Civilization 5 AI ? Civilization 6 AI ?

Civ 5, in single player, is absolutely unplayable for me due to the catastrophic AI which fails the most, in what is the most important thing in the game. The tactics and strategy of the war time. And playing higher difficulty level, like deity, doesn't make AI any smarter. It just destroys the game in the early eras and feels like AI is heavily cheating.

So, are we going to get in CIV 6 more competitive AI, or we will instead, get new civilizations, and new game concepts ?

More complicated game mechanics, with the same stupid AI ?

I fear I know the answer...

What Firaxis ought to do is get in touch with Stardock. I hear their AI is phenomenal.

Getting in touch with anyone would require them to admit anything is wrong. Doubt that's gonna happen.
They can't go back to stack attack. They have put too much into it now to go back so soon.
So that leaves us with what we have now and i'll be waiting to hear reviews on AI behavior in civ 6 before I make my next purchase. I think what hurt me the most was no Rhyes and fall for Civ 5 mod.
This is still early though. I doubt they are done milking the DLC and expansion markets on this one yet. Despite its major AI flaws on the battlefield (Which has gotten better since release.) The game is still one of the most played games and ranked or rated high on most sites.
I know many people scream this game wasn't made with a multiplayer first mindset. But I cant see how its true. if that's the case, why didn't they stick to stack attack. Things can be fixed in a stack attack to help even the odds. In multiple one on one battles where one has to worry about individual strat, overall strat, positioning and trickery to win. Well that's only ever going to be fair in multiplayer.
Maybe in the future of gaming this will change but at the stage we are at now the AI just cant compete.

I've played many strategy games and in all of them you eventually figure out the AI and they become easy. The only way they can make a game hard is to give the AI advantages. At least CIv gives a pretty good difficulty slider, and yes deity is a pretty hard game even if you consider it cheating.

Here are some other strategy games that I've played and their weaknesses:

Total War - As soon as you figure out nothing stops cavalry you just spam horsies and charge. It becomes braindead easy.

Medieval Total war - seems hard at first when everyone attacks you, until you realize they are sending everything including the kitchen sink at you. If you can get some men in a boat and hit one of their cities you will notice they only left one dude there and you can light them up.

Crusader Kings 2 - Mercenaries

Stronghold games - The game gets hard, real hard, but only because the AI starts out with insane bonuses and you start out with nothing. Same thing as deity in Civ.

Heroes of might and magic games - same deal. The only reason these games are hard is because the AI gets tons of advantages.

My point is that it doesn't seem possible to make a great unpredictable AI without giving it hardcore advantages. Name me one and I'll happily go out and try it.

I agree. The fact is ai in general isn't up to par. This isn't a knock on firaxis its just fact. However in the system firaxis has chosen to use it makes the ai problem even more glaring and harder to fix. Ck2 can be fix the easiest as combat is auto calc. Meaning by changing a few rules or the price of mercs the problem is fixed.I total war calvalry can be altered and so forth. In civ 5 teaching the ai when it is ok to move an archer into cavalry range to fire and when to focus fire and which units to focus on. How to bypass heavily defensive areas to strike and open up flanks are not easy fixes and can become huge problems when the cpu is throwing 10 to one unit count against a properly fortified and leveled unit. This is not a knock on firaxis its just I feel the system they use is much harder on the ai and more complex to fix.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

One unit per tile is the thing that is really hurting the ai.
Its far easier for the ai to produce a stack that it can just throw away attacking us, and you will notice the ai's bonues to unit production alot more with stacks then with OUPT.

Also the game would be alot harder if the ai's did not make stupid (for them) trades with us, like trading lux for 7gpt then they got like 20+ if not more happines or strategic Resources they can't even use.

Beaver79 said:

I've played many strategy games and in all of them you eventually figure out the AI and they become easy. The only way they can make a game hard is to give the AI advantages. At least CIv gives a pretty good difficulty slider, and yes deity is a pretty hard game even if you consider it cheating.

