Are all Conquests like this?

[alexman]

I finally started my first Conquest scenario yesterday. I had been saving the Conquests to enjoy after the initial C3C bugs were resolved, and 1.15 seemed like a good patch.

Well, I played the first 7 turns of the Rise of Rome conquest on Deity and then I quit.

Why?

I played as Rome, and on turn 1 I bought the workers of every civ in exchange for a military alliance against Carthage. They gave my all of their gold and workers in exchange for allowing them to help me with my war!

On turn 4 I met the Skythians, who had contact with nobody else, despite sharing a border with the Persians. I sold contacts to the Skythians to everyone for all their gold and maps again.

On turn 6 I conquered Carthago. Evidently, Carthage, like Rome, starts with an Army, but fills it with just one Numidian Merc and leaves it sitting in the capital. What could have been a great battle of my 3-Legionary Army against their 3-Numidian merc Army, ended as a slaughter of their single unit.

Are all conquests this bad? Didn't anybody catch these things before they were released?
If these things had been caught during the beta testing period, I bet we would have a better AI for the epic game as well.

I guess to get more enjoyment I needed to role play more and use fewer exploits against the AI. But when, for example, the capital of Macedon is Athens (should be Pella, BTW - Athens is not even in Macedonia) I was having a hard time treating the scenario as anything but another random game.

[Inverse Icarus]

in the napoleonic scenario, you could trade a MPP with other civs for a ton of their cities, and win on turn 1, without even moving a unit. well, you could in C3C 1.0, i dunno if they changed that.

the AI is horrible at the conquests.

[vmxa1]

After reading so many exploits I skipped the conquest.

[pvzh]

Well, they are all like that.

I played more: Mesopotamia, The Middle Ages, Age of Discovery. Each of them needs great amount of work to be anything enjoyable.

I spent lots of time rebalancing and re-editing all these scenarios, but realised that some of them are beyond any repair because AI just does not know how to meet objectives and cannot be made to meet objectives.

Out of all I think only Mesopotamia can be worked in something playable (without Wonder victory obviously) and, maybe, Sengoku (needs, removal of regicide, probably, have not tried it yet) because they are the closest to epic game. REX, research, smash units/cities. AI's are ok at that.

The Middle Ages have regicide which put all AI's in constan REX, and in part "idiotic" (auto-razing everything after death of 2-3 kings: even wonders and probably treasure units) and "crusade" (the fun part that undoable by AI).

The Age of Discovery is even worse. The whole point of the scenario is bringing treasures from the New World. After numerous attempts I failed to encourage and/or facilitate AI's to do so at any decent rate. I played it like 3 times to test out different stuff and each replay gave me 1-2 treasure-picked-up events by ALL AI and 0-1 actually brought to europe. Just sad, very sad.

Edit: plus all of them are littered with stupid mistakes like harbours are not seafaring, or unit does not have strategy selected, or does not have properties that it supposed to have for no apperent reasons (archers without 0-range bombard) etc.

[Rhothaerill]

Originally posted by pvzh
Well, they are all like that.

I played more: Mesopatamia, The Middle Ages, Age of Discovery. Each of them needs great amount of work to be anything enjoyable.

I spent lots of time rebalancing and re-editing all these scenarios, but realised that some of them are beyond any repair because AI just does not know how to meet objectives and cannot be made to meet objectives.

Out of all I think only Mesopatamia can be worked in something playable (without Wonder victory obviously) and, maybe, Sengoku (needs, removal of regicide, probably, have not tried it yet) because they are the closest to epic game. REX, research, smash units/cities. AI's are ok at that.

The Middle Ages have regicide which put all AI's in constan REX, and in part "idiotic" (auto-razing everything after death of 2-3 kings: even wonders and probably treasure units) and "crusade" (the fun part that undoable by AI).

The Age of Discovery is even worse. The whole point of the scenario is bringing treasures from the New World. After numerous attempts I failed to encourage and/or facilitate AI's to do so at any decent rate. I played it like 3 times to test out different stuff and each replay gave me 1-2 treasure-picked-up events by ALL AI and 0-1 actually brought to europe. Just sad, very sad.

