I have started maybe fifty games in Open Beta, on the Nation (default, middle) difficulty.

In 90% of those, some time between turn 40 and 45 the Green AI declared surprise war and attacked me with six to eight units, all of which were promoted and specialized. I don't understand how the devs think I'm supposed to have enough troops to defend against that when troops cost population, and I can't get population more than once every four turns. And even that level of population and production takes the time to build two districts to get set up and whoops now I'm out of time to build the eight units I need to defend my borders. 

This isn't interesting, or challenging, or fun - the AI simply takes their massive production and technology head start and wallops me before I can even begin. There's no diplomacy I can offer him, no tribute I can pay to make him go away, no chance to hire mercenaries, no chance to even build a defense. Just consistently 50 turns and game over because I'm wrecked. 

I have had one game in which Green somehow got distracted or I skirmished enough of his tribe before it formed that he couldn't get his act together. In that game, I rolled to victory without any of the other AI even trying to attack me, and by turn 100 I was ages ahead of everyone else. Which also isn't interesting, or challenging, or fun. 

In addition:

* Era pacing is terrible, with technology lagging terribly behind era/civ choices. Stars are easy to get, technologies are horribly expensive, and as a result by late game of the one game I survived, I was entering the Early Modern era and just discovering boats that might survive the ocean. This also make early game specialty units for several civs completely laughable - the Zhou heavy chariots require the tech for copper, horses, and having settled areas that have both of those and you'll never do that before an AI neighbor rolls you over.

* Influence pacing is also terrible, with it being incredibly dear for the first eighty turns and then simply useless after that when your borders are hemmed in and you have all of your civs. I had ten thousand influence in the bank at the end of that one game because there had been nothing to spend it on for dozens upon dozens of turns. Which also meant that influence-based civs, or influence-providing projects, are simply not worth your time.

Well, the game is not as simple as it looks. There is immediate tension between settling down and starting the counters, OR continue to hunter/gather to increase population before becoming "civilized". If you favor delaying the settling, and are careful and strategic with your scouting/hunting/gathering, you will have enough population to earn agrarian the moment you switch to Ancient; but, more importantly, you will have enough population to hold Vlad, and even someone from the East, with armies of scouts until you have enough tech to start producing proper military units.

This ain't SimCiv 6, my friend. And I hope it never becomes it.

Just think, go slowly, think some more. The early game tension is brilliant.

Choices, choices...

I'm not fully disagreeing with your complaint, but much of it is related to the specific circumstances of this scenario.

In my very first game, I hounded Green from the beginning and had a very successful run (I saw he was warlike and thought, well you die then). After many more playthroughs, I've found that anytime I fully attacked Green before he started, it was easy. If I let him live, I had a harder time (though not necessarily because he attacked me); it's just he has some valuable land and it eliminates your second front and you can concentrate fully on the east.

However, if you kill all his units before he starts, he'll always respawn a 4 stack for free. So one time, I just let that four stack through my land so he could settle east of me. Then he got wrecked by purple. Another time I did that, he coexisted peacefully with purple. There was some randomness.

Anyway, as you can see, all of this is related to the scenario setup.

Aristos wrote:

Well, the game is not as simple as it looks. There is immediate tension between settling down and starting the counters, OR continue to hunter/gather to increase population before becoming "civilized". If you favor delaying the settling, and are careful and strategic with your scouting/hunting/gathering, you will have enough population to earn agrarian the moment you switch to Ancient; but, more importantly, you will have enough population to hold Vlad, and even someone from the East, with armies of scouts until you have enough tech to start producing proper military units.

This ain't SimCiv 6, my friend. And I hope it never becomes it.

Just think, go slowly, think some more. The early game tension is brilliant.

Choices, choices...

So, the idea is that you should delay moving into your first Era in order to continue to accumulate resources to be able to survive Green's massive advantage. If that's the strategy, so be it.

But nowhere does the game suggest this. In fact, the tutorials and help boxes and prompts all do the exact opposite - they push the player into choosing a first Era civ right away.