Here are some other strategy games that I've played and their weaknesses:

Total War - As soon as you figure out nothing stops cavalry you just spam horsies and charge. It becomes braindead easy.

Click to expand...

Not much use in campaigns because campaigns are all about sieges - you don't need to know any tricks to beat sieges in TW games because the AI is uniformly appalling in them (Rome 2 gets a lot of very well-deserved flak for having an especially bad implementation, but TW siege AI is so atrocious across the board that in Empire and every subsequent game the developers have added workarounds designed to help the AI, such as grappling hooks).

Crusader Kings 2 - Mercenaries

Click to expand...

Crusader Kings II barely has an AI - everything is handled through scripted decision-making; the system sets limits on units that can be raised, does the fighting automatically, sets terms for declaring war and forces peace when a certain condition is met. The AI only really has control of (a) where to move units, (b) when to merge units and which characters to set as generals, (c) knowing when it would be a good idea to quit (say, if its armies are all gone and the only territories it can raise from have enemy forces, but the warscore is still below 100%), and (d) - as you note - hiring mercenaries.

The AI is nothing short of atrocious at every one of these. It sends armies to pointless places and can easily be stalled just by sending something of your own towards its province, it engages with tiny armies instead of merging stacks and isn't capable of raising new armies as they become available (a patch in development will supposedly fix the latter), it rarely hires or effectively uses mercenaries, takes no account of the fact that the player can hire mercenaries, and it's as bad as Civ games if not worse at surrendering a lost war if the warscore is anything below 90%, and will often hold out at 99%. CK II is the fantastic game it is largely because it gives the AI so little scope to screw up by railroading its decision-making. If it had anything like the freedom of Civ V's AI decision-making, people would be decrying it in droves.

Stronghold games - The game gets hard, real hard, but only because the AI starts out with insane bonuses and you start out with nothing. Same thing as deity in Civ.

Click to expand...

Nearly every strategy game with difficulty levels does this. The only exceptions I can think of are a few RTSes like Starcraft II, which are so deterministic in their play that the AI can be given a fixed script at a higher difficulty level, with better strategies hard-coded at different levels. This isn't a question of programming better AI, it's a matter of coding worse AI - the highest difficulty levels are the ones where the AI is programmed to build enough workers, attack at earlier times, and sit on fewer spare minerals, while lower levels are deliberately coded to play 'carelessly'.

It's basically like making Prince the highest difficulty in Civ V and reducing AI performance at every level below - instead of programming harder AIs with bonuses, you're programming easier AIs with handicaps. It's exactly the same basic design, however. And the strategies used at each level are highly stereotyped, always following the same build order, attacking at the same time with the same unit mix and so forth.

PhilBowles said:

Not much use in campaigns because campaigns are all about sieges - you don't need to know any tricks to beat sieges in TW games because the AI is uniformly appalling in them (Rome 2 gets a lot of very well-deserved flak for having an especially bad implementation, but TW siege AI is so atrocious across the board that in Empire and every subsequent game the developers have added workarounds designed to help the AI, such as grappling hooks).



Crusader Kings II barely has an AI - everything is handled through scripted decision-making; the system sets limits on units that can be raised, does the fighting automatically, sets terms for declaring war and forces peace when a certain condition is met. The AI only really has control of (a) where to move units, (b) when to merge units and which characters to set as generals, (c) knowing when it would be a good idea to quit (say, if its armies are all gone and the only territories it can raise from have enemy forces, but the warscore is still below 100%), and (d) - as you note - hiring mercenaries.

The AI is nothing short of atrocious at every one of these. It sends armies to pointless places and can easily be stalled just by sending something of your own towards its province, it engages with tiny armies instead of merging stacks and isn't capable of raising new armies as they become available (a patch in development will supposedly fix the latter), it rarely hires or effectively uses mercenaries, takes no account of the fact that the player can hire mercenaries, and it's as bad as Civ games if not worse at surrendering a lost war if the warscore is anything below 90%, and will often hold out at 99%. CK II is the fantastic game it is largely because it gives the AI so little scope to screw up by railroading its decision-making. If it had anything like the freedom of Civ V's AI decision-making, people would be decrying it in droves.



