanzer]

AI privateers have shown up in my game, especially where I have no navy visible to them.

[JimMac]

Originally posted by Blaupanzer
AI privateers have shown up in my game, especially where I have no navy visible to them.

That is interesting. I have just finished my third epic game; or rather the Chinese finished me. In the 1990’s they surprise attacked me. (My first battle of the game. Hey, I am a peaceful builder type! They had two stacks totalling over 50 units. Wow! Though they hammered me, it was exciting to watch.)

Anyway, still no sign of A.I privateers in any of my games. I guess the AI doesn’t know how to use them properly even if it does build them. One further Privateer oddity: over two turns I couldn’t get my Privateer to attack a French caravel, It simply moved into its space in both turns. I’m not reporting it as a bug though, there must be a reason for it…even if it is just due to the wine I was drinking at the time.

My experience is that the attack AI is excellent. Certainly Blake doesn’t need to put any more effort into this at present. However...

I still find the governor AI not as efficient as it was in later build of BetterAI in responding to my ‘emphasize’ choices. Too often I find my cities have specialists assigned when I haven’t wanted them, and a city can go unnecessarily into starvation when it wasn’t following my emphasize food instructions.

[CerberusIV]

Well, I'm still playing my first BtS game but have noticed a few things. I never played Blake's AI so my comments are BtS vs. Warlords.

Governors do seem to be improved over Warlords - some of mine appear to stop city growth when the city is at it's happiness cap. Also, when the city has population growth set to off they seem to switch citizens around so that one turn the city is starving and the next turn growing to maximise what they get from the citizens.

Workers - an irritation here. In Warlords you could set your workers to automatically improve and they would do everythng including railroad all your tiles - now they don't unless you change them to the build trade network setting.

Corporations - not sure here. I have built Mining inc and it adds 8 hammers per city for a cost of around 11 gold (but you gain 5 gold per city in the headquarters city). Useful to boost production in selected cities but expensive to put the corporation in all your cities. I tend to use Environmentalism rather than State Property to keep up the health limits to run larger cities with specialists so I had hoped for a clear advantage from corporations.

Events/Quests - I like this. The events that add extra gold or whatever to a building do apply to those built after the event happens - so after a political scandal in the opposition party all my barracks generate 2 EP's - nice! I also completed a corporation quest and spread Mining Inc to 8 cities but the payoff was only an additional 10 gold per turn in the headquarters city.

Maps - I've never liked pangaea maps so the Big and small with a nice mixture of continents and large islands is really nice. It led two AI's to spawn vassals quite early on and has made for a different game.

I've not seen any privateers but the AI's have built a lot of airships. The Koreans were carrying out reconnaisance flights over my territory but seem to have stopped now I have built fighters.

Overall, Bts is far better than I had expected. A few things will need to be tweaked or just gotten used to but as expansions go this one was definitely worth the money.