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Back in Civ2/Civ3 days, the way to win was to implement Infinite City Spam. One reason this worked was the fact that cities itself had zero maintenance but many buildings cost money. As a result, it was cheaper and faster to build more cities than to grow a city and build buildings since "building" new cities had zero cost while until population grew large enough to justify it, buildings cost money!
With Civ4, this changed to a much better mechanism. Now buildings cost zero but cities themselves cost money. Therefore someone with tons of villages will be crippled while a more balanced city spreading approach will succeed. It was common to have like 20+ core cities in Civ2/3 whereas in Civ4, 8 is a common optimal starting number.
Civ4 also attempted to reduced the number of units. For the most part Civ4 SoDs are smaller. But it looks like BTS has taken a step backward.
The problem is that there isn't a good game mechanism to reduce military spamming. You can build massive SoD even in the ancient era out of all proportion to your Civ's total population and economy. The new AI at aggressive settings remedies this in the same way Civ3 tried to remedy ICS, by making the AI be better at IMS!
Maybe some players love massing and building hundreds of units and facing AIs with hundreds of units. But when military unit numbers are so enormous, it dwarfs all other aspects of the game and reduces Civ to that ancient wargame called "Empire" (in which cities only built military unit after military unit).
Some people will say, well just turn off aggressive AI but that misses the point. NO ONE humans or AIs should be able to afford such disproportionately huge SoDs to begin with!
The game would be much better if unit maintainence and such were done so that it became impractical to have huge standing SoD armies without bankrupting your nation. Think North Korea here. A nation of 20million with 1million man army, it is starving and bankrupt with crumpling civilian infrastruture as it tries to maintain armed forces much larger than a small nation like that can afford. Yet in Civ, we are building massive SoDs in the ancient era out of 2 cities with 2-pop each.
Perhaps a mod is the only way but I would have liked to have seen BTS fix the IMS problem. Instead with aggressive AI, it looks like Civ3 style massive hundred-man stacks all over again!
With Civ4, this changed to a much better mechanism. Now buildings cost zero but cities themselves cost money. Therefore someone with tons of villages will be crippled while a more balanced city spreading approach will succeed. It was common to have like 20+ core cities in Civ2/3 whereas in Civ4, 8 is a common optimal starting number.
Civ4 also attempted to reduced the number of units. For the most part Civ4 SoDs are smaller. But it looks like BTS has taken a step backward.
The problem is that there isn't a good game mechanism to reduce military spamming. You can build massive SoD even in the ancient era out of all proportion to your Civ's total population and economy. The new AI at aggressive settings remedies this in the same way Civ3 tried to remedy ICS, by making the AI be better at IMS!
Maybe some players love massing and building hundreds of units and facing AIs with hundreds of units. But when military unit numbers are so enormous, it dwarfs all other aspects of the game and reduces Civ to that ancient wargame called "Empire" (in which cities only built military unit after military unit).
Some people will say, well just turn off aggressive AI but that misses the point. NO ONE humans or AIs should be able to afford such disproportionately huge SoDs to begin with!
The game would be much better if unit maintainence and such were done so that it became impractical to have huge standing SoD armies without bankrupting your nation. Think North Korea here. A nation of 20million with 1million man army, it is starving and bankrupt with crumpling civilian infrastruture as it tries to maintain armed forces much larger than a small nation like that can afford. Yet in Civ, we are building massive SoDs in the ancient era out of 2 cities with 2-pop each.
Perhaps a mod is the only way but I would have liked to have seen BTS fix the IMS problem. Instead with aggressive AI, it looks like Civ3 style massive hundred-man stacks all over again!
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