Lets list AI stupid behaviors

I'm not sure that one is valid. The AI usually only does this when they have an ally who declares war with them, and some civs are just really bold and willing to take risks. Alexander may be an idiot sometimes, but I'm not sure that this is the type of idiotic behavior I want to take out of the game.

Also, denouncing a powerful civilization is not a bad move in the slightest. I do it all the time if I think it will earn me points among other civs.

That said, changing the combat strength calculations to account a little more for ranged units and upgraded units would be a nice change, since right now the computer isn't very good at calculating true army strength.

Yeah i know it's not that valid but (no exaggeration) when they have riflemen and I have nukes they should exercise a little caution.
 
Another that springs to mind particularly from my latest game:

- avoiding Natural Wonders. AIs will settle near and around NWs, but will never claim them. This seems to be a side effect of the fact they're given low priority by the culture system, so they don't recognise them as valuable tiles. In my last game, India settled two cities within reach of Kilimanjaro, but settled just too far away to get it in its borders despite an available spot. Later in the game China did the same with Sri Prada. Though Catherine did wisely settle Uluru, that was very late, and I ended up finding and setting Fountain of Youth - the first time I've seen it in a game for a very long time - after turn 200. I did have to kill two Chinese settlers trying to get there, but even so it should never have been available in a settlable spot that late in the game; China was a lot closer to it than I was. Germany and Russia had ships stationed off the island with FoY on, and Germany disembarked units to clear the barbarian camp, but no one sent any settlers.
 
I've noticed Great Generals left unprotected quite a few times, and I'm all too happy to deal with them.
 
Surprised noone has mentioned building Petra with only one desert tile in range of the city. I have fair number of extra wonder mods by Poukai+Sukriat, and the same is true of any of their wonders that have terrain specific bonuses. No fish? No problem, build Itsukushima Shrine anyway!
 
Surprised noone has mentioned building Petra with only one desert tile in range of the city. I have fair number of extra wonder mods by Poukai+Sukriat, and the same is true of any of their wonders that have terrain specific bonuses. No fish? No problem, build Itsukushima Shrine anyway!

That's true, but it may help to make a distinction between "stupid behaviours" and "subpoptimal behaviours".

This is because certain code will provide results that are generally good for the AI (such as 'build Wonders when possible', and a list prioritising valuable Wonders) but that will go wrong on some occasions (such as when a Wonder is buildable but only because an isolated tile is of the right type). This is a suboptimal behaviour resulting from good code.

A 'stupid' behaviour is one that is pretty much never optimal, and often is never useful - using ranged attacks against cities with 0 health, for example. I think these are the target of this thread; these are the behaviours based on bad code, and so are the easiest ones to fix (add a rule to the code that tells the AI to check if a city is at 0 health, for instance, and if so prioritise attacking with a melee unit instead of continuing to fire).
 
The AI doesn't use the best units like the XCOM squad for example. In the information era, AI can have the opportunity to use these units but instead uses other weaker units like Mobile SAMs, Bazookas or even rocket artillery. AIs usually end up making too much units and produce too much that they eventually end up losing money per turn which cause the AI's economy to fail.
Another thing that the AI does is make a DoW on you and lose their units foolishly. The AI could send out swordsmen, crossbows or even pikemen and end up losing its military and eventually its cities.
AIs like to kill, they usually end up killing their fellow AIs. Whenever you revive the dead AIs, the AIs that were alive re-kill the AIs that were brought back to life.
 
I've noticed Great Generals left unprotected quite a few times, and I'm all too happy to deal with them.

Haha, yeah. Sometimes I question the actual greatness of these AI generals. :)
 
I just saw a Dutch warrior fortified to heal itself next to a barbarian axe thrower. The warrior healed 10 points per turn, but the axes did more damage per turn. The warrior died quite unnecessarily. It could have easily tried to find a better spot to heal (out of ranged attack range) or it could have attacked the axemen.
 
I have seen the strangest behaviour. An AI proposed world ideology Freedom before it even has an ideology. Then chose order the next turn.

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AI sends GP/missioners trough territory of opponent/CS who is at war.
(Once poor CS had like 3 GP til the end of game)
 
Not clearing the marsh on calendar luxury tiles (I notice this mainly on Sugar).
Building roads between 2 or 3 pop cities.
Embarking Great people without naval escorts or protection.
 
Great, thanks for all the issues, any other details, also regarding AI city production would be nice to have.

Yesterday I were working with the code that tells the AI witch promotion take when possible.

The code was incredibly long, with many factors taken into account: leader flavors, current unit bonus, type of AI unit (COUNTER,ATTACK,DEFENSE,RECON) , but for some reason the results are always the same.

I simplified the code quite a bit to only take into account flavors and current unit bonus, and instead of a custom calculation all promotions fall into three base values for low/medium/high priority promotions, and a function to calculate them all. Now the result is a quite random, but have a clear preference on higher tier promotions and some inclinations based on flavors.
 
There's a lot of stupidity, as has been mentioned, with regards to the way AI chooses targets in war. They always go for the perceived weakest point and therefore always fall into traps.

aka:

-I can use workers to lure melee units into traps repetitively

-I can use sacrificial horse units or other melee with slight damage to attract city fire. Then just run away and send another. The AI should prioritize hitting units that are the biggest threat to the city instead such as my artillery or more threatening melee. As it is I can always get them to destroy or waste their fire and give my artillery enough time to break the city.

