Org Mobile Site
Originally Posted by econ21:
This is true. I think Civ has always had one of the best AIs in the strategy genre, but it also has cheated outrageously at higher difficulty levels. The cheating is what makes it challenging in a way that most TW games have not been.
I think vanilla TW could cheat more in favour of the AI - a money top up is the obvious route; mods like EB use it successfully. Over in the Throne Room, we've been making sure AI factions have 50k or so in the bank in our M2TW HRE PBM. This, together with limits on player expansion, has meant that that AI has gone from fielding virtually no significant armies to fielding forces that can match our own (and indeed sometime out-tech us).
However, Civ does have some better AI behaviour than TW (as well as some limitations). Having played Civ4 recently, the two obvious ones to me are:
(a) In Civ, when an AI goes to war, it usually does so very seriously - it may mass several scarey stacks and slowly march halfway across the world to get at you. It can be quite frightening to see those looming out of the fog of war reading to take down a border town (and keep going). By contrast, TW still tends to go for penny packets, not just ruthlessly compiling a stack of doom and not going for the jugular, being content to just snatch the odd settlement.
(b) The Civ diplomatic programming is great fun - dealing with the varied personalities of the different factions (Ghandhi vs Shaka etc) makes that side of the game rather rewarding. In TW, AI diplomatic behaviour is often hard to make sense out of and almost never pulls off the trick of feeling "human" (e.g. you don't feel you have annoyed a faction or that they are your friends, etc).
This is true. I think Civ has always had one of the best AIs in the strategy genre, but it also has cheated outrageously at higher difficulty levels. The cheating is what makes it challenging in a way that most TW games have not been.
I think vanilla TW could cheat more in favour of the AI - a money top up is the obvious route; mods like EB use it successfully. Over in the Throne Room, we've been making sure AI factions have 50k or so in the bank in our M2TW HRE PBM. This, together with limits on player expansion, has meant that that AI has gone from fielding virtually no significant armies to fielding forces that can match our own (and indeed sometime out-tech us).
However, Civ does have some better AI behaviour than TW (as well as some limitations). Having played Civ4 recently, the two obvious ones to me are:
(a) In Civ, when an AI goes to war, it usually does so very seriously - it may mass several scarey stacks and slowly march halfway across the world to get at you. It can be quite frightening to see those looming out of the fog of war reading to take down a border town (and keep going). By contrast, TW still tends to go for penny packets, not just ruthlessly compiling a stack of doom and not going for the jugular, being content to just snatch the odd settlement.
(b) The Civ diplomatic programming is great fun - dealing with the varied personalities of the different factions (Ghandhi vs Shaka etc) makes that side of the game rather rewarding. In TW, AI diplomatic behaviour is often hard to make sense out of and almost never pulls off the trick of feeling "human" (e.g. you don't feel you have annoyed a faction or that they are your friends, etc).
Yeah the problem lies with the "default state" being a kind of war in TW states.
Not completely unrealistic for a Medieval setting, mind. Most wars back then didn't go to the end in a sense like wars today.
In Civ, most AIs don't go into full-scale war mode either though, you often see them having large stacks in their own cities, far from the front. To be honest, war in Civ4 isn't much harder than in TW.
It got a bit better with BtS but not by a huge margin, at least the AI more often creates larger stacks now, but this obviously also opens up collateral damage possibilites
Edit: Jambo, "As a long term modder of campaign scripts in Med II" you should've realized that add_money is a new command. You're referring to the console_command of the same name which however doesn't necessarily have the same syntax. I'd say it probably works (can't imagine their scripters screw so big time) but can't test it since I don't have the game.
Why don't you just try giving yourself money with it? It's a two-minutes' test.
Thread Ratings provided by
Thread Ratings (Lite) -
vBulletin Mods & Addons Copyright © 2025 DragonByte Technologies Ltd.
User Alert System provided by Advanced User Tagging (Lite) - vBulletin Mods & Addons Copyright © 2025 DragonByte Technologies Ltd.
User Alert System provided by Advanced User Tagging (Lite) - vBulletin Mods & Addons Copyright © 2025 DragonByte Technologies Ltd.
Single Sign On provided by vBSSO