Just another example of AI idiocy

Heh, that story of yours Lord Parkin is such a common sight in my games that I don't bother with "diplomacy"-instigated wars. Did you know that when you'll join in and declare you get diplo hit for aggressive behaviour from all the AI, including the very AI that asked you to go to war?

And don't even get me started with the crappy territory issues - "oh noes, I'm a city state and I'm calling you to help with a terrrrible barbarian threat I'm having! Oh yess, you have like +5 influence with us for killing that barb NOW GTFO CAUSE YOU'RE TRESPASSING "


Please fix this

kaltorak said:

This is the problem. Nobody wants an AI that never backstabs. Backstabs are fun. In fact, monty was one of my favourite rivals in civ4. But that is because he was unique in doing so. The fun about a backstab is that you don't expect it. But in civ5 you don't expect anything else. It's not a unique erratic personality, it's how they all always act.

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Couldn't have put it better myself. Civ5 AI is actually boring, because they act the same way all the time: demand stuff, get pissed off whether or not you accept, then backstab you. It's not even a surprise any more, it's just what you expect from EVERY AI in EVERY game. That's the problem.

(Incidentally, love the username. Presume you're an Eddings fan.)

Guardian_PL said:

Heh, that story of yours Lord Parkin is such a common sight in my games that I don't bother with "diplomacy"-instigated wars. Did you know that when you'll join in and declare you get diplo hit for aggressive behaviour from all the AI, including the very AI that asked you to go to war?

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No, I didn't know that, but it sounds about right. The number of times I've been called "bloodthirsty" by the hypocritical, lying, backstabbing AI is insane. It doesn't matter how many wars the AI has got into with other AI's and city states, it still thinks you're "bloodthirsty" the moment you get involved even in a defensive war. Heck, the last message Liz ever said to me before I declared war in the game I mentioned in the OP was that I was "bloodthirsty". No Liz, I'm only fighting YOUR war FOR you. But since you mention it, I may as well declare on you because you're being a complete and utter dick.

Guardian_PL said:

And don't even get me started with the crappy territory issues - "oh noes, I'm a city state and I'm calling you to help with a terrrrible barbarian threat I'm having! Oh yess, you have like +5 influence with us for killing that barb NOW GTFO CAUSE YOU'RE TRESPASSING "

Please fix this

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Damn, didn't realise they did that either. Very stupid.

Lord Parkin said:

She didn't take anything from Ramesses, I took both his cities.

She has a pathetic 2 or 3 city empire while I have a 5-city empire.

I still think it's broken. Shouldn't the AI be the tiniest bit grateful that you're doing them the favour of helping them out? They get pissed off if you don't help them, and they get pissed off if you do? How in the hell does that work?

Especially when turning on you the instant the war ends is suicide for them? Crazy.

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I agree. Wu did the same thing to me last night....and we'd been friends for 2000 years, game time.

However Lizzie is a bit bonkers. Earlier in my game I demolished her, mostly because she kept smack-talking about how pathetic I was. Even though I had an empire twice the size of hers, and a more advanced and larger army. (took me about ten turns to kill her without really trying). Doesn't the AI calculate relative strength? I guess not or she would have kept her trap shut.

I'm starting to think that i should follow the example of another poster and compare myself to cassandra ... because i predicted this and no one listened to me

IMHO this AI is the direct descendant of a XML setting TMIT devised for BtS AI, that was informally called "Ruthless AI " ... that was pretty much a copy cat ( in what was possible inside the XML frame of Civ IV ) of the human behaviour that worked against stock BtS AI. And it definitely did trounced BtS stock AI if it was the only "ruthless AI" in the game . I said at the time ( and no one listened to me ) that this kind of AI would look good against the normally cooperative and good faithed BtS AI, but , when in flock they would kill eachother mercilessly until only or 2 super AI appeard ... a thing that in fact was worse AI in average ( better for the living without doubt, but surely worse for the dead ).

Now port a AI made on this molds, take tech trading out, join a lot of them together, add a obscure diplo system and bugs in the AI city placement and enemy troop detection while retaining the chicken memory of civ IV AI ... does it sound familiar ?

That is why I said a lot of times that firaxian coders showed so far a completely lack of knowledge of game theory ( no, not game design theory ) : when I see the solutions they impletmented in here ( and in some areas of BtS ), I sometimes see a complete disregard for the obvious fact that solutions that look well on 1:1 might be subpar or even flat out stupid in a enviroment with a plurality of active players ( like civ games always have been ). I would even recommend them to read some stuff on evolutionary biology ( they could start with Dawkins Blind Watchmaker and his chapter on how cooperative behavior in most of times is actually a competitive strategy in darwinian terms vs self-centered short-term-gain centered strategy ( his pigeon example is quite instructive ) for a light start ) because the evolutionary biologists were forced ages ago to explain why cooperative behavior existed at all in a darwinian framework and how those guys that cooperate even prospered in general , something that game designers seem to have failed to grasp so far

JoxerNL said:

actually there might not be anything broken here...

