Okay, that's it, SCREW the AI in this game

Carmack

Chieftain
Joined
Mar 13, 2013
Messages
79
It's stupid. That's it. it's flat-out stupid and poorly written. I had a nice and quiet game where Morocco and I were best buddies. The Zulu start smacking him around, cap his capital, and reduce him to one city from his starting 4. Me, I just got done bringing Siam down to size with my legions because he insisted on plopping cities on my doorstep before telling me he didn't appreciate me building in land he considered his. Anyway, I've got this juggernaut war machine with nothing to do and Zulu presented himself with job opportunities. I crushed The Zulu, liberated all of Morocco's cities, and took the fight to The Zulu. I destroyed two Zulu cities and suddenly, Morocco, with a grocery list of green diplomacy modifiers from me propping him up on my shoulders, begins to warn me about my aggressive ways. A few turns pass and he denounces me. What. The. Funk.

The AI in this game is miserably stupid. It's to the point I feel like every game is me vs the world. In Civ4, you could at least build and maintain long-lasting relationships. In Civ5, it is so, SO easy to earn the warmonger trait, but so, SO arduous to shake it off.

Mind you while all this was happening, Morocco was still at war with The Zulu. :crazyeye:
 
while i agree the AI makes no sense, i think this is gonna get you a lot of flack mate...is this BNW?

I was looking at getting BNW in the hope it fixed AI issues..
 
It's stupid. That's it. it's flat-out stupid and poorly written. I had a nice and quiet game where Morocco and I were best buddies. The Zulu start smacking him around, cap his capital, and reduce him to one city from his starting 4. Me, I just got done bringing Siam down to size with my legions because he insisted on plopping cities on my doorstep before telling me he didn't appreciate me building in land he considered his. Anyway, I've got this juggernaut war machine with nothing to do and Zulu presented himself with job opportunities. I crushed The Zulu, liberated all of Morocco's cities, and took the fight to The Zulu. I destroyed two Zulu cities and suddenly, Morocco, with a grocery list of green diplomacy modifiers from me propping him up on my shoulders, begins to warn me about my aggressive ways. A few turns pass and he denounces me. What. The. Funk.

The AI in this game is miserably stupid. It's to the point I feel like every game is me vs the world. In Civ4, you could at least build and maintain long-lasting relationships. In Civ5, it is so, SO easy to earn the warmonger trait, but so, SO arduous to shake it off.

Mind you while all this was happening, Morocco was still at war with The Zulu. :crazyeye:

"Warmonger penalty" is more realistically a "you are a threat to the balance of power.. ie you will take cities in a military way".. i might like that you took them from someone else.. but I didn't like that you took them

Morocco was probably remembering your earlier warmongering (ie city taking) against Siam as well as the new Zulu cities you just took (liberating Moroccan cities did ease your warmongering level).

The "you liberated us" is probably not a big enough modifier... but you do get their votes for world leader.
 
I've also found (YMMV) that razing cities will piss off anyone and everyone who knows you. It's really put a damper on my warring since BNW...
 
@OP - did you denounce Siam OR Shaka before DOW'ing them? Or did they DOW you?

I tend to agree with the "liberating" bonus being too low. IMHO, if I rescued 3,500,000 of your citizens from occupation, bondage, slavery, religious and culture persecution and reclaimed half your GDP, culture, faith, etc, for instead of puppeting it as my own... you get to wash my car until victory turn.

As is, there is disincentive to liberating, as it levels the playing field. You're better of razing, and best off puppeting..
 
Ya pretty much the only way you can go to war is have everyone on the map denounce 1 civ and gang up on them.

If you declare war against someone that all the other civs are not ganging up on then you are screwed diplomatically for the rest of the game it seems and will result in the rest of the AI randomly denouncing you and randomly dowing you and you become the one that they all gang up on.
 
You Liberated Us should be fixed to outweigh Warmongering or most other modifiers. i hope it does in the future.
 
Well I was playing the Wonders of the Ancient world scenario again, and turn one, as soon as I built a city, the Hittites sent me a message about how pitiful my army was. Then in turn 3, they denounced me and were hostile. And they were on the other side of the map. So something's not right there...
 
I got hit with the warmongering label for honoring a defense pact. And then got denounced by the civ that I had said defense pact with.

