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Comment by a1371 | Hacker News Reader

0AD gave me an insight about how exponential systems work. The game's bot difficulty is essentially a multiplier on the resources the bot harvests. Most people find the bot very hard to beat when they start playing, even at the lowest difficultly. Everything starts out evenly but all of a sudden the bot becomes impossible to beat.

The key is to take a risk early in the game to break the bot's exponential growth with an attack. Then even the hardest difficultly becomes easy. It's interesting how sudden and aggressive that growth is.

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Personally my experience is opposite: I've always found success in expanding quickly and throwing up defense towers and later fortresses, thereby draining the enemy's strength when they launch a poorly-considered attack. To me, the game seems strongly favoring defensive strategies, and I'm fascinated to find someone who describes attacking early as key.

I've found defense doesn't help a great deal once they've got battering rams.

A nice tweak will be to make them more effective against gates but less effective against a fortress wall.

My favorite strategy is to race to tech level 3, start building as many champion cavalry as possible plus enough temples to heal them and then bleed off the enemy army/buildings with quick raids. Eventually you can beat any number of siege/elephant units that might come your way. Full towers, fortresses and upgrades are essential though.

Building a new civic center near the enemy territory early is a good way to bleed off enemy workers. Same for ships on level with some water.

That is why you need your own rams or non-ranged warriors to destroy their rams. Also if you can deny your enemy's access to metal, perhaps with towers or guerrilla attacks, then they won't be able to build (more) rams.

Typically this occurs because bots are so bad at building up that even with all that assistance a human can still outscale them. That's how it is in most games, so even as someone who's never played this game this is closer to what I'd expect.

I find with Civ V or 0ad the bots always arrived with a massive army (even on easy) when I have barely got a shed and a dude scratching out furrows with an asses jawbone.

Still find them fun, most recently I got annihilated by tanks and 5 air squadrons, playing Civ V. For some reason my charioteers and pikes didn't hold up well.

That is also why players usually want any difficulty change that is not a resource multiplier, as beating the AI then becomes its own meta game.

A great example for using fewer multipliers and improving AI instead is the Civ V mod Vox Populi (which is also the reason why Civ V is far superior to VI)

Can you explain how it improves the AI in ways that CIV 6 mods can't?

It has more rules and logic to the AI. I’m not sure if Civ VI mods could do it, but Civ V allows a lot more customization (Vox Populi does way more than just AI) because there was an actual SDK (and maybe some sources?) released back then.

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