You helped her, aka playing her game.
You were a convenience.

Did she take any cities from ramesses?

Did she have more cities then you?

If you digg some through these forums you would find out thet Lizzy doesn't like people with a smaller empire (ammount of cities is below some treshhold for her).

So what might have happened is...
She wanted Ramesses dead, asked you for help, actually got it, capped cities got "too big" her AI calculated that your small and pathetic compared to her and she started to hate you.

I agree alot of AI things need fixing but this one might actually be part of a working AI! zomg

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You give too much credit to firaxis. i bet you its not the case. whats happening is that the AI is programmed to get hostile towards you if you war monger, and irrespective of the fact that you actually went to war at their request the stupid brain dead AI turns hostile, after you've done them a favour.

Guardian_PL said:

And don't even get me started with the crappy territory issues - "oh noes, I'm a city state and I'm calling you to help with a terrrrible barbarian threat I'm having! Oh yess, you have like +5 influence with us for killing that barb NOW GTFO CAUSE YOU'RE TRESPASSING "


Please fix this

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amen to that. when it happened to me i was like WTF have the developers been ???

seriously nobody pointed this out during the testing?

Unfortunately a lot of players are seeing the erratic and hard to explain AI behaviour and , instead of going the simplest path and assuming that the AI is not working as its best, chant the "playing to win" mantra and think that the AI is following some kind of Madman strategy, Occam razor be damned

JoxerNL said:

Maybe she got pissed you took those cities then!

But as Danny said, the AI are best treated like complete sociopaths untill someone can either patch it, or modd it.

For me personally : They always get a "no" to any question, im not going to mingle in their little wars, if however they dare to attack my military might i will smite them down, burn or take every city they have and leave them to rott in their capital.
(actually it's funny to make your citystate friend take their cities aswell )

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problem is i end up going the same path every game cos of this, horsemen + spears = time

its not much fun after a while, i dont feel like playing peacefully cos the AI is psycopathic.

somebody please help ....

I find the AI frequently dogpiling me in wars, choosing to declare war on me while I'm at war with another AI. This is incredibly obnoxious and would be more so if they were competent. Yea, it's a way for them to "win". But in a multi-player game, and with decent tactical AI (which we currently lack), then the computer players could win at any time by just ganging up on you and beating you down. It's artificial in the same way that Deity games are: the AI has to be programmed to ignore how much stronger it is than you are.

You have no choice but a military one. It's a terrible, cramped vision of how the game should be played; a game with no alliances and no peaceful borders. Mad Max is not a Utopia.

Shafi-is-back said:

problem is i end up going the same path every game cos of this, horsemen + spears = time

its not much fun after a while, i dont feel like playing peacefully cos the AI is psycopathic.

somebody please help ....

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Earlier today, the Romans asked me to help them pwn Japan. I took and razed their only city other than the Capital, and then waited for the romans to be the first wave against it. Suddenly, I realize the whole roman army is engaged and my whole army is at it's rear. Golden backstabbing opportunity. I took it, wiped the romans and then took the japanese capital. That was fun, but then I went and steamrolled the whole roman empire. Now the only reasonable thing to do is do the same thing with everyone else and win Domination. Boring.

My point is even if diplomacy made sense, if the combat AI isn't fix into a challenge, then I will be the warmongering sociopath, it's just too easy to pass but so boring to execute.

Here's another story of weird AI mentality, or whatever one should call it. Wu of China became annoyed at me because I built too many Wonders that she wanted to build. So she cancelled our Open Borders agreement, our Co-operation agreement and our Mutual Defence pact. Well and good. But then Montezuma attacked her and exterminated her, only keeping Beijing and a couple of her other cities for his own use. Some 2,000 years after that, I demolished Montezuma, and when I had captured Beijing, I decided to liberate it. Was Wu grateful? No, she was still pissed off because I had built those Wonders 2,000 years ago. She refused Open Borders, Co-operation, everything. So I decided to say "Yes" to the question: "Do you want to declare war on her?" Well, she had no units, for obvious reasons, so capturing Beijing once more and killing her again wasn't exactly a chore. Her adieu to me went: "Perhaps my curses from the the other side of the grave will put a jinx on on you", or words to that effect. The grave I had pulled her out of and was now kicking her back down into. I mean, honestly. What were the game designers thinking?

