Devil's Advocate: Why shouldn't I get BTS?

[Wiglaf]

Here's my list of annoyances:

1) AI too passive

2) privateers are not implemented well:
a) AI seems to never use them
b) AI seems to not go after my privateers when it easily can
c) every turn I get this ridiculously large string of messages telling me how much gold each of my privateers has pillaged that turn; additionally I get a really, really annoying sound effect of gold hitting something.

3) Espionage is a little unwieldy. Aside from the bugs on marathon speed, theres a lot of micromanagement needed. I have to keep checking the espionage screen more than I'd like.

4) Apostolic palace .... is broken. I never seem to get to propose meaningful resolutions, and neither does anyone else.

5) UN and apostolic palace need SMAC -style council graphic, not a bland text box. This would take about 10 minutes to implement, and it is lazy they have still not done this.

6) Do I really need to know every time there is a bandit loose in someone's tile somewhere? I mean, it costs them 18 gold to get rid of the bandit. It's not like this deserves a spot on the text crawl.

7) Random events tend to be non-issues; they are easy, no-brainers a lot of the time.

8) Final frontier scenario AI sucks.

9) AIs spam corporations in all their cities. This is counterproductive.

[fed1943]

Because it is not here (yet).

Best regards,

[Shrapnel12]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
Here's my list of annoyances:

1) AI too passive

2) privateers are not implemented well:
a) AI seems to never use them
b) AI seems to not go after my privateers when it easily can
c) every turn I get this ridiculously large string of messages telling me how much gold each of my privateers has pillaged that turn; additionally I get a really, really annoying sound effect of gold hitting something.

3) Espionage is a little unwieldy. Aside from the bugs on marathon speed, theres a lot of micromanagement needed. I have to keep checking the espionage screen more than I'd like.

4) Apostolic palace .... is broken. I never seem to get to propose meaningful resolutions, and neither does anyone else.

5) UN and apostolic palace need SMAC -style council graphic, not a bland text box. This would take about 10 minutes to implement, and it is lazy they have still not done this.

6) Do I really need to know every time there is a bandit loose in someone's tile somewhere? I mean, it costs them 18 gold to get rid of the bandit. It's not like this deserves a spot on the text crawl.

7) Random events tend to be non-issues; they are easy, no-brainers a lot of the time.

8) Final frontier scenario AI sucks.

9) AIs spam corporations in all their cities. This is counterproductive.

1) Even when Aggressive AI is checked?
3) Except for the passive effects, I find espionage no more useful then in previous versions of civ, though I admit I'm still playing with it.
4) I too am having problems with the AP. In my current game, I built the AP. When voted Resident, I only had one choice for a resolution (To stop trading with Isabella). After that, I lost the vote as Resident, no resolutions passed, I became Resident again but never got the option to pass a resolution, and finally I lost again and the new Resident was able to pass a resolution to go to war with Isabella (which I had been trying to do all along).
7) Might not be such a bad thing.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
4) Apostolic palace .... is broken. I never seem to get to propose meaningful resolutions, and neither does anyone else.

And in my current game it went even worse. The civ that built it was the only civ in the world with that religion (out of ~15 civs), and 1000 years later it is still the only civ with that religion

While I do see how it still can be an advantage on several levels (other civs doesn't get the extra help it can give, and there's still a chance that this civ might convert other civs), but from a realistic point of view it doesn't make sense. Why spend lots of resources on getting all religion X civs unite, when there are no other civs?

[Wiglaf]

1) Even when Aggressive AI is checked?
3) Except for the passive effects, I find espionage no more useful then in previous versions of civ, though I admit I'm still playing with it.
4) I too am having problems with the AP. In my current game, I built the AP. When voted Resident, I only had one choice for a resolution (To stop trading with Isabella). After that, I lost the vote as Resident, no resolutions passed, I became Resident again but never got the option to pass a resolution, and finally I lost again and the new Resident was able to pass a resolution to go to war with Isabella (which I had been trying to do all along).
7) Might not be such a bad thing.

Aggressive AI does fix the problem, though it's necessary to switch to a custom game to play with it, unfortunately.

Espionage is very useful for poisoning water supplies and seeing civ's power graphs. Other missions aren't quite so good, though obviously the passive visibility is a huge advantage.

I'm not sure why the AP never amounts to anything in the 3 games I've played so far.

[Wiglaf]

One other cool thing about espionage is that it can be useful for stalling culture victories.

1) Use espionage to see who is going for a culture win -- you can tell because they usually are taking forever to research techs

2) AIs going for culture are going to be running Free speech, since it doubles their culture output. so, do the "civic influence" mission and force the AI into some other civic that isn't free speech. if you can do this consistently (AI will be able to switch back to free speech in 3-4 turns),you will be doubling the amount of time it'd take them to get a culture win.

The main reason I have reservations about espionage is that the AI is too dumb to do tricks like this, so it really can't use the feature for anything but destroying improvements.

[Shrapnel12]

Another fault of BtS is its complexity. Not the fact that it is complex, but rather that its complexity has been poorly documented by Firaxis. Most people just don't know how to utilize the new features well enough and thus they end up giving up and saying the new features are broken. I'm seeing the same frustrating aspects of diplomacy in the Apostolic Palace and Espionage, those aspects being options that don't really seem to be options. I'm tired of not being able to use options that are supposed to be available. Perhaps if we all knew what you had to do to get these option available, it would not be so frustrating, even if they were still rare and hard to do. Some examples of options I find frustrating are:
1. Trading cities in diplomacy
2. Spreading culture in Espionage
3. Most resolutions in the Apostolic Palace.