-city selection during attack. The AI seems to have no concept of surgical striking and sucks at effectively using preemptive strikes. They can have a massive military, but instead of really breaking me quickly by striking at the heart or cutting supply lines or cities off. They one-by-one go for the border cities and slowly move in. I understand this from an absorption point of view but it is a dumb strategy if you massively outnumber someone and can be abused to distract someone with a much, much larger military.

-bad grasp of victory conditions and easy to derail:

Case in point on these last two: I played a tall, cultural game with India and had 5 cities was about 50 turns from winning. This was my first immortal game so I was expecting some intelligence. Russia, the overseas warmonger had conquered her entire continent, was ahead slightly in science, and had a military that put everyone on our continent to shame. I had a large navy with about 30 modern ships and nuclear subs and 10-15 aircraft and was really the only credible threat on our continent. Everyone else was hopelessly behind on tech. She was obviously going for domination and had started to denounce us and try to turn us against one another. Note: I had gone patronage and owned all the city states. She kept attacking all the overseas ones and racked up a lot of ire for it. Then she fought a long war with another nation on my continent--granted one everyone hated. We all ignored her. Finally she declared ware on Siam, my buddy, and I declared war on her as she had a large navy within striking distance and was vulnerable to a preemptive action. I took a few losses but destroyed about 40 ships and won navally by targeting the carriers with my submarines. I then spent the rest of the 50 turns just off the coast between us, bombing with aircraft carriers and distracting her with two weak CS's. She had so much land military that she could barely move it and the military advisor says she wielded a miltary that could wipe me off the map. However, she ignored my navy and my continent and was obsessed with taking the two CS's with her land units. Each turn I bombarded and killed a few more of them. Occasionally I couldn't halt the waves and the CS would fall. I'd then wait a turn for her to move away, bomb it to oblivion, and take it with a destroyer and liberate it. Rinse, repeat, waste another 5 turns as she attempted to take it again. This is an example of going for the weakest link taken to stupidity. I controlled the direction of her military and baited her massively superior military for 50 turns and then achieved a cultural victory. If she had been programmed a bit more strategically, she would have learned from the CS mistake, made more aircraft and subs and sunk my offshore fleet, then invaded me. This would have #1 stopped my cultural victory (which was obvious to everyone) and made the rest of the game easy for her. But she diddled around attacking the weak guys like CS's and other nations and let me win.

Note: she balanced her military really well though, and littered the land troops with SAMs which really wrecked havoc with my bombers so the content of her troops proved pretty good (I noticed some ppl said the AI did this badly). To be fair, she also did produce some subs toward the end and occasionally sent another carrier or battleship north the contend with my fleet, but it was pathetically insufficient priority for the amount of damage the fleet was doing and my nuke subs always found the new ships/subs and destroyed them before they got anywhere close.

For the mod, I suggest a simple solution to this ******ed mis-prioritizing behavior. Introduce a military memory. The AI remembers and keeps track of how much damage a certain city/group of units/fleet/or particular unit is doing. If it gets really high or a particular city is noted to be producing way too many units the AI should shift and target the source of the damage. This is strategic planning. In my case study, this would have resulted in her giving the CS lower priority after 2 tries and targeting my fleet and offshore boats which had destroyed 100+ units after 15 turns or so. In the city example with artillery it would result in the city recognizing after a turn of bombardment that the artillery are the only credible threat and targeting them one by one--resulting in the city being saved.
 
I see you have chosen my religion as world religion at the vote.

I'm going to vote against it however because I want to hate you and want to destroy you.

There's a lot of counterproductive behaviour with regard to resolutions. For instance, a civ will always hate you for spreading religion to them if they founded a different one, and will always act to remove your religion. Fair enough? Most of the time perhaps, but if they already have your religion in most of their cities, and your religion is the world religion, trying to get rid of your religion just costs them votes.
 
This is specific, but in my games, when he shows up, Nebby is always the last AI leader to research writing, which seems monumentally stupid for him.
 
Is there any way to mod the AI to build less artillery units and more melee/ranged units? This simple change would have greatly increased the difficulty of the game I just finished. Thanks in advance
 
This is specific, but in my games, when he shows up, Nebby is always the last AI leader to research writing, which seems monumentally stupid for him.

I've noticed the same, however it makes sense because AI Babylon doesn't play like player Babylon. A player will rush Writing and settle an Academy immediately. AI Nebby always bulbs the scientist - that being the case, waiting is actually a better move than it appears, since if AI Nebby rushed Writing then bulbed, he's going to be bulbing something very early.
 
AI doing a really poor job with regard to scouting tiles around their starting location. If I had a penny every time I had found Ancient Ruins three tiles from an AI capital on turn 150...
 
I just saw a Dutch warrior fortified to heal itself next to a barbarian axe thrower. The warrior healed 10 points per turn, but the axes did more damage per turn. The warrior died quite unnecessarily. It could have easily tried to find a better spot to heal (out of ranged attack range) or it could have attacked the axemen.

Ah yes, this is a good one - AI scouts do this all the time, and have since BNW launched.
 
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