Difficulty Levels

[Exile]

Father Beast; thanx for commiserating. My own experiences w/deity level play have only been w/OCC mode. Nevertheless, those experiences parallel yours. Wiped out when they finally found me. How's life out in Utah, getting any snow? Or are you up in the mountains?
Hey, Exile.

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[This message has been edited by Exile (edited September 24, 2000).]

[Empress]

personally I prefer to play King level, right in the middle

[Exile]

Empress; Right in middle is where I used to play Civ1, the old game, and I enjoyed the setting, until I got totally bored with it. I kept on playing though, mainly because there just wasn't anything better. I would've thought that King would be the level most folks would want to play on, even though I've only played at that level a few times just to see if I could beat the machine. I did, (eventually) but it just wasn't as much fun as playing at a slightly less hectic pace on prince. However, I'm starting to get bored w/prince level play now, so I guess its inevitable that I'll join you sometime soon in King level play.

The responses from the forum participants have all been so positive! thanks.

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[SandMonkey]

I play mostly on Emperor now, which is a far cry from the chieftain i played on when i first came to this site (a year and a half ago). One of the differences that gets to me is the dates at which I finish... it got to the point on easier levels where I could be up to spaceflight before AD times! And now, usually on my first or second game on a level, I have trouble finishing before the time limit. I don't get as annoyed when I lose units on the higher levels, unlike when i played on the lower ones and I would flip out when I lost a battle I should have easily won.

[Shadowstrike]

Its wierd, but I can actually achieve more growth on Prince then I can on Chieftain.... Once you get to 60+ cities before AD times, it gets tedious.....

[Exile]

Sandmonkey (Great handle!) and Shadowstrike; Thanx for the response. It sounds like you guys have been playing using the Infinite City Sleeze (tm) method. 60 cities! Before when? I've also seen folks claiming 200+ cities at such-and-such a point in the game. Managing around 30-40 can be a chore, 200 sounds exasperating! Yeah, I used to flip out over unrealistic losses, but that hasn't been so much of a problem on Prince (and w/Civ2!). I did notice that a vet ironclad could sometimes beat a cruiser at King, which sorta seemed questionable, realism-wise. I don't mind the idea of cities out of control, not really. If that's all there was to it. I saw a thread around here somewhere where somebody claimed that they actually enjoyed (!) city disorder problems in deity! Hey, more power to him! What I don't like is when the game begins to weigh the combats WAY too much on the side of AI units. Talk to Ken Hinds; some folks apparently LIKE getting "hit with blunt objects."
My sensibilities are invariably as outraged when an advanced unit is killed by pikemen or something else as when, in Civ1, I would lose a battleship to a phalanx that was fortified in a city. There are some questions I'd also like to ask about those that use the ICS method, but maybe I should start a new thread.

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[This message has been edited by Exile (edited September 24, 2000).]

[Mark von Wagner]

200+, if done properly, isn't much of a chore. In the game I played where I had 254 cities, I founded about 45 early in the game. I got those cities to the point where there were no more buildings to construct around 1500AD, and started conquering the world. By about 1850, I'd conquered the world, and started improving the 150 or so captured cities. Since most of these cities had been improved by the AI, I didn't need to do much managing. Around 1900, I started my second wave of expansion, with all of my cities that had maxed out on population building settlers and sending them to found or join new cities. At no point did I have more than about 50 cities that needed detailed management -- most of the cities were simply building either settlers or Capitalization.