Nearly every strategy game with difficulty levels does this. The only exceptions I can think of are a few RTSes like Starcraft II, which are so deterministic in their play that the AI can be given a fixed script at a higher difficulty level, with better strategies hard-coded at different levels. This isn't a question of programming better AI, it's a matter of coding worse AI - the highest difficulty levels are the ones where the AI is programmed to build enough workers, attack at earlier times, and sit on fewer spare minerals, while lower levels are deliberately coded to play 'carelessly'.

It's basically like making Prince the highest difficulty in Civ V and reducing AI performance at every level below - instead of programming harder AIs with bonuses, you're programming easier AIs with handicaps. It's exactly the same basic design, however. And the strategies used at each level are highly stereotyped, always following the same build order, attacking at the same time with the same unit mix and so forth.

Click to expand...

Was there a point in any of that?

Mine was that I've never seen a game with a decent AI that didn't come from giving it advantages. If you would like to refute that point then name one instead of telling me the games I listed are even easier than I led onto.

Beaver79 said:

I've played many strategy games and in all of them you eventually figure out the AI and they become easy. The only way they can make a game hard is to give the AI advantages. At least CIv gives a pretty good difficulty slider, and yes deity is a pretty hard game even if you consider it cheating.

Here are some other strategy games that I've played and their weaknesses:

Total War - As soon as you figure out nothing stops cavalry you just spam horsies and charge. It becomes braindead easy.

Medieval Total war - seems hard at first when everyone attacks you, until you realize they are sending everything including the kitchen sink at you. If you can get some men in a boat and hit one of their cities you will notice they only left one dude there and you can light them up.

Crusader Kings 2 - Mercenaries

Stronghold games - The game gets hard, real hard, but only because the AI starts out with insane bonuses and you start out with nothing. Same thing as deity in Civ.

Heroes of might and magic games - same deal. The only reason these games are hard is because the AI gets tons of advantages.

My point is that it doesn't seem possible to make a great unpredictable AI without giving it hardcore advantages. Name me one and I'll happily go out and try it.

Click to expand...

True. When first time i played civ5 on king i though this game is so hard... never would though that AI is stupid. Now after many hours i think that deity is a joke. Its depends on a player i think, and there is many casual players who thinks AI is okey so they might never fix it or improve it.

Firaxis changing an aspect of the game between major versions doesn't always imply that were wrong about how it worked in tn the previous version; all it means is they want to do something different in the new one.

As I recall, one of the guiding principles for both Civ III and Civ IV were 1/3rd brand new concept; 1/3rd the same; and the remaining 3rd put a different spin on a previous concept.

Beaver79 said:

Was there a point in any of that?

Mine was that I've never seen a game with a decent AI that didn't come from giving it advantages. If you would like to refute that point then name one instead of telling me the games I listed are even easier than I led onto.

Click to expand...

There are quite of number of relatively simple games compared to Civ games that have perfect AIs written for with no cheating.
These are otherwise known as solved games. (A fairly complex one is checkers which was recently solved. The best AI for it will never lose.)

For the SSI games which are a good deal more complex; I normally found their AIs good at defending; but terrible at offense.

And also the Better AI mod from Civ IV was all about making the AI better without cheating; it inself has spawned mods that improve the AI from there; while it's not yet to the point where the AI on prince level modified to have no handicaps would be competitive; it's a whole lot closer than base Civ IV.

An absolutely critical thing we must remember about civ AI is that it also must play blind. I mean this in two different senses:

- Like the player, the AI can't see through fog of war. It would actually be easier to let it "cheat" and do this. In fact, doing so would make it much more effective at combat overall. When the AI makes an especially stupid move, remember that sometimes it does this because it can't see your units. Giving the AI the ability to "guess" where your units likely are based on where it last saw them (like a human player can do) is a massive task.