That's a pretty glaring design flaw, wouldn't you say? That the way the game tries to teach you to play is the exact opposite of how you actually need to play to be successful? It'd be like me teaching you Monopoly and telling you that your first goal should be to amass deeds of as many different colors as possible. The game should at least prompt the choice, let you know the options and the advantages and disadvantages instead of pushing you forward with constant glowing symbols and end-of-every-turn "are you ready yet???????" prompts.

SeekTruthFromFacts wrote:

jmc003 wrote:

I have started maybe fifty games in Open Beta, on the Nation (default, middle) difficulty.

.... Just consistently 50 turns and game over because I'm wrecked. 

* Era pacing is terrible, with technology lagging terribly behind era/civ choices. Stars are easy to get, technologies are horribly expensive, and as a result by late game of the one game I survived, I was entering the Early Modern era and just discovering boats that might survive the ocean. This also make early game specialty units for several civs completely laughable - the Zhou heavy chariots require the tech for copper, horses, and having settled areas that have both of those and you'll never do that before an AI neighbor rolls you over.

On the first point: the evidence suggests that you should play at a lower difficulty level. There's no shame in that: I am playing on Hamlet because that's the right level for me. Other players are surviving at Humankind level so it is possible.

No, the evidence is the opposite. If I can get past the initial fight with Green, the rest of the game is a cake walk with no pushback. And the initial fight with Green isn't a matter of "be better, n00b", it's literally impossible if you actually follow the tutorial. You can't get the army up to push back on Green if you don't spend extra turns in Neolithic against the game's advice. You can't produce what he produces because he simply gets a massive production and tech bonus at the start so that, again - 40 turns in, not nearly enough time to set anything up - he has a massive army and an immediate need to smash you. And it's massively bad design to teach the game one way when the game is only winnable in a different way. It needs to be fixed.

I did not say it is a meta. I said it applies to this scenario, but I am sure it can be also done if settling as soon as possible. I don't think the game "pushes" you towards anything, and if anything, it pushes you to at least consider "one more turn" of hunting-gathering to engross the tribe... the map itself is teasing you with that all the time, with food resources tempting you at every step. In any case, it was harder for me to stop jumping into all those potential new men when it was time to settle.

I think the initial tension is in a good position. In a random game, where you may have different neighbors and not as close, we will have to find the strategy. Do you go for a bigger tribe but forego being able to chose your preferred first culture? Can you?

I don't see any meta. Not yet anyways.

The thing about delaying the ancient era is having to pick the civs that the AI left.
And the pace is definitely wrong. My second run I went full science. By the end of the game, I was producing 2300 science per turn, but I got just one of the first techs from the industrial era. And of course my production and money income overall were bad. I just survived by being the nice guy with everybody, because if I had to build units as well, it wouldn't work. 

My era stars earning was bad too, specially in the late game - I end up in 3thd. It seems that killing stuff gives you more stars faster than doing research or expanding with outposts.
In comparison with my first run, that was more balanced overall, focusing more on production and food, going for war here and there... I didn't fall that behind in science (I didn't build a single research district) and got era stars more easily - and end up 1st. 

And this is just about the pace. The diplomacy is too simple overall, the vassal system is broken, trading is too susceptible to war, units retreat forward (?!) around your army... 
Its a great game, with lots of potential, but there are a lot of things to fix. So saying "play on a lower difficulty" is just a dumb simplification.   

Aristos wrote:

I did not say it is a meta. I said it applies to this scenario, but I am sure it can be also done if settling as soon as possible. I don't think the game "pushes" you towards anything, and if anything, it pushes you to at least consider "one more turn" of hunting-gathering to engross the tribe... the map itself is teasing you with that all the time, with food resources tempting you at every step. In any case, it was harder for me to stop jumping into all those potential new men when it was time to settle.

I think the initial tension is in a good position. In a random game, where you may have different neighbors and not as close, we will have to find the strategy. Do you go for a bigger tribe but forego being able to chose your preferred first culture? Can you?

I don't see any meta. Not yet anyways.

But there isn't a choice! If you don't spend extra time in the Neolithic, you're screwed, plain and simple. You can't possibly build up fast enough in Classical to offset the AI's advantage of six to eight advanced promoted units. You can talk about "this scenario" all you want, but every single game might have an aggressive AI on the other side of territory you haven't explored, and so you will always have to spend extra time in the Neolithic in order to build up the strength to fight off a potential threat. The only argument is how much extra time you need to spend, and how many tribes and influence you need before you can be safe.

