Newbie advice

from Elemental Forums

Hi, guys,

 

After getting familiar with a couple of games in normal difficulty, I tried a new one in challenging. Apparently, I started doing fine, looking at the power scores. However, all of a sudden Pariden declared war on me. My main army was led by 2 L20 heroes focused on magic and army buffs. They had good equipment and artifacts and the troops were mainly defenders and archers around level 14. The opposing hero was L17 and she had militias and spearmen. It seemed like a piece of cake. Well, no. For some reason, their troops had +280% bonus in defense, so even the militias had more than 25 defense. I was badly defeated. To make things worse, a few turns later she had a couple of dragons. Looking at their capital, it seems like they have a huge technological advantage (I calculate at least 50 seasons of research ahead of me), despite having just 4 cities against my 12 cities. I'm still wondering what did I do wrong. I started focusing on civilization research, then I did some militar and magic research so to build a better army and then I returned to strong focus on civilization, while steadily expanding my kingdom. To be honest, I find it very odd that Pariden could outmatch me so bad with basic troops and so few cities, specially that insane +280% defense and so absurd research advantage over me. Any clues?

Thanks.

4,415 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I played a long game with parden as an ally.  Towards the end of the game P s civ (mil, magic etc., went way up.  Seems  Parden does a lot of research (repeatable) in attk, def, and the magic one.  Eventually that leads to 'normal' troops with uber + adjustments to def,, attk, and accuracy. I noted, early in that game, that P focused heavily in building research oriented buildings in her cities.  Perhaps this?

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Thanks for your reply. I did another run and this time it was even worse. Despite a lucky beginning, getting a couple of sand golems and a wolf as rewards, so I didn't have to invest in an army for a long while, when I found the AI enemies they were even stronger. Several of them don't have but 2 or 3 cities, but their research is very advanced (they even have civilization research in the thousands, which I find weird having just a couple of cities). Perhaps there is something wrong with their research numbers, I don't know. And even the few AI civs that have less power than me, have at least 20-30 turns in advantage over me in research. I even tried rushing a lot of research buildings in my cities, but it was pretty much the same. What am I missing?

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

The AI do also trade tech amongst each other, but there have been compounding errors that gave them too much research as a bonus. It could be a bug in the research area of the AI.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Like Parrotmath mentioned, there's a bug with research. The AI opponents will trade research points almost indefinitely with each other. It's not so bad when there are only 1-3 opponents, but anything more and you will fall behind quickly.

As for advice: from your description, it sounds like you'd already played hundreds of turns. On higher levels, I find it easiest to crush (some of) your opponents as early as possible. Attack them with your sov + backup before they all get a chance to build decent armies and start harassing you.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Yes, that tech points trading bug definitely needs to be fixed and squashed!

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Thanks for your reply, that explain my problem, specially since I had 15 AI opponents. I wouldn't like to play with just 3-4 players. Is there a way to disable tech trading?

Edit: I found a possible fix in a forum:

 

carlopaggi


found this in ElementalDefs.xml :

<!-- ** Percentage of research points put towards completing a tech go into the generic tradable knowledge of that tech's category ** -->
<KnowledgeFromResearchPercentage>10</KnowledgeFromResearchPercentage>

question : might not be that 10 in percentage should be .10 as ten lines below:

<BaseCaravanTradePercentage>0.10</BaseCaravanTradePercentage>

this should explain the ludicrous values of AI tech trading.

i'll mod, check and come back.
Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Ildabaoth, reply 6
10
End of Ildabaoth's quote

If you set that to 0, then you would have 0 knowledge to trade period.