The AI did not build a single city!

I just played through a whole game where the AI did not construct so much as a single new city and almost no new units.....

I was playing against Japan, in the modern era on a small map on king difficulty with game speed set to normal. I was using the improved economy and future tech mod (however, there is no real reason to assume that the mods had anything to do with the problem since I can't think of any reason for why the AI should just stop constructing cities simply because the tech tree has grown larger and because there are some new buildings you can construct).

I played through the whole game from start to finish and even though the AI had huge amounts of land (the map was easily large enough for 2-3 more players) and plenty of resources it did not build any new cities at all, and very few army units even though domination was the only victory condition. Even though I left the AI completely alone the whole time I was able to defeat it in just a few turns once I declared war by nuking the city closest to me to bits, and then by nuking the capital once before moving in with 1 mechanized infantry and taking it thus winning me the game (well I technically had 3 others but I only needed 1 to take the capital).

There are those who claimed that the AI is horrible, but I disagree. I think the AI is nonexistant.

The AI was enjoying what can only be described as literally ideal circumstances.

It had huge amounts of space all to itself in all directions, there were no other Civs nearby (well besides me but I still wasn't that close), there were literally huge amounts of valuable resources all around it even though the game was set to standard settings when it came to resources. And yet, it simply used the 3 settlers that it started with and then did not build any new cities for the reminder of the game. I looked, all over the map and did not find any.

This has made me less exited about the new patch, because while seeing Civ 4 style diplomacy return is indeed welcome the sheer amounts of horribleness of the game's AI is such that I feel Firaxis could as well just scrap it completely and start all over again. Hell, odds are that by the time they released the game they had only finished writing the skeleton for the planned AI anyways, so its not like they have anything to lose.....

Thoughts?

I've played 30+ games on no lower than price difficulty and never had a game where I built a 2nd or 3rd city before the AI, and never had a game where the AI didn't build any cities/units.

I have however played games with mods that did get some unusual bugs with how certain aspects of the game should play out, but nothing where the AI didn't build anything.

Interesting... the AI in all my games spams cities... to the point of squeezing cities onto random unculturated hexes inside my empire....

Never happened to me before either!
Some AI's will expand to the max...some will just build 1 or 2 cities...
But never no cities at all! Although I did experience a few games where certain civilizations only spammed workers without units

This has never happened to me either (quite the opposite actually), however if he started with 3 settlers and had 3 cities it's possible i guess if he was Ghandi who tends not to expand much past about 3 cities in most games.

Also, I feel that while the AI certainly isn't up to scratch, your wild speculation and hyperbole in bold is completely unfounded and unnecessary and you should remove it.

Revoran said:

This has never happened to me either (quite the opposite actually), however if he started with 3 settlers and had 3 cities it's possible i guess if he was Ghandi who tends not to expand much past about 3 cities in most games.

Also, I feel that while the AI certainly isn't up to scratch, your wild speculation and hyperbole in bold is completely unfounded and unnecessary and you should remove it.

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1. I was playing against Japan.

2. It isn't speculation if I saw it with my own eyes and kept an eye on the AI the whole time.

I once started with 4 CS City States spawning right next to my own settler. When I built my first city, they were immediately shunted to my border. They never built their own cities, so I sent my warrior to kill them, and get a few free workers.

This is not the first time I've seen city states spawn to close to me, and can't build their own cities.

Revoran said:

Also, I feel that while the AI certainly isn't up to scratch, your wild speculation and hyperbole in bold is completely unfounded and unnecessary and you should remove it.

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Why attack and insult a person who was just describing what they saw in their game? That is completely uncalled for and posts like yours which do that ruin the forum for everybody.

I have seen the AI go 100+ turns without founding a second city on multiple occasions, once on Emperor and again on Immortal difficulties. (In the latter game, Bismarck sat with a single city for 150 turns despite the extremely high difficulty!) During both of these cases, the AI in question had marble at their start, which I think caused their AI logic to place some crazy high priority on wonders. Both times, the AI had a single city with tons of wonders and nothing else. Also in both cases, the AI was attacked and destroyed by another power because they had no army whatsoever.

In other words, while I don't think this is common, it's really hard to believe that an inert AI could appear in the release version of the game at all.

This topic is pointless. No one else experiences this behavior and you can't comment on features of the game when you are playing with mods. The mods are obviously the cause of this. Have you ever had this happen in a game where you weren't using the mods? Have you played the game without mods even?

Yeah, this sounds exactly like a case of a mod breaking some basic AI script. I have played many many many games and never seen this happen to even one AI.