I've said it many times, the game needs a way that lets you tell the other civs why you are attacking other civs. I'm playing a game now where Siam orchestrated 2 multi civ wars against me. Why? Because I had 4 cities to their 3 and was building cities too aggressively BS. With fighting on 4 different distant fronts, I only had enough units to be defensive and wait for the peace treaties. After the 2nd war ended, I started my buildup as I could see that Siam and the Huns were again pumping out unit after unit. So I bribed the Huns to go attack another former enemy, and I attacked Siam. Now everyone considers me a warmonger, when all I did was launch a preemptive strike. I should have a way to announce why I attacked and let each civ decide if the attack was justified.
 
Ya pretty much the only way you can go to war is have everyone on the map denounce 1 civ and gang up on them.

If you declare war against someone that all the other civs are not ganging up on then you are screwed diplomatically for the rest of the game it seems and will result in the rest of the AI randomly denouncing you and randomly dowing you and you become the one that they all gang up on.
That's not what I see, even on immortal. For instance, in my current game I declared war on Alexander, razed his little city in "my territory", took his capital city, and then declared peace, leaving him with 3 moderate cities. Of the other civs I knew at the time, three remained entirely positive (Korea, Shoshone and France had no red), and one (Darius) had a light red factor of warmongering. No problems even 30 turns later.

It undoubtedly helped that I had a long buildup to the war - denouncing Alexander 7-8 turns previously, and trying to do my best to get him to declare war on me. I also remained out of the top 2 in score, even after getting his capital.

I agree that once the world gets the idea that you are going after a domination victory, then the number of civs you can remain at peace with is quite small. But limited war still seems possible.
 
There are so few diplomatic options in this game, and most of the modifiers for doing things doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
 
I think the key problem AI-wise lies here:

liberated all of Morocco's cities

You can only "liberate" one city of a given civ and get a bonus - even if you give any extra cities you take back to Morocco, you'll just get a "we traded recently" modifier, not any improvement to the "liberated" modifier (which is large, or used to be pre-BNW as I haven't liberated any civs since - I had civs denounce me post-liberation if they hadn't liked me before, because they kept any past modifiers, but not with civs I previously liked and never a war declaration).

So in the above case the Morocco AI sees you taking cities - it no longer "remembers" that they were Moroccan cities (unless one's Marrakesh, in which case they'll just hate you for taking their capital), it just sees you going around taking cities. I'd challenge anyone to argue that this is appropriate AI behaviour - and I say that as a fan of the diplomatic AI more generally.

You Liberated Us should be fixed to outweigh Warmongering or most other modifiers. i hope it does in the future.

It did in G&K and vanilla, but I can see why it would work differently now. Liberation is a fixed, large but one-time bonus, while warmongering no longer is a one-off penalty but scales with the numbers of cities taken. However high you set liberating, eventually if you're going domination your city captures will outweigh it.

In principle the new warmonger penalty is a good change, but this isn't the only case where its interaction with pre-existing modifiers and mechanics that haven't changed doesn't seem to have been thought through. Another is G&K's pseudo-cassus belli system, when declaring war in response to having an allied city-state bullied would be less likely to incur a warmonger penalty. The issue with that now is that this relied on the warmonger penalty triggering as soon as war was declared, while now it doesn't trigger until the first city is taken.
 
I think the key problem AI-wise lies here:



You can only "liberate" one city of a given civ and get a bonus - even if you give any extra cities you take back to Morocco, you'll just get a "we traded recently" modifier, not any improvement to the "liberated" modifier (which is large, or used to be pre-BNW as I haven't liberated any civs since - I had civs denounce me post-liberation if they hadn't liked me before, because they kept any past modifiers, but not with civs I previously liked and never a war declaration).

So in the above case the Morocco AI sees you taking cities - it no longer "remembers" that they were Moroccan cities (unless one's Marrakesh, in which case they'll just hate you for taking their capital), it just sees you going around taking cities. I'd challenge anyone to argue that this is appropriate AI behaviour - and I say that as a fan of the diplomatic AI more generally.

I agree they need to have a lesser 'liberate' for cites originally founded by a civ that is still in the game (that you are not at war with)

(also it seems he didn't technically liberate any Moroccan cities as the Zulu reduced morocco to a few cities, not eliminated them)

The
"You brought us back into the game" needs to be a bigger bonus.

There needs to be a 'liberate' option for a civ that is still in the game as well (to avoid the warmonger penalty and allow restoring the balance of power.)
 
I agree they need to have a lesser 'liberate' for cites originally founded by a civ that is still in the game (that you are not at war with)

(also it seems he didn't technically liberate any Moroccan cities as the Zulu reduced morocco to a few cities, not eliminated them)

The
"You brought us back into the game" needs to be a bigger bonus.