Allso, the AI civs are so predictable. Even if you've been buddies for millennia, they start to hate your guts the moment you become neighbours. They also have an interesting tendency to line up a huge army on the very edge of their side of the border and then complain that they feel threatened by the defence units you keep three or four tiles back on your side.

Know what I'll do in the future? Exterminate them all after they have enslaved enough city states, then win diplomatic with the votes from those eternally grateful city states. Might even be fun. I agree with those who say that Civ V has great potential but is rather flawed right now. And the way no surplus hammers or beakers are carried over from finished building projects or research projects is a huge step backwards.

templars rule said:

This AI move sounds very close to real life to me,

2 countries agree a pact to attack a 3rd country and a year later after winning are at war with each other. (Germany, Russia & Poland if you had not guessed). If it happened in real life why should you complain that the AI does it??

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So when are we going to commence bombing on the Brits?

Guardian_PL said:

Heh, that story of yours Lord Parkin is such a common sight in my games that I don't bother with "diplomacy"-instigated wars. Did you know that when you'll join in and declare you get diplo hit for aggressive behaviour from all the AI, including the very AI that asked you to go to war?

And don't even get me started with the crappy territory issues - "oh noes, I'm a city state and I'm calling you to help with a terrrrible barbarian threat I'm having! Oh yess, you have like +5 influence with us for killing that barb NOW GTFO CAUSE YOU'RE TRESPASSING "


Please fix this

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The city state trespassing thing is the most annoying bit of AI idiocy to me right now.

Most of the time I play as Alexander, so that's not a problem because of his city-state friendship trait that allows him to freely move through city-state territories.

I've come to dread playing as any other leader because of the constant annoying popups I get as my automated exploration units keep dropping into city-state territory.

All the 'Play to win' stuff hides the fact a player likes making informed decisions in a game. If there are no players decisions in diplomacy, i.e the AI just decides if it likes you or not and you have to live with it, then it is worse gameplay than CIV4. As far as I can tell this is what happens; one of the AI nations decides it will like you and the others decide they won't and that's it. All your diplomatic efforts have little impact and you have to deal with the one who's chosen to deal with you.

mrt144 said:

So when are we going to commence bombing on the Brits?

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I believe us Brits have to DOW on them first, old chap. Then we are allowed to have a nice cup of tea for a year before they bomb us. There have to be some rules - playing fields of Eton and all that...

If the AI Diplomacy were the only problem, i would not be here. Thats just one part. AI Diplomacy never were that great in previous CIV's. No, the worst part is the fighting. Period. If the whole idea of Fireaxis was to let the player wage war, they should have made that part much better then it is now.

Just for "fun" i tried the horseman "steamroll", *kuch* , can hardly get it out of my mouth.. "strategy". Now we all here know that the Horsemen is way overpowered, and, boy it shows. Taking over town by town, with four Horseman "regiments" is a piece of cake. Taking out every unit he brings up to you, also. Yes even spears or pikes.

The only "skill" you must have as a player, is to now how to position your horsemen and when to attack. Which is pretty straightforward, when you understand the mechanics. Assemble them 3 hex away from their town, fully healed. Pick of any enemy unit you encounter, heal, assemble 3x away again and when there's no unit left to charge into to, attack with, again healed , all four horsemen the enemies town. Victory ensured, mostly finished of by the third charge. Heal, and do the process again to take a other town.

But it gets worse. While enemy troop behavior is a nightmare. He could fire with his archers to me, sitting in his town; he didn't. From the neraby town he send a horce archer, just parked it right next to his city, afcourse, a sitting duck; a horsemen took it out with one strike. Same thing would have happened with a cat, if he put it there.

And that is in my mind showing why 1 UPT is bad. It's not so bad for the player (aldo i disklike it very much), but it's devastating for the AI. That we have trouble to defend those weaker units is one thing; we use over human brain to overcome that. No, that the AI can't cope with it is pretty obvious and that's the main reason i dislike 1 UPT so much in CIV5.

Because besides all the AI shortcomings, he does not even have enough units to make up for his stupidity. Take those"ranged" or whatever units out with your "superiour skills" of warfare and your done; Victory is yours. That's why 1 upt is wrong; it makes it sure; that you never can defend your weakers stuff properly, besides a sturdy defence. In offence, or underway, they are just sitting ducks; ready to be finished off.

That's why SOD is better to me; atleast the AI's arty or other weak stuff was not THAT easy to kill. Atleast, you never knew with how many forces he defended his town; so you didn't knew how many forces you needed to take it. With 50 Chivalry, yeah that should work. But you first needed to make sure to get those 50, right ?

