List of AI Stupidities

In all my games that get to the modern area the favorite defender is the mech inf unit. Although poor civilization (that remins in easy games) defend with the alpine troops in the worst case. A well formed spiderweb ais is really a fortress if it has the advances and sea frontiers. But it will never attack seriusly if it doesnt sorround you with its cities. A more simple and ambicious central ai with paralell strategies in diferent spiderwebs expansions could result in a very challenging game. A little more artificial friendship could be more fun too. I mean that allies could plan together military plays, common targets...and when the enemy is destroyed, territory repartition talks would be pretty interesting, and the future wars more tasteful and with sense....maybe por civ4...

AI building 6 million freights and sending them to obscure coastal areas.

Always happens on world-earth map!

Look at spain or florida areas near the end of the industrial era!
you'll what I mean!!!:crazyeyes

AI MADNESS!

why the heck do they research so slowly?? when i finished researching Advanced Flight, they had just researched, like, Warrior Code, The Wheel, and/or Sanitation. its messed up!!!

Just once, I would like to see a Civilized Perfectionist whoop up on the invader, who always wins, that evil Agressive Expansionist. For example, if America was invaded, we would have a very good chance at beating back our opponent. You don't have to be agressive to win at war. It may take a few turns to get the war units produced, but it gets real old to see all nations fall needlessly to the agressor.
It would also be nice to spice up the nation's ai type. Every time I play, China is always Agressive, India is always Civilized, etc etc.

Originally posted by CurtSibling
AI building 6 million freights and sending them to obscure coastal areas.

Always happens on world-earth map!

Look at spain or florida areas near the end of the industrial era!
you'll what I mean!!!:crazyeyes

AI MADNESS!

Click to expand...

I wonder if thats because the AI is trying to send the frieght across the Alantic but that is impossible so it sends them to the closest point...Spain and Florida.

brain is exploding…my eyes are itchy and I need to chuck a leak (I have just read every single post up til now…no skipping). I hope I don’t repeat anything…even though I have just ready it all!!

I love the fact that the enemy cant expel a stack of two spies!

I love the fact that on world map the Zulus seem to think it is of the upmost importance to defend Madagascar and the Japanese are content on having one city (Tokyo) of size 5/6 for the whole game.

I love the fact that a fortified Mech Inf or two on a mountain can/ and will kill the dumbass attepts by elephants and pikemen and the like for 1000s of years...

Not so much stupidity but a bug…
An extremely interesting bug happened to me the other day…
I created a map with one island big enough for 7 cities (I placed them and chose 7 civs & don’t randomise starting locations)
I then saw advanced starting date and turned it right up.
Weirdest thing happened with the extra cities that were created! TWO CITES WERE OCCUPING THE SAME SQUARE!
I cheated and changed to one of the civs that owned it. It was freaky. Both could defend the square but couldn’t enter it with extra units! They couldn’t even share resource squares lol

Not exactly an AI stupidity, but I absolutely hate the fact that when I kill a barbarian raiding parties leader, my government ransoms him for 100 gold... It is an insult when my government, which earns 5000 gold a turn, is offered a measly 100 gold for the leader of a faction which has taken up arms against our people! I think we should have the option of public execution, to excourage future uprisings. Sure, it may not change any gameplay issues, or the amount of barbarian uprisings, but I still think that would be GREAT!

That's an interesting idea.
I wonder what would happen if you set up the map so that there was only one more square than there were starting settlers? Would it then be possible to found new cities and for the human player to just march from one end of the map to the other and take all the AI cities that had been founded?

This sounds like the stupid scenarios that people make for a laugh. You could cover the whole map in goody huts or how about all railroads so that whoever makes the first unit will win...

The problem with your idea would be that they would be all size one so you wouldn't capture them... and I would expect the AI to only start a few cities because the Ai would not build its cities next to each other. Well I don't think it would.

When I was playing on Tuesday I was crossing the map with my freight-laden transport insearch of new continents and new, better trading opportunities. As I was rounding the bottom of the Mongols' territory, what should I see blocking my path but one of their submarines? In case you rshed over the first sentence, I shall recap: my transport suddenly developed the ability to see subs. This may not be AI stupidity in the traditional sense, but I certainly benefitted from it so it wasn't the brightest move on their part. I haven't altered the rules (I can't, it was on the Playstation version) but cannot think why it would have happened. I haven't built subs since mine was sunk by a galleon (described above), and I have now come to realise that they are pretty useless anyway.

Do'York: Your transport could see the sub only because you tried to move thru it. If you had chosen the square next to it instead, it would have remained invisible. That feature exists simply to let you see why your non-combat unit cannot enter a seemingly empty square. If it had been a frigate, instead, you would have attacked.