- More importantly: Civ AI is not hard coded with any specific unit in mind. The AI doesn't know what an "Archer" is. It just sees a unit with 2 move, 2 range, attack value X. It has to do this because this game is moddable. The AI has to be able to play with the random units it is given. Could you hardcode the AI for the "core" game? Yes, but its generally avoided as an option.

isau said:

- Like the player, the AI can't see through fog of war. It would actually be easier to let it "cheat" and do this. In fact, doing so would make it much more effective at combat overall. When the AI makes an especially stupid move, remember that sometimes it does this because it can't see your units. Giving the AI the ability to "guess" where your units likely are based on where it last saw them (like a human player can do) is a massive task.

Click to expand...

Yes, but most players who do the exact same mistake stop moving units blindly and will move them one tile at time (as to why the AI doesn't move one square then recalculate vision and move one probably has to do with turn times becoming longer with all this processing).

And the AI isn't completely blind... it does consider the value of late-game resources players cannot see when choosing locations to settle (Human players can take a little advantage of this with recommendations active).

Also had my Economic advisor keep telling me to "improve sea resources" near cities that had no unimproved ones and discovered that's a hint there's oil offshore I couldn't see yet... which explains why sometimes the AI builds workboats that otherwise seem pointless and loiter around a city doing nothing.

I had read, I believe on this site;, somewhere, about an ai that was given the instructions to a civ game and the requirements to winning, and it went on to figuting out on its own which move was best. Thats the future. I only pray I still have all my faculties when such a gane that utilizes tech like that is released.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

awetzel said:

I had read, I believe on this site;, somewhere, about an ai that was given the instructions to a civ game and the requirements to winning, and it went on to figuting out on its own which move was best. Thats the future. I only pray I still have all my faculties when such a gane that utilizes tech like that is released.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

Click to expand...

And it was probably a military-grade supercomputer processing that AI's decisions.

"Would. You. Like. To. Play. A. Game?"

isau said:

An absolutely critical thing we must remember about civ AI is that it also must play blind. I mean this in two different senses:

- Like the player, the AI can't see through fog of war. It would actually be easier to let it "cheat" and do this. In fact, doing so would make it much more effective at combat overall. When the AI makes an especially stupid move, remember that sometimes it does this because it can't see your units. Giving the AI the ability to "guess" where your units likely are based on where it last saw them (like a human player can do) is a massive task.

- More importantly: Civ AI is not hard coded with any specific unit in mind. The AI doesn't know what an "Archer" is. It just sees a unit with 2 move, 2 range, attack value X. It has to do this because this game is moddable. The AI has to be able to play with the random units it is given. Could you hardcode the AI for the "core" game? Yes, but its generally avoided as an option.

Click to expand...

#1 Actually the main reason they introduced fog of war back to the AI in Civ IV is that the Civ III AI was so bad at using the cheat that it was being constantly being yo-yoed by the human. (When at war, remove all garrison units from a distant city that you want the AI to head towards and they'd do so. Then when you wanted them to head back the other way, get the garrison back in that city and remove from a city in the new direction you want them to go)

#2 Worse that it, when selecting units to build all it sees is "flavors" & "flavor modifiers"

First off, the discussion here is awesome. Interesting stuff, and you all are clearly a lot brighter than me at this AI stuff That said, I think there's some pretty easy fixes that could be made that would make the AI significantly better without (I don't think) increasing turn times too much.

1) The AI needs to move then attack. This bothers me to no end. An AI will attack with its adjacent melee units, then move it's ranged units, then attack with those. A smart player knows to weaken with ranged (and hopefully kill) first, then attack with melee, but the AI doesn't, since it won't move anything until all units in attack position are done attacking. It also prevents the AI from taking full advantage of flanking bonuses. Switching the order can't be too hard, can it?
2) Take advantage of great generals! This sort of ties back to 1, the AI will leave a gg out of range until all attacks are done, then move it. But more importantly, the AI will leave a gg in place throughout the attack phase, rather than moving it to maximize it's effect. Making the AI understand how to maximize ggs would go a long ways towards making the AI dangerous, especially as China.
3) The AI needs to understand units aren't just meat shields! When was the last time you saw an AI with a 3+ upgraded unit? Actually, scratch that, any upgrades at all?! The AI never retreats a unit to allow it to heal. Either it dies or it uses its promotion for an insta-heal. Either way, it prevents the AI from ever working with any strong, high level units (and it makes wiping their armies out a lot easier). The AI needs to place a higher value on the life of its units, and on the value of real upgrades.

