The Best of the Best

[Gen.Dragolen]

Rough Draft

Vel,

I have prepared a rought draft using the changes you had suggested in your posts.

Most of the unit changes I made were based on suggestions from others and alot of my own view on how combat units should work. I figured that many of them were grossly underpowered considering the technologies involved.

Please go to the Quest for a Deeper Strategy thread and look for the posted file: Civ3Mod.01.071802vel.zip

D.

[DaveMcW]

Re: Re: The Best of the Best

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis
btw, if you want a killer AI, have you considered lowering the production bonus below 6 (the Deity level)? Has anyone tried it at 1?

AI cost 1 has finally been tried.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?threadid=66169

[Theseus]

I scanned it...

Maybe I need to read it again, but I am not blown away. Maybe I don't get it.

But there's something wrong with the AI civs. ("1450-Notice Arabia still lacks currency. A couple civs still lack literature.")

And the key move was an ROP rape.

Uh, where are the mounted units?

And what's the deal with the exteeeeeended period facing Muskets and LB?

Don't get me wrong, I think Bamspeedy is one of the most knowledgable and best players aroung... but that's just a weird, unit-fest game.

And, to DaveMcW's point, I didn't see a KAI, which was supposedly the point of giving the PB of 1... (in other words, Soren's suggestion has not yet been publicly tested, due, I suppose, to some of the limitations that Bam built into the game).

[Aeson]

The main problem is that the AI cannibalizes it's economy with units and improvements. The faster production just means it's supporting more 'useless' improvements and units. Deity suffers from this already to a large extent. The AI builds too many units so fast that it eats up potential income that could be used for research and upgrading. Those units don't really help the AI in most situations, and eat up their gold per turn. Eventually the AI ends up with a slowed tech pace (even though it still can be pretty fast) and a lot of obsolete units. Scaling production bonuses without a similar economic scaling exacerbates the problem.

There is an economic boost associated with faster population growth, but it caps out (size 12) and may be a problem in it's own right. It allows the AI even faster production in timeframes where it can't produce anything of worth.

Certainly giving the AI that much of a production bonus does introduce other problems in dealing with it, but bombardment is so overwhelmingly important in efficient warfare, and the AI so incompetent at using it (as well as military tactics in general), that all it really amounts to is killing more units. You see the kill ratio around 96-98% and it doesn't matter how many units the AI has, all it will change is the length of the warfare.

The limitations on creating a KAI are economic (gold for upgrading) and military tactics (bombardment, invasion routes, valuation of targets). As long as those are kept at the same level, the other changes that we can make in the editor (short of giving it supermen units) aren't going to help it in regards to how the game is going to turn out.

That said, Bamspeedy's game is an amazing, epic struggle. Flaws in the AI affect every game played, and will almost always give the player a route to victory, but there certainly are more difficult scenarios than others.

[player1]

I think that the real problem with that game was that it was played at Huge Map, which crippled AI later due to breaking unit limit.

It should have been played on standard map instead.


P.S.
And that some islands were too small, which made severeal totaly undeveloped civs.