Anyway, a evoluted SOD system and balanced gameplay would have been so much beter then the 1UPT we have now. The only good thing about CIV5 are the hex tiles. For the rest, i could not care less. 1 UPT will never work, i think, while the AI is stupid (al always) and i honestly don't see how they are gonna fix that; they never could with previous CIV's. We and are speaking of AI for ages now and look how far we got. Right: more of the same "short cuts" . To make up for the AI's stupidity; the only answer i see is: give the AI more bonusses. How "harder" you play, how more gold the AI gets, units, faster production etc.

That is situation now just as it was with CIV 1. Nothing have changed. Only now, they have crippled the AI even more....

When you look at computer Chess, you get a grip of what i mean. A Chess AI cannot think, there is no intelligence. All intelligence there is put in there, is coming from people, people who have coded every possible move into the "CHESS brain" , every sidestep, and 9 steps beyond the first move (or more). All options they can think of, are all written in the code. Look how long it took to make the ComputerChess player as good as the beste chess players around . And that's only with 32 pieces, 6 different types of ""units" and a playground of only 64 tiles.

See where i am getting at ?

Thing is though, the AI doesn't have to be programmed to win. It just has to be programmed to put up more of a challenge. Fixing a few small things would go a long way - for instance, making the AI keep and use ranged units in all its cities, making the AI concentrate its ranged attacks on weak units rather than strong ones, removing (or nerfing) the Horseman's ability to retreat, removing the 33% defence penalty on plains, making the AI go on the defence if it starts losing a war, and making the AI analyse one move ahead when attacking (i.e. if I move into this tile and lose a few HP's, will I die next turn?).

I agree that there's probably some limit on how intelligent the AI can be made with limited time and resources, but hopefully some tweaks can make it at least slightly challenging. I certainly wouldn't be averse to increasing the unit limit per tile though, so that for instance you can have 1 ranged and 1 melee unit per tile. That would at least allow limited protection of ranged units, which might fix some of the AI idiocy to a certain extent.

Here's an instance of AI stupidity in my game:

I was playing as Russia. My neighbors were Persia and Rome, who were at war between themselves. For some reason, the Persians managed to gain the upper hand. Rome was slowly being eaten by the "Red Menace." When the Romans were down to one city, I enter into diplomacy to save them. I make an offer to Augustus to declare war on Darius. Since I have riflemen, cossacks, and cannons while they were still in the medieval era, I was expecting that they'll be more than happy to agree. Guess what? He refuses military aid! WTF. A few turns later they were conquered... all because of reasons I can't comprehend (refusing help from a far more technologically advanced civ).

I certainly wouldn't be averse to increasing the unit limit per tile though, so that for instance you can have 1 ranged and 1 melee unit per tile. That would at least allow limited protection of ranged units, which might fix some of the AI idiocy to a certain extent.

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Exactly. 1 UPT will never make it challenging for warmongers (with skill, afcource). That's what i try to explain to people in favor of 1 UPT. Maybe it "works" from them, but that has more to do with conviniance (i gues) then anything else.

501st Legion said:

Here's an instance of AI stupidity in my game:

I was playing as Russia. My neighbors were Persia and Rome, who were at war between themselves. For some reason, the Persians managed to gain the upper hand. Rome was slowly being eaten by the "Red Menace." When the Romans were down to one city, I enter into diplomacy to save them. I make an offer to Augustus to declare war on Darius. Since I have riflemen, cossacks, and cannons while they were still in the medieval era, I was expecting that they'll be more than happy to agree. Guess what? He refuses military aid! WTF. A few turns later they were conquered... all because of reasons I can't comprehend (refusing help from a far more technologically advanced civ).

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Mate, now you're entering the issue of AI trade table. Where regardless of the resources the AI have they'll always trade for them (even when they're angry as hell at you and say no just try to take 5/turn from them, click "propose" and they'll go for that), and don't even get me started on war/city issue! In one of my games I sold two freshly conquered cities to some faraway AI for 50/turn and 600 each. And they were 6-tiles grassland cities at size 2, in rebellion. Exploit much? Naw, it's yet another "strategy"...

So whatever bananas are happening on the trade table I'm not surprised anymore. "Would you like to enter Cooperation Pact?" you ask, "No, it's not to our liking". Turn later they go "would you like to sign Cooperation Pact?"
It's all complete and utter mess, even the simple stuff like when I click on resources (and btw I don't see reason for separate tabs with strategic and luxury resources, most likely it's to cater to newbies who could be surprised that iron does not give +5 while gems do ) I have to click on mine, on his, then if I want to withdraw something I have to click again, and again and ohmygoodness how useless it is. And it's a simple thing, with big shining example of Civ4 in the background. I mean wtf?