Then on top of that, everything in the UI design, everything in the tutorial explanations, everything in the way the game claims to work pushes you to jump ahead ASAP. And again, that's bad design. That's stating your game is one thing, when the only way it's playable is in a completely different direction. 

And then, on top of even that, once you smash your enemy early on the rest of the game has no challenge, because the AI isn't good enough to keep up with a decent player, it's only good at taking a starting stack of benefits and smashing you before you get ahead.

There are a lot of interesting mechanics, and a lot of interesting abilities, but the fact that the AI starts as massive overkill where you have to delay the actual gameplay they've advertised in order to hit goodie huts until you're ready in order to survive, and then once you've survived the early game the AI quickly rolls over and becomes useless, makes this a really unfun game.

jmc003 wrote:

Aristos wrote:

I did not say it is a meta. I said it applies to this scenario, but I am sure it can be also done if settling as soon as possible. I don't think the game "pushes" you towards anything, and if anything, it pushes you to at least consider "one more turn" of hunting-gathering to engross the tribe... the map itself is teasing you with that all the time, with food resources tempting you at every step. In any case, it was harder for me to stop jumping into all those potential new men when it was time to settle.

I think the initial tension is in a good position. In a random game, where you may have different neighbors and not as close, we will have to find the strategy. Do you go for a bigger tribe but forego being able to chose your preferred first culture? Can you?

I don't see any meta. Not yet anyways.

But there isn't a choice! If you don't spend extra time in the Neolithic, you're screwed, plain and simple. You can't possibly build up fast enough in Classical to offset the AI's advantage of six to eight advanced promoted units. You can talk about "this scenario" all you want, but every single game might have an aggressive AI on the other side of territory you haven't explored, and so you will always have to spend extra time in the Neolithic in order to build up the strength to fight off a potential threat. The only argument is how much extra time you need to spend, and how many tribes and influence you need before you can be safe.

Then on top of that, everything in the UI design, everything in the tutorial explanations, everything in the way the game claims to work pushes you to jump ahead ASAP. And again, that's bad design. That's stating your game is one thing, when the only way it's playable is in a completely different direction. 

And then, on top of even that, once you smash your enemy early on the rest of the game has no challenge, because the AI isn't good enough to keep up with a decent player, it's only good at taking a starting stack of benefits and smashing you before you get ahead.

There are a lot of interesting mechanics, and a lot of interesting abilities, but the fact that the AI starts as massive overkill where you have to delay the actual gameplay they've advertised in order to hit goodie huts until you're ready in order to survive, and then once you've survived the early game the AI quickly rolls over and becomes useless, makes this a really unfun game.

Eh. I play on empire or civilization difficult and usually rush to the Ancient era, but Vlad was only an issue once. In that one run, I was focusing on early science and didn't prioritize units. Every other occasion Vlad ended up my vassal. It seems more like you messed up your city/unit management more so than extreme difficulty. 

I've never played the tutorial, so I can't comment on that, but I disagree that the game pushes you to advance. Tho I rush to the Ancient Era, I often wait 10+ turns more than necessary to advance from there and the only times I don't are when I feel one of the AI might take the culture I need for that run. The game never pushes you. It does, however, remind you that it is after all a competition and if you dally too long your desired option will be taken. You personally feeling rushed isn't a reflection on the game's design. Have some patience.  

I quite enjoy the starting age. The fact you refer to it as just 'hitting goodie huts' kind of explains why you struggle to get good starts. Use that time to properly scout the land, figure out where the nearest AI are, plan your empire out. It's a great addition to regular 4x gameplay imo. 

I mostly agree with the rest of your points in regards to pacing needing A LOT of work and AI turning into target dummies late game. 

There is two ways to deal with Vlad.

Option 1 is to go south in Neolithic and build your capital there.
Then rush vlads city immediately while also killing his hunting parties.

If you do it will you wills stand with 4 scouts in front of his city the moment it's founded. Siege it immediately and starve him out.

Option 2 is to shut down his demands every time and when he declares war just surrender.
This will result in you only loosing some gold and a forced peace.

And yes, the AI is terrible in long-term play.