Emperor Me wins, and comments on the Artificial Intelligence of his rivals

algieba

Chieftain
Joined
Dec 23, 2010
Messages
5
Hello

I played a game as the Dutch (Financial is the best trait, and I like cultural for the rapid border pop, I like traits that give early bonuses) with better bts ai and BUG, and wanted to share my experience in this thread. I read better bts ai is dead, I hope it will be continued because it made this game really better. I plan to use Fuyu's merged mod next time, as he seems to still be maintaining it. I wish I knew how to program, because there are many things that could make the AI more challenging and fun, but alas, my parents wanted me to study the humanities!

I played a standard map, fractal, low water level, tropical climate, balanced resources, 12 civs, emperor difficulty, oh and random personalities and no vassal states. I read a lot of strategy articles and after finally winning on monarch (the level I usually play) I felt ready for a challenge. Better BTS AI is great and forced me to play balanced and take care of my military I lost many previous games by allowing an AI to get far ahead in military score and swamp me.

The map turned out to be a quasi pangeaa, 9 civs on same square continent. I used a swordsman rush to quickly kill my nearest neighbour and got enough space to grow. At the same time everyone on the continent became jew, except for poor ghandi who was later eliminated. That resulted in frantic tech trading between Ais, and probably means I will try a no tech trade game next time to see what happens. Many times I fell 5-6 techs behind Ais only to catch up by researching something and trade it around, only to fall back again later.. anyway.

After killing zara yakob I used my experienced swordsmen stack to attack tokugawa. The war started well, but then he got samurais before I got macemen, and my city capturing stack stalled. I believe he asked his brothers in faith for assistance, because he suddenly became very advanced in tech. I made peace, got macemen, and then kicked his but.

And this is my first AI complaint. Neither tokugawa nor other Ais tried to attack my stack. They certainly put up a rugged passive defence, with more than 10 defending units sometimes, but never massed their forces to counter attack. One of the reasons for that is that they kept many good units in non threatened cities, and even if ou military score was equal, I had more units where it mattered.

They also seemed to snob city defenders for more versatile units, that got destroyed defending a city with no bonuses, instead of attacking en masse my stack. I saw them shuffling units between cities and reinforcing threatened cities but no counter attack.

Anyway after tokugawa I went for rifling and got it before Kublai Khan, my third neighbour. I was killing him when he got an apostolic palace truce, sponsored by the leading AI, the Khmer (can't spell the name of that king!), one of the many clever uses of the apostolic palace I saw in this game.

After finishing off Kublai, the AI tech trade seemed to stop, as many where eliminated or couldn't keep up, or went free religion and lost the diplo bonus. And while everything seemed quiet, the Khmer declared war on the Inca. I quickly joined in, and narrowly managed to capture the interesting (full of wonders) Inca cities (Kapak is industrious).

After he got wiped out, I got a narrow tech lead, and thanks to my many cities I thought I had the spaceship in my pocket. What I failed to notice is that the Khmer had double the military score I had. Thankfully I got to assembly line and started producing tanks, when, a few turns later the Khmer launched a surprise attack. I managed to push them back. Again, even though they had many many units, most of them where garrisoned in cities, and the ones he sent were not in any way massed as a big stack. The composition was good, there were infantry, anti-tank, and artillery, they used defensive terrain, but they were easily wittled down by my massed forces. However in another stroke of AI genius, as I was finishing to kill his invading units and starting attacking border cities, the khmer voted for an apostolic palace truce! They also researched fission and are now going for rocketry, although assembly line and tanks seem more reasonable. Are they going space race or are they going to nuke me?

Well, I haven't finished the game yet, I don't know if I will be able to do that the days to come, but i think i will win, i know i got ahead of myself in the title. But just a few thoughts:

AI's don't seem to know how to push an advantage. Bismarck and Gilgamesh were at war in another part of the continent, and Bismarck made little progress even though he was A LOT more advanced than Gilgamesh, who had started on a nearby island and had missed out on the early judaic tech trading bonanza. Ghandi was at war against many civs larger and more advanced, he managed to hold out really a long time before being eradicated. I would say the AI doesn't use promotions for city capture properly or, I don't know, it can't press an advantage. It would also be nice if someone could teach it to create stacks like the ones in the “stack of doom” strategy guide, and to use medic III great general promotions, they are very powerful as I read on a strategy thread and saw myself.

Else I must say that AI diplo is delightful, that the cities are well groomed, and they have a good advantage due to difficulty level to compensate for their lack of human micromanagement, that great scientists were used to create academies.

Spying was also annoying but in the end irrelevant. I got a few improvements blown up and some poisoned water, but nothing serious. Some tech stealing would have been more useful for them, unless they did it and the game didn't tell me.

So that's all for now. I know civ IV is dying, with V having come out (I haven't played it), it is a great game.
 
Even with the better BTS AI, the AI are not very good at capturing cities. Most of the time you will see the AI standing outside of a city doing nothing and not even moving to a nice hill that is right next to them (yet somehow, whenever they are attacking me, their strategies are flawless).
And, yes, the diplomacy is much better than normal. I've learned to master diplomacy but that really doesnt matter when I get sneak attacked :mwaha:

So that's all for now. I know civ IV is dying, with V having come out (I haven't played it), it is a great game.
No way. CivIV is just getting started ;)
 
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