I will agree that the AI seems to disregard the fog of war and hits you where you are weakest. As for the combat odds, while I believe that certain advanced units should be indestructible against units below a minimum level of obsolescence, I don’t think the AI cheats in combat. My strategy is to always wait until I acquire the “paradigm shifters” (riflemen -> infantry -> armor), pump out a considerable number of them (or convert existing), and invade my weaker neighbors. I’m generally operating with so many units that the combat overall turns out fair, though that doesn’t mean there aren’t individual battles where I’m yelling “BULLSHIT!”
I dunno if this is true or not: if you look at which of your rivals is getting the drop on you in the tech race, it tends to be those which haven’t spammed all over the place, but rather concentrated on building some big kick-ass cities.
You know, the newest update removes the requirement for having the CD in your system to play. If you have the game installed on a computer you can use, just install the 3.19 update and you can play.
To a point: if you liftoff as late as possible and spend that time maximizing population, you get a higher score than if you liftoff as soon as possible. A big, happy population is the biggest part of the score.
I went to try that. There is no little hole in the front (curses). Anyway I have managed to get a lot of work done and it has shown me how much rime I wasted sitting on my fat bum and playing Civ (badly).
It seems like a lot of the combat cheating can be explained by a difference between how human and AI players understand odds. A human player will probably never try a 20% attack unless they’re desperate, but the AI is (presumably) more willing to take them on the understanding that they will probably pay off one in five times. And an AI can confidently take hundreds of 90% chances without getting outraged when one in ten of them fails.
CivFanatics is a great source of information and yeah, they’re fanatics. They’re the type who actually will test out a couple thousand battles to make sure the odds are accurate. If one of their major geeks says combat is square, yeah it probably is. However, I seem to remember reading something about the drill line of promotions being misleading.
The AI probably does cheat in several ways, like big fat production bonuses, more starting units, free techs and all that on the higher difficulties, but it sure isn’t as obvious as the old days of Civ I.
I played a fair bit of Civ IV and I never once ran into anything like losing heaps of odds-on battles. Once some fanatics drilled the use of siege into my head I didn’t fight many offensive battles below 90% or so. You guys should try a succession game if you haven’t already. I went from noble to emperor in a couple months.
Yeah the AI does cheat, I’d launch 20 ICBMs and 19 of them will get shot down.
also unit building is definitely fixed, even late game an AI city will complete a unit just in time to make it harder for you to take the city.
I remember playing a game once where just for fun i wanted to destroy every improvement in an opponent’s territory and surround his cities with units, i even destroyed all the roads… somehow even after years of having absolutely nothing in his empire and no way to trade with anyone his cities still had large amounts of units in them, building more units and buildings and still getting research done advancing tech, tech trading was disabled for that game.
I think making a 100 vs 100 stack might work out according to the odds because maybe civ calculates the odds like dota, where a 10% chance of winning actually equals 1%, then the next battle a 10% chance actually means 5%, until by the 10th battle a 10% chance actually means 90%… I believe this only works in the AI’s favor, and does not apply to humans, because launching 100 ICBMs against an enemy with SDI should mean 15 of them detonate, however only about 5 actually will… I just tested it by launching 100 ICBMs, 17 of them exploded, spread out evenly over the launch