Is it harder to play with fewer civs?

[godot]

This question is prompted by the poll regarding each players favorite number of civs to play with/against.

I am a (relative) newbie and am playing King with 4 civs. Would it be easier or harder with more civs? With more civs would they be more likely to bicker among themselves and leave me alone or just cramp my plans for manifest destiny? Pick a question; any question.

[SlowwHand]

Generally speaking, the more players, the longer the game takes.

[Ralf]

Re: Is it harder to play with fewer civs?

Originally posted by godot
With more civs would they be more likely to bicker among themselves and leave me alone.

Yes, I believe so. They are more likely to bicker among themselves, and the HP is more likely to exploit that to his own advantage. Partly because of this reason Im against having too many simultaneously playing AI-civs in the game (6-7 max is more then enough!).

Lets say one actually can play with 16 simultaneously playing civs in Civ-3:
Now, the human player can reasonably, only have direct border-to-border contact with perhaps 3-7 AI-civs near the end-games.
The residual 8-12 Ai-civs are more likely to have direct border-to-border contact with some other AI-civ, rather then the human player. So, obviously - the risk of AI-against-AI backstabbings increases dramatically with too many AI-civs.

[Bereta_Eder]

I'd say it all depends on how good your building skills are.

For me playing with fewer civs is immensly more easy because I have time and space to build a kick ass empire in a short time and not be disturbed with ancient territorial pissings and the like.

On the other hand more civs means more early interaction which most of the times i beneficial to SCIENCE (Exchange techs 'till you have no more in the eraly game )

[finbar]

Depends on the size of the map and your intentions. That aside, if you're on a bigg-ish map with plenty of water, if you don't get Lighthouse you're pretty much stuffed for a long time.

[Alexander's Horse]

The ai seems to concentrate on building up 1 or 2 civs. If you have 6 ai civs in the game 1 or 2 will be strong, a couple will be so so and the last couple usually only build one or 2 cities and fall hopelessly behind. Less civs and the same principles still seem to apply but you get less weaker civs.

[East Street Trader]

For no good reason, habit I suppose, I always have 7 civs. Maybe I should try 4 or some other number just for variety.

But I doubt there is a definitive answer to your questions.

On a small map, 7 civs with decent sized landmasses you'll share your continent. That changes your early priorities. If the neighbour is an aggressive civ it is a losing game to let him build up. He's going to come for you so get your retaliation in first.

Now that's bad news because the time and effort you have to put into the war is time and effort that other civs are putting into getting cities down.

But hold on. How about you kick that sucker's ass but good? Well that's not so dusty. Maybe he doesn't have bronzeworking and your horsemen make mincemeat of his ill placed weakly defended capital. Better still maybe you get lucky with some gold from an early barb chief or a hut, bribe in his second and third cities and then get the capital too.

Now you've probably gained time because the cities and tech you get from the conquests may more than make up for the quite limited resources you had to put behind the war effort.

And you can come up with similar balance sheet pluses and minuses for being left in peace (not being able to exchange tech early because of isolation is a very bad drawback sometimes but getting to sea early can counter that and leave the long term benefit of peaceful expansion still in place).

So I guess I'm (boringly) saying that its all in how you use what you get.

[SlowwHand]

Thought you were talking MP, not SP that is boring as hell.

[Caligastia]

Re: Re: Is it harder to play with fewer civs?

Originally posted by Ralf
Lets say one actually can play with 16 simultaneously playing civs in Civ-3:
Now, the human player can reasonably, only have direct border-to-border contact with perhaps 3-7 AI-civs near the end-games.
The residual 8-12 Ai-civs are more likely to have direct border-to-border contact with some other AI-civ, rather then the human player. So, obviously - the risk of AI-against-AI backstabbings increases dramatically with too many AI-civs.

Not only that, but towards the end of the game the AI civs tend to ally against you if you are kicking arse. With so many AI civs in the game their combined might would probably be greater than yours...