Sullla said:

I have seen the AI go 100+ turns without founding a second city on multiple occasions, once on Emperor and again on Immortal difficulties. (In the latter game, Bismarck sat with a single city for 150 turns despite the extremely high difficulty!) During both of these cases, the AI in question had marble at their start, which I think caused their AI logic to place some crazy high priority on wonders. Both times, the AI had a single city with tons of wonders and nothing else. Also in both cases, the AI was attacked and destroyed by another power because they had no army whatsoever.

In other words, while I don't think this is common, it's really hard to believe that an inert AI could appear in the release version of the game at all.

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I've had this happen once myself at King, Wu built zero settlers or workers yet churned out things like the Great Library and Great Wall. I suspect it's got to do with the marble resource, which is actually pretty bizarre because she didn't build any workers to improve it to get that +25% hammer boost.

AI might have been going for a culture victory.

It has to be your mod that is causing the problem. How about you try the game again without mods and see if the problem recurs?

CivDude86 said:

AI might have been going for a culture victory.

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He mentioned that domination was the only victory condition.

Hey, if you want AI to build cities you should play CIV 4!

You really need to re-create the same problem again without the mod, to prove it isn't the mod. Given how bad the "AI" is generally though, it wouldn't surprise me at all if this is in the base game and has nothing to do with the mod. It would be less noticeable if you were playing with several AIs, as the chances are at least one of them will start spamming cities like crazy.

Watching the AI move its units around, it looks a lot like "if you can attack something, % chance you will attack it, otherwise move in a random direction." Last night, Wu attacked me, which was expected, but suddenly a lot more units than I expected came into view. She had 2 warriors, a spearman and 3 archers. I had the city (str 7) and 3 archers, one of which was wounded. I thought I was going to lose the city, but suddenly the warriors and spearman retreated, while the archers stood around waiting to be killed.

My guess is, like the OP said, a lot of the "AI" is just skeleton code that they intended to fill in later but never got around to. We won't know until someone gets their hands on the code, by which time they will hopefully have put some proper AI behaviour in anyway.

I've seen this happen too in 2 of the 3 games I played with Civ5 (both on emperor) before giving up on the game completely out of sheer boredom. I distinctively remember from the last game I played Bismarck had only his capital around turn 160 (as Sullla mentioned I think he did have marble) while the Chinese and Iroquois both had only 2 cities despite loads of land around them. The one with the least land (Darius) at least had 4 cities before I decided to do the inevitable horseman rush to get it over with.

I once saw Ghandi not build any cities. 200 turns into the game I roll into his borders and find nothing but academies and elephants.

I think what happens is each of the AI's has a "flavor value" for various things and each game those values are randomized +/- two each game. Certain leaders have lowish expansion values to begin with. Combined that with a -2 randomization and then a settler gets eaten by barbs and then they decide to build a wonder and then they go to war... They just never get around to actually putting down a second city and being a game AI they don't realize how bad that is.

Sullla said:

I have seen the AI go 100+ turns without founding a second city on multiple occasions, once on Emperor and again on Immortal difficulties. (In the latter game, Bismarck sat with a single city for 150 turns despite the extremely high difficulty!) During both of these cases, the AI in question had marble at their start, which I think caused their AI logic to place some crazy high priority on wonders. Both times, the AI had a single city with tons of wonders and nothing else. Also in both cases, the AI was attacked and destroyed by another power because they had no army whatsoever.

In other words, while I don't think this is common, it's really hard to believe that an inert AI could appear in the release version of the game at all.

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Not hard at all Sul, there were numerous issues from scratch suggesting the AI was plain broken!! I remember a guy posting he killed 80 units with his mere 3, just to have a second guy immediately answering he had an army of 7 (and described the composition) which killed 800+ enemy foes. An inert AI in this context is at worst a minor evil.

I've never had that happen to me in exactly that way.

In one game however, I did see Persia avoid expansion for no good reason. It was on a pangea map, emperor. The map had a choke point. Most of the land was in the west. I was in the east with just Persia and one other civ. I wiped out the other civ and choked off the access point so that all the other civs couldn't get to my and Persia's side of the board. I spent the whole game focusing in the west and never attacked Persia.

When I was ready to wipe out Persia for the win, I finally wandered down to their area, only to find 3 cities and some very very old tech units. They had enough room to build another 10 or 15 cities, without any crowding and without coming near me. But they didn't.

That's the only time I've been able to identify non-aggressive tendencies. For the most part, the AI seems to be very happy cramming a city into every nook and canny they can find, including in the middle of my empire, next to my army in the middle of a war against me, in the frigid tundra, in the empty desert and so on.

I don't think this is a general problem.