But I don't know, I'm just a student with no real understanding of how my shiny glow-box and its games work. Would any of this make sense? Basically my mindset is that Firaxis should just tweak every issue they see with the AI. It'll never be perfect, especially since turn times have to be minimized. But it could at least be improved, little by little.

Beaver79 said:

I've played many strategy games and in all of them you eventually figure out the AI and they become easy. The only way they can make a game hard is to give the AI advantages. At least CIv gives a pretty good difficulty slider, and yes deity is a pretty hard game even if you consider it cheating.

Here are some other strategy games that I've played and their weaknesses:

Total War - As soon as you figure out nothing stops cavalry you just spam horsies and charge. It becomes braindead easy.

Medieval Total war - seems hard at first when everyone attacks you, until you realize they are sending everything including the kitchen sink at you. If you can get some men in a boat and hit one of their cities you will notice they only left one dude there and you can light them up.

Crusader Kings 2 - Mercenaries

Stronghold games - The game gets hard, real hard, but only because the AI starts out with insane bonuses and you start out with nothing. Same thing as deity in Civ.

Heroes of might and magic games - same deal. The only reason these games are hard is because the AI gets tons of advantages.

My point is that it doesn't seem possible to make a great unpredictable AI without giving it hardcore advantages. Name me one and I'll happily go out and try it.

Click to expand...

Galciv 2?


Sent from my BNTV600 using Tapatalk

CivilizedPlayer said:

2) Take advantage of great generals! This sort of ties back to 1, the AI will leave a gg out of range until all attacks are done, then move it. But more importantly, the AI will leave a gg in place throughout the attack phase, rather than moving it to maximize it's effect. Making the AI understand how to maximize ggs would go a long ways towards making the AI dangerous, especially as China.

Click to expand...

Especially as Mongolia (moreso than China)... that Medic General promotion combined with March is brutal (especially as it was in my last Mongolia game where I also found the Fountain of Youth... having a small group of units travel around with that and a Medic II scout made them practically immortal).

I get depressed when I see AI moving GGs with no units in sight (all by their lonesome unprotected) and even watched AI having a general dance 2 or three tiles away from the current battle between embarking and being on land... until a CS ship got tired of watching him and ended his pitiful existence.

joncnunn said:

#1 Actually the main reason they introduced fog of war back to the AI in Civ IV is that the Civ III AI was so bad at using the cheat that it was being constantly being yo-yoed by the human. (When at war, remove all garrison units from a distant city that you want the AI to head towards and they'd do so. Then when you wanted them to head back the other way, get the garrison back in that city and remove from a city in the new direction you want them to go)

Click to expand...

That's actually a different sort of problem. The issue with that is the weighting of changes in battle plans. Although that problem will always likely exist to some extent (even the AI could make a lot of human players respond that way if it were programmed to move units around to set up "fake" vulnerable cities).

The issue Civ 5 (and any game with fog of war) usually has is that if a unit makes a blind move and lands in a forest of enemies, which results in it getting killed, the death also renders it blind again, causing it to send in the next unit... There are ways around this, but its potentially costly.

I am actually curious whether the solution to civ's AI issue isn't simply giving all Melee units a base 3 move, removing the "set up" penalty for early siege weapons, and causing archers to take damage even when firing remotely (which even airplanes take). The ability of ranged units to fire without taking damage is a core game imbalance around which no level of AI can really accommodate. It's too easy for the player to game. The other changes would also significantly alter how the game plays. The AI is too optimistic about Melee and early Siege units.