Edit: plus all of them are littered with stupid mistakes like harbours are not seafaring, or unit does not have strategy selected, or does not have properties that it supposed to have for no apperent reasons (archers without 0-range bombard) etc.

Unfortunately the best way to enjoy the Conquests is through playing it with other humans (i.e. PBEM and MP) as they understand the concepts and have the ability to play to win.

I ran into the same exact things on both Mesopotamia and Age of Discovery with the AI not being able to cope with the win conditions that made for fairly breezy victory for me on emperor level. I started Rise of Rome (as Rome) but it's just one big slugfest that I've already won....I just haven't bothered finishing out to the actual win condition.

[Arrian]

I did just about the same thing: got everybody's workers on turn1, and got alliances vs. Carthage.

I too killed a 1xNumidian army in Carthago.

As for the other Conquests... I've only played a few, but the bugs/design flaws haven't inspired me to play the others.

I have played:

Mesopotamia: easy wonder victory, helped greatly due to getting a SGL from the first tech I researched.

Mesoamerica: kinda fun, actually. I didn't look at it with the same critical eye you have, so I may have missed all sorts of problems with it. But I enjoyed that one.

Age of Discovery: the AI isn't good at all at bringing the treasure back, which is the whole point, so it's almost sure to lose, unless it decides to just attack you. This did not happen to me. I also benifitted massively from the old gpt bug - I played it before the patches.

Rise of Rome - the problems have been mentioned. I still kinda enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I'd play it again.

All my games were down on Monarch.

-Arrian

[Fried-Psitalon]

I think part of the problem you may be experiencing (at least from a "challenge" aspect) is your difficulty level - I'm normally a monarch/emperor player, and I play the scenarios on Demi/Deity and enjoy a good challenge from them.

Most people I've talked to find the scenarios challenging once they jack the difficulty level up a bit. Want a worthy scenario challenge? The Maya on Sid in AoD - never seen it done yet.

[player1]

The one of the problems here is that you play of high difficulty level.

At such levels, AI always gets several bonus workers.
Unfortunatly those workers are always placed at AI's capitol.

For fair game I suggest waiting one turn and then start trading.

[player1]

One other thing.

There is no such thing as scenario AI.

All scenarios use standard random game AI.

That makes it tricky to solve some scenario specific issuses.

[Inverse Icarus]

AoD is an awesome multiplayer scenario, especially if there is a no war in europe clause

[player1]

It seams that trading in 1st turn iS BUGGY.

You can, as alexmen said, get AI to pay you for entering in war, for example.

Luckly, from 2nd turn, things go back to normal.

And consdering that AI will move his workers in 1st turn, I guess, that for fair game no trading should be allowed in

1st turn.


As for neighbours having no contact with each other, that probably since contact at start have only civs with

embassies. I guess some extra embassies should be added then for a fix.


Regarding Armies, that's probably weakness of AI.
Maybe it sent other NMs in exploration and then left without enough units to form an army. Who knows...

[WarpStorm]

A simple suggestion. Don't buy workers on the first turn. The AI hasn't had time to sort out it's affairs yet and thinks it needs the money more than the workers.

[Dominae]

Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica and Sengoku are all pretty low on the "exploitable" scale. Try those.

[alexman]

Because they are the closest to epic games, I guess?
I'll try them. Thanks.

Warpstorm, it's not that the AI thinks it needs money more than workers. They gave me their workers AND their money in exchange for an alliance.

Player 1, the workers are given to each civ in the player setup, so that's not related to difficulty level. This scenario actually gives zero extra AI starting units to all difficulty levels.

pvzh, the 'silly mistakes' are discouraging. It makes me want to fix the conquests before playing them, but that defeats the purpose. BTW, I thought they fixed the AI strategy flags in one of the patches.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by alexman
Because they are the closest to epic games, I guess?

Yup. As someone else already mentioned, the AI was not redesigned to play the more esoteric Conquests well. That's fine with me: I prefer epic games to scenarios.


Dominae