I have sunk around 53 hours into Lucy OpenDev. After many games, I thought to myself "wonder if it's possible to win with only the Neolithic tribe." So I gave it a shot, I fully expected to lose considering the AI opponents on the other continent that I could not reach without the sailing tech. But to my surprise... I actually won.

This image is taken from turn 149 right before the final turn. At this point in the game the framerate was dropping because I had so many armies of Tribe units as shown in the image below.

My strategy doing this challenge was to ensure that the AI players on my continent couldn't pick a culture and create a single city, and in general deny them from getting any fame points. At first I simply hunted them down, and pillaged any outpost they made as soon as they sprung up. But eventually I figured out that instead of essentially spawn camping them, I could simply trap their only army into a corner by surrounding them as pictured below. They could not retaliate because they did not have any diplomatic war desire.

I fully expected my plan to be foiled by the AI picking a culture on the other continent. But for some reason that did not happen. Its strange. I know the AI is capable of advancing to the Ancient Era before the player can. It has happened in a few of my other games. I suspect that only applies to the AI on the starting continent, and the AI on the other continent can only advance after the player does so first. That, or the framerate dropping might have messed up the code or something.

In conclusion, this challenge is pretty fun, and I recommend everyone reading this give it a try before the OpenDev ends. For any of the dev's reading this, I think it would be cool if in the future it would be possible to actually seriously win the game with only the Neolithic tribe, without any cheese strats or weird AI behavior required.

Looks like an oversight in the coding that made the AI not transition unless the player transitions.

Currently there seem to be a bug to make players cannot really pick AI difficulty. If the AI refused to advance into next Era, it is very likely that you are actually playing with Easy AI. Try to click through every difficulty and then land on the difficulty you want, the AI should advance into next Era fairly quick - usually around turn 10 in the real Normal and under turn 10 in the real Serious.

alQamar wrote:
read here why the current state does make sense, it will not affect players that play a regular or fast pace, so imho the gameplay is not negatively affected and no change needed. 

It is not about making sense or changes. The point is the game does have difficulties in which the AI will advance into next era before the player. If you don't want to play a stressed game you can always click the difficulty to easy.

ok then lets have the agreement on easy / normal the AI will not advance until the player does, and the higher difficulties you are playing against the time :) 

so the thing is that AI will only progress to the next era if you pick the Serious difficulty.

still picking the difficulty is bugged. apparently you have to first go select the easy difficulty, then the normal difficulty and only after that you can pick the serious difficulty and actually get serious AI oponents.

try this tactic on serious and lets see how it plays out!

Think it's a poor decision to hold back the AI on easier difficulties when it comes to aging up. The entire deterrent to not staying in the neolithic and setting up a ton of outposts is the chance a rival empire techs and beats you with their superior forces, which doesn't happen here.