Warlord Sam, you could change the text for the popup following barbarian leader capture - in game.txt, I think. You could edit the quote to something like:

"Barbarian leader captured! Public hanging at noon tomorrow!"

You'd still get the gold, but then you could just quietly accept it as ticket sales for the execution.

Originally posted by Sodak
If it had been a frigate, instead, you would have attacked.

Click to expand...

Doesn't it still show the submarine first? I have noticed that the computer is remarkably reliabble at being able to find my subs straight away so I no longer build them because they always lose...Unless I attack first.

The submarine is a fundamentally useless unit and by way of explanation, I only moved past the sub ie inside its ZOC, I didn't try to move towards it, nor could have, because it showed up before I had a chance to move, being right in front of my transport. I wouldn't have minded too much if I'd lost the tranport because it only had a single alpine troops unit aboard for late game hut-popping. Except when the bloody AI gave me an advanced tribe 2 squares away from the barbs I'd unleashed the turn before. Grrr. That effectively ended my exploration as I fortified the alpines and disbanded the transport to rush in some mech infantry. Managed to sell the granary I got free with the city though . I also saw a Carthaginian galleon merrily exploring an inland sized precisely one square and it has been stuck there for about 30 years now. I know this must have been mentioned in one of the posts above, but I am trying to keep this post on-topic and not just end up writing the history of my Russian empire.
One day I will begin a great wonder: the Epic o' Duke's OCC, but I'm just off to make some caravans in readiness.

I have never seen an AI have a ship trapped in a one square sea...Has anyone seen this though on TOT.

I started a game on the expansion game, real world with proper starting positions. The Alpha centuari map was Europe though and this caused problems. Only me and the Japanese and the alien race (I had all 7 civs) built any cities. Eventually the Germans did start which was weird and I saw The English had a settler asleep in the middle of an ocean.

I have put the cheat mode on to see where the other civs were because I was suspicious at the lack of attempted wonder building...

In the game I finished last night, the Mongols were trying to bully everyone else into giving them whatever they wanted (which happened to be the opportunity to use nukes). At one point they had about 40 ships of varying uselessness (Cruisers, Destroyers and Subs only) clustered around Volgorod, one of my coastal cities. Having foreseen the arrival of this very impressive collection of naval hardware, I had vacated the city and left it completely defenceless. Since they were unable to find anything to attack in that city, they just decided to cluster around it for the rest of the game. It never occured to them that a transport full of troops would have made an excellent back-up to this show of strength.
Eventually I got bored, and began to notice a pattern emerging in the 5 or so minutes this fleet would take to move every turn. They were clustered just outside my city, but kept moving around in such a way that if I was to manoeuvre a nuke onto a particular group of ships, the whole lot would sink and I wouldn't get any pollution! Anyone guess what I did? This is where the Duke stupidity kicks in. In 1907 (SS arrival 1909) I changed my democracy to communism, so the nukes I would rush-build at the end of the turn wouldn't upset the folks too much. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I had the SoL, the game made me go through anarchy and I couldn't rush build half the nukes or spies I wanted to so I could go out on a high. I still took out the huge stack of ships in one go, and they stopped threatening me with nukes after that. Must have been well-laden subs! And to add insult to injury, I took 2 of their other cities and a German one just before the end to boost my score a tiny bit.

The Zulus decided to destroy one of my poor defenceless cities (Not my fault because I had only jsut created it a few turns before) so after changing to Fundamentalism a rush built 3 transports and 3 diplomats. After arriving on the Zulu island I proceded to buy 3 of their cites. I may buy the rest of their cities or I may actually build some units because I do not think they have even got Musketeers and I have Riflemen

Dell, why didn't you just put all the dips on the same transport? The Ai cities are never that far apart anyway.

The transports were built in separate areas. I was attacking their island so I wanted to attack at several different points. I did this by landing on roads and buying the nearest city. Also the transports allowed me to reach their island at different times. Anyway now the Zulus are almost dead apart from two cities on the Egyption continent and the Persians only have their capital left with one fortified unit left in it.

Next I have to kill the Vikings and the Egyptions. Everyone is at war with me because I accidently betrayed the English twice by buying their cities whilst in peace. Although the English did steal my technologies first.

the first one is really annoying: when I own most of a continent covering most of the earth and the AI that I am allied with, who has a few cities in one corner, puts damn units on my railway between major city areas, I have a sav of this if anyone is interested, second is when the AI continually tried to nuke a city that is protected by a SDI Defence in another close city and the third is when the AI continually tries to kill my AEGIS Cruisers with cruise missiles and Stlth Fighters STUPID!

I hate it when your allied with the ai, and you have being for half-the-game and biult your cities inside each other and all that and then cancel their alliance. On top of te fact that your the most powerful civilization and own the whole continant. The AI never respect its terms. It expects you to bribe your way threw the alliance. I hate that.