I've been ignoring this game ever since I heard it would be a scaled-back Civ, which in my view is sacrilege for a series which epitomizes extreme complexity. And lo, it's not only dumbed down -- it also, apparently, plain simply sucks.
TORUMASUTA wrote:I'm getting frustrated with Civilization: Revolution, and I wanted to know if things like this are common.
Basically, I'm playing in Warlord difficulty, which is the second of the five difficulties, and the AI is unbalanced to the point of it being some sort of joke. In the regular game, the AI opponents don't seem to recognize how territory works and don't really settle area in the early game beyond one or two additional cities, so by the time they declare war on you you already have four or five good cities on their border before they attack you. In addition, they don't really seem to understand how naval units work, or how you can explore using naval units to get ancient artifacts from islands, or how to settle another continent, or how to attack another continent; you really only have to worry about being attacked by guys on your own continent for 75% of the game, at which point you have to make a light naval effort to defend yourself (and you can get away with not doing that if you have good defensive units anyway).
The thing, though, is if you play a scenario map on which the world is one continent, then the AI can find out where you are easily, and then they attack you--as one unit.
It was just crazy the last game I played--I knew there would be trouble if I played like I normally did, and built my cities close together, circling the wagons so to speak, and put an emphasis on defense; I built barracks to get these guys as veterans which helps a lot. At Warlord difficulty, you get a 50% bonus to attack and defense, so with the Veteran bonus you have extremely strong units.
The problem, though, is that Every. Goddamn. Civilization. decided I was worth attacking. I literally had nothing else to give them, so they kept demanding my Great Builder which I got early on, and all four of them moved, as a single unit, to attack one of my more important coastal cities. Now, this is a game where the AI attacks for no reason; the default attitude is in fact war, and the other side will only accept peace for bribes or they're losing, and sometimes they declare war BECAUSE they're losing. The problem is, this only seems to be you they do this with. The Indians (fuck you, Gandhi) have the strongest economy in the game, and they're attacking me, and instead of attacking the Indians, the Zulus (strongest military) decide to attack me alongside the Indians. The Chinese are nearly dead after a desperate struggle by myself where I sent the one army I could spare to kill most of their civilization; I had a fully upgraded unit (+18 battles) before I finally succumbed to a single Warrior, of all things. Down to their last city, they're STILL at war with me, and no other civilization even THINKS about declaring war against Mao, when they could capture his capital in a second. The English nearby have the most territory, the most culture, and are equal in technology with me, so they're ahead of me in the game, and they're at war with nobody; the Chinese capital is nearly defenseless and right next to their border, but instead they send units to pacify me.
It just got ridiculous when one of my coastal cities got attacked. It became like a goddamn clown car. All four civilizations had fortifications around the city, never once attacking each other, all focused on attacking this ONE city. If they each attacked a different city, I would be okay; if only two people attacked this one city, I would be okay. But all four are working in unison to attack one city at a time. It's ridiculous.
The game doesn't allow for alliances, at all, and you can only tell someone else to fight another civ for a huge bribe; yet all the other four guys are working together, know what city they're attacking together, all four content to sit in fortifications and slowly attack and never think, hey, that one unit of the other guy's is weak, let's off him.
Basically I think the AI is unbalanced because they couldn't get the computer to use naval units early in the game for that difficulty setting, and set them all to "hate the fucking guts out of the player" and "we the AI are a hivemind" to try to make up for this, and this works when the random map generator follows the usual guidelines; when you play a scenario where the world is a Pangaea shape, though, their stop-gap AI tendencies become more apparent and unfair. There's no way I can win, no way I can get these guys to make peace, and each of them is already winning in some way so that my civ isn't a threat (or as weak as) one of the other opponents. There's no reason I'm drawing agro, or whatever the term is, from these guys other than someone thought it was a clever way to balance the difficulty.
I want to move up to the next difficulty, because Warlord is usually TOO easy, but I also don't want to play the game and find, surprise, there's a land bridge between the two continents and now the five-way race is Me vs Them.
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=16877
