What is the worst thing in each Civ game?

[Immortal Wombat]

Abolitionists have 0 attack... and there wasn't a man-o-war unit. But whatever

Oh, and "AI" for all Civ games.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by moomin

Mark, back when Civ3 was new and Poly flame wars where hot, a gent called Analyst Redux did a tremendous piece of work on dissecting the Civ3 AI - I'm too lazy to search for it now, but do it if you're interested in the Civ3 AI and how it differs from previous releases. It was great stuff.

Thanks moomin, I'll try to find it about 37 pages back. . . Too bad the #$#@% search engine only goes back about 3 months nowadays. Maybe I can get it from "all posts" in his profile.

BTW, anyone who's interested, we could Desperately use comments on the Clash Diplomacy Model. See the link to the thread in my sig.

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
Abolitionists have 0 attack... and there wasn't a man-o-war unit. But whatever

This actually happened to me. I was attacking with two ships of the line (or men of war, I don't know what they were called, I uninstalled over a year ago), and the city I attacked was garrisonned by only 1 abolishionist. THe ship in the back row (fighting as a ranged unit) fired first, but failed to destroy the abolishionist. The end result of the battle was that one of my ships was sunk and the other was in the yellow by the time I killed that dang woman.

[Dauphin]

Civ1 - Everything relating to military units. (AI fortification/Battleship vs Phalanx etc)
Civ2 - Instances where the AI acquired stealth bombers without ever having researched writing.
Civ3 - Terraforming (lack of) and technology tree mutilation.

[DrSpike]

Civ1 was not balanced.

In Civ2 trade is too powerful. Lots of little bugs were never fixed as well.

Civ3 is a little mindless in combat due to the way stacking is organised. The tech model is also annoying.

SMAC: Crawlers and some air units were too powerful by far.

[moomin]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Thanks moomin, I'll try to find it about 37 pages back. . . Too bad the #$#@% search engine only goes back about 3 months nowadays. Maybe I can get it from "all posts" in his profile.

Ah, found it. God, that entire thread was great, but this post topped it all. If Civ3 is nothing else, it's still an object lesson in designing a game around the AI limitations.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=700693#post700693

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks for the link moomin, an interesting read. I don't think I saw it the first time around. . . I didn't read all of it, just the page the quote was on. Sometime when I've got an hour to burn, I'll go back and hit it from page 1.

BTW, we've designed several parts of Clash to make it easier on the AI too. But not by lobotomizing the player's choices . The economy already knows how valuable different econ development actions are in the local economy so that the AI (or the player) can automatically identify and pick from the best ones. The player can even issue orders such that they only want to build tin mines or whatever if the additional ones are providing a huge rate of return (FE 50%). That way you can automatically 'cherry-pick' the absolute best options if all you want to do is give the economy a little boost in just the right places.

[LDiCesare]

civ1: AI Diplomats popping out of nowhere where the aihad only put a fortified phalanx. No stacked combat.
civ2: ToT file format being not compatible with MGE. No stacked combat.
CtP2: Lousiest AI when unmodded. Useless trade (though the system looks pretty, it just doesn't pay).
moo: Starting position is too important.
mom: Lousy AI

[Gatekeeper]

Originally posted by Big Crunch
Civ2 - Instances where the AI acquired stealth bombers without ever having researched writing.

I second that motion!

And to that end, I've gone into the RULES.TXT file and made it so that dang diplomats and spies don't have as much power — usually by reducing their movement allowance and forcing them to respect ZOCs (but I also made them able to see two tiles instead of the usual one.

Gatekeeper

[alva]

Originally posted by moomin


Ah, found it. God, that entire thread was great, but this post topped it all. If Civ3 is nothing else, it's still an object lesson in designing a game around the AI limitations.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...693#post700693

A long time since I read it, must be one of the all time best threads on Apolyton.

Thanks

[Jamski]

Civ1 : Caravans (I mean it takes 100years to make this trade route?)
Civ2 : Caravans
SMAX : Crawlers
Civ3 : No Caravans/no hurring wonders with cash

Yeah, I missed a feature that drove me mad. What kind of sad sayk am I?

-Jam

[Optimizer]

And now, the number of posts here have exceeded the number of post in the "What's the best thing" thread.

Are you guys pessimists, or is it easier to find drawbacks than advantages?

[Jamski]

Originally posted by Optimizer
And now, the number of posts here have exceeded the number of post in the "What's the best thing" thread.

Are you guys pessimists, or is it easier to find drawbacks than advantages?

It's always easiest to criticise. This is certain. Or maybe there are so many good things, that we cannot pick one as the best in each game...

-Jam

[Dauphin]

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so therefore the best things of a game are naturally not the focus of attention.

What use is a masterfully crafted diplomacy, technology, and military set-up in the game if the AI is too dumb to let you appreciate it and there are no MP functions (*cough* Civ3 *cough*) to use it with.

[Nikolai]

See it as constructive(?) critizism that'll help the game to be better! After all, we all like the civ genre, don't we?