There needs to be a 'liberate' option for a civ that is still in the game as well (to avoid the warmonger penalty and allow restoring the balance of power.)

I think the "You brought us back to life" bonus is probably fine as it is; the issue is that, as with any modifier - however large - if there aren't enough positive modifiers together you'll still get hit by negatives. You're exactly right that you should be able to liberate a city and return it to a civ with an appropriate bonus, rather than just capture and gift it.

And yes, if he didn't actually liberate Morocco at all the question of the "Recalled to life" modifier doesn't even arise - Morocco has no particular positives other than perhaps "fought against a common foe" (which can be strong, but seems to depend a lot on civ personality with warmongers favouring it more, which Morocco isn't. It is also temporary).
 
That's not what I see, even on immortal. For instance, in my current game I declared war on Alexander, razed his little city in "my territory", took his capital city, and then declared peace, leaving him with 3 moderate cities. Of the other civs I knew at the time, three remained entirely positive (Korea, Shoshone and France had no red), and one (Darius) had a light red factor of warmongering. No problems even 30 turns later.

It undoubtedly helped that I had a long buildup to the war - denouncing Alexander 7-8 turns previously, and trying to do my best to get him to declare war on me. I also remained out of the top 2 in score, even after getting his capital.

I agree that once the world gets the idea that you are going after a domination victory, then the number of civs you can remain at peace with is quite small. But limited war still seems possible.

Ya I feel u i might have exaggerated a bit when I said like just 1 small war. But idk full on domination is very very hard on diety whereas I can pretty much faceroll it on immortal, diety is a big step up. So much easier to just sit back early game build almost no units and do the "lets all be friends" thing while expanding aggressively and building up infrastructure as long as u have a dec of friendship AI won't dow you even if you expand very aggressively towards them.
 
I agree they need to have a lesser 'liberate' for cites originally founded by a civ that is still in the game (that you are not at war with)

(also it seems he didn't technically liberate any Moroccan cities as the Zulu reduced morocco to a few cities, not eliminated them)

The
"You brought us back into the game" needs to be a bigger bonus.

There needs to be a 'liberate' option for a civ that is still in the game as well (to avoid the warmonger penalty and allow restoring the balance of power.)

I should've said The Zulus captured 3 Moroccan cities, including their capital, not "reduced". Then I liberated all 3.

I razed all of Siam's cities except one strong city and annexed his capital. The city I left him is actually a pretty darn nice city with 2 luxuries, but too logistically inconvenient for my empire. Siam was the only 'injustice' I committed and, let's be honest, he was asking for it. We all know how the AI roles with its city spam. He was deliberately planting cities 3 tiles apart from my cities and were far from his capital. Alexander is notorious for this.

The interesting thing about all this is Sweden: They had gone to war with both Siam and The Zulus in the early game. Ever since I warred with Siam, they constantly denounce and insult me. What makes it even better is Sweden hates The Zulus and denounce them just as much as me while they gradually befriended Siam. While I was cutting The Zulus down to their capital, I was planning to either puppet their capital or gift it to Morocco because A) I wanted Morocco to have another trading city; B) I couldn't afford the happiness; C) The Zulu had one other city left. Not so. Sweden decided to declare war on The Zulus for the second time and captured that last city, leaving the Zulus to just their capital, which I had pillaged to hell. So as an act of mercy, I spared Shaka, much to Morocco's disappointment because he keeps asking me to go to war with them. Yet Morocco denounces my warlike ways...? I dunno lol.

People say not to completely eliminate civs because it's a huge diplo hit. I don't know, it doesn't seem to make much difference to me. All it takes is one declaration of war, then the denunciations start, and from there it snowballs. Half or damn near everyone hates you and it lasts all game. Try to pamper one civ and they'll back-stab you when your DoF expires.

It's funny though, the other civs should be thanking me for crippling The Zulus. He's a frequent run-away on other continents in my games, often conquering entire landmasses.
 
Yeah we need both a national and internation "casus belli" system, instead of just red and green dots. The fact that Firaxis INTENTIONALLY made the diplomacy system opaque and vague (which they admitted) is one of the biggest flaws in the game.

Also: why is it a negative when some denounces me ? That makes no sense. They denounce me *because* they have a negative view of me.
Then there is the: "either denounce your friend with me or I denounce you" request. If you go along with it, everyone (including them) hates you for backstabbing your friends. The same for "move troops away from borders".
That would not need to happen if there were non-aggression pacts in the game. Troops on my borders ? Please sign this non-aggression pact so you can't attack me for x turns.

Many easy solutions that would make the game a lot better and realistic.
 
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