is the AI impacted by ticking off certain victory types?

[HansA]

Hi,

When you tick of all victories but "Domination", will the AI be more aggressive or will it still try to do a cultural victory or build the spaceshuttle even when it can never lead to victory?

I want to play a domination game only where everyone dominates everyone. Or where everyone tries to go for cultural (this might take a while then... )

Gr

 

[nokmirt]

Hi,

When you tick of all victories but "Domination", will the AI be more aggressive or will it still try to do a cultural victory or build the spaceshuttle even when it can never lead to victory?

I want to play a domination game only where everyone dominates everyone. Or where everyone tries to go for cultural (this might take a while then... )

Gr

I play with just domination, but I am not sure if the AI only tries for that victory condition. I am not sure if it knows the difference. The last game I played most of the world went to war with me because I conquered a city state. The AIs seemed very aggressive diplomatically, except for Russia who was my only friend.

 

[Dedrytus]

IMO AI doesn't know that the rules are not default. For example: you can disable city states and some AI will take patronage policy tree. I think that AI is not programmed to check startup rules, because startup menu is messed up: you can choose "raging barbarians" and "no barbarians" at the same time (I think it could be confusing for AI)... and how should AI play when all victory conditions are disabled (by broken menu selection control or by purpose)?

 

[Spatzimaus]

The AI, at the start of each game, picks one of a handful of "Grand Strategies", generally one per victory condition. This choice then weights the Flavor values that the AI uses to decide what buildings or units to build at any given moment. Also, the AI has an inherent diplomatic penalty against any other players or AIs following the same path to victory.

So, if you turn off everything other than a Domination win, then the AI just won't pick the "culture", "science", or "diplomacy" grand strategies. Every civ will take the conquest strategy, which'll weight things towards military buildings and units over infrastructure, and will change how many units get built in a typical game. Also, with every player on the same grand strategy, it'll probably make the AIs less friendly with each other (thanks to that penalty I mentioned above). So yes, this'd probably translate into a more aggressive game, although not the sort of all-out warfare you might expect; the difference might not be noticeable for some AIs. Flavor shifts are not THAT severe; a civ biased towards gaining culture (like France) will still do so, and civs biased towards city-state alliances (Siam or Greece) will still do that. It's just that they won't bias quite as severely as they would if you'd left those victories on. And no one will try to build a spaceship, because turning off the victory condition automatically disables the Projects involved.

Dedrytus, while you're correct that the AI doesn't account for most of the optional rules or other setup options, this is one of the few cases where the AI DOES recognize a change, albeit in a very crude and random way.

 

[OverWind]

I hope you don't get the "We think you're winning the same way as us" penalty from each and every civ then

I mostly play with only domination checked, if I play just for the cozyness of it all, because I like to play until I'm the only one left standing.

 

[Mesix]

I you are playing with only Domination checked, wouldn't it be realistic for all the AI to have that penalty? You are all building up to take each other over. Doesn't it make sense that the military build up and competing interests would cause diplomacy problems which eventually spark a conflict?

 

[headcase]

"winning the same way as us" is equally dumb no matter how which victories are ticked.

There is already a lingering attitude of going to war with a civ if it's in one's best interest for victory and after factoring in the other diplomatic factors. Every civ is supposed to be in it to win. Losing because another civ won with a different victory type is still losing.

They should just remove it entirely and maybe replace it with a small, invisible, consistent penalty between all civs to make up for the missing penalty.