Just bought the game and have a few Q's

[reck]

Just purchased the game with the recent Steam sale and purchased all the DLC as well.

First a question about something that's bugging me. I picked a race to start with, first game I chose humans, but I soon discovered that when you capture towns you can start to control other races. Doesn't this just mean that with every game you're going to end up playing each of the 3 races regardless of what you pick at the start of the game? I'm really not liking this and would have preferred to just stick with the race I picked. The only thing i've found to do is destroy the captured cities and build my own city, which seems a bit daft.

1.How do find out how many turns until a city expands? All I can find is the circle that fills up a bit after each after each turn but how do you know how many turns it'll take to completely fill up and expand the city?
2. When a city expands how do you know which tile it will expand to? Sometimes there's a nice tile just next to the existing city and I want to tell it to expand to that particular tile, similar to how you can with civ buy choosing the tile the city will expand to.
3. I purchased all the DLC due to the really good sale price. What do these DLS packs add to the game and do you think they were worth it?
4. I've not been playing for long but the AI in this game seems really, really bad. Is this just me or is it a known problem? Are Paradox going to fix it, if not is there a way to mod the game to get a decent ai?

Thats it so far. Been enjoying myself with this game and in some respects I enjoy it more than civ in that you can just jump into battles and not worry so much about the deeper kind of gameplay, just wish the ai was better.

Thanks for any help

 

[Grombeard]

Just purchased the game with the recent Steam sale and purchased all the DLC as well.

First a question about something that's bugging me. I picked a race to start with, first game I chose humans, but I soon discovered that when you capture towns you can start to control other races. Doesn't this just mean that with every game you're going to end up playing each of the 3 races regardless of what you pick at the start of the game? I'm really not liking this and would have preferred to just stick with the race I picked. The only thing i've found to do is destroy the captured cities and build my own city, which seems a bit daft.

1.How do find out how many turns until a city expands? All I can find is the circle that fills up a bit after each after each turn but how do you know how many turns it'll take to completely fill up and expand the city?
2. When a city expands how do you know which tile it will expand to? Sometimes there's a nice tile just next to the existing city and I want to tell it to expand to that particular tile, similar to how you can with civ buy choosing the tile the city will expand to.
3. I purchased all the DLC due to the really good sale price. What do these DLS packs add to the game and do you think they were worth it?
4. I've not been playing for long but the AI in this game seems really, really bad. Is this just me or is it a known problem? Are Paradox going to fix it, if not is there a way to mod the game to get a decent ai?

Thats it so far. Been enjoying myself with this game and in some respects I enjoy it more than civ in that you can just jump into battles and not worry so much about the deeper kind of gameplay, just wish the ai was better.

Thanks for any help

1. I don't think there is a way of seeing it directly. You have to do the maths (in the city view i think you can see the population and how much it grows every turn) or look at the "pie chart" in the world view.

2. Cities always expand a full "circle" of tiles around the current area you control. At first you have the city and the surrounding tiles, then at level 5 you gain the next circle of tiles around it, and at level 10 the next again, so you have the city + 3 tiles around it in every direction. While the city can still get more population after lvl 10, it won't grow larger on the map after that.

3. The Elves DLC is definately worth it and also the Armageddon DLC as these two add a whole new playable race and a whole new game mode. The others are nice, but not really necessary. If you can afford it (and especially while they're on sale), i'd recommend to buy them alltogether though, just to get the complete experience.

4. It doesn't look like there will be any more patches to this game and i don't know if mods would have the capabilities to really improve the AI. The AI has gotten a bit better with the latest patches, but it isn't great overall. As a decent player you should jump directly to the highest or second highest difficulty setting or it gets all too easy. For me at least the game is fun nonetheless. After all there are worse AIs out there than Warlock's...

 

[Buladelu]

3. I purchased all the DLC due to the really good sale price. What do these DLS packs add to the game and do you think they were worth it?
4. I've not been playing for long but the AI in this game seems really, really bad. Is this just me or is it a known problem? Are Paradox going to fix it, if not is there a way to mod the game to get a decent ai?

Thats it so far. Been enjoying myself with this game and in some respects I enjoy it more than civ in that you can just jump into battles and not worry so much about the deeper kind of gameplay, just wish the ai was better.

Thanks for any help

The game is good even without DLCs. They mostly add some monsters with corresponding building sites on map. And we have a new race, elves, which is nice, but not really game-changer. Armageddon, on the other hand, is a game-changer - it's a more difficult game mod where you have special winning condition - destrowing a powerful race.

AI is not so bad. It lacks strategic vision so you should play on higher difficulty with strategic buffs for him, but he's competent in tactics.

 

[unmerged(166495)]

2. Cities always expand a full "circle" of tiles around the current area you control. At first you have the city and the surrounding tiles, then at level 5 you gain the next circle of tiles around it, and at level 10 the next again, so you have the city + 3 tiles around it in every direction. While the city can still get more population after lvl 10, it won't grow larger on the map after that.

One thing to note: If cities have potentially overlapping borders the first city to expand into a tile will control it.

 

[reck]

Thanks everyone for the reply. Been having lots of fun with this game and it helps to know how the game works.

 

[unmerged(166495)]

Something I missed in my first reply:

Doesn't this just mean that with every game you're going to end up playing each of the 3 races regardless of what you pick at the start of the game? I'm really not liking this and would have preferred to just stick with the race I picked. The only thing i've found to do is destroy the captured cities and build my own city, which seems a bit daft.

Playing a "single race" game is a gameplay choice to give yourself an artificial challenge. It will make your game a bit tougher due to not having access to all units and perks. There is one in-game effect: cities not of your starting race will have a 20% population growth penalty.

 

[unmerged(7340)]

20% everything (i.e. resource generation) penalty, I think.

 

[davidwalsh]

Some players only develop same race cities and demolish others.
This increases difficulty a little and makes things a bit more consistent.

 

[unmerged(485924)]

I always demolish the small cities I capture because in the long run the 20% penalty makes it better to just demolish and put one of your own. For the bigger cities I leave them since I only play small maps and the games don't last long enough for it to be efficient to demolish them.

For AI I go impossible with smallest map and 2 of us; it seems to be the most challenging though 3 can be sometimes depending on how the other 2 start out.