Really bad AI. Anyone else experiencing this?

[dailyminerals]

Playing through a game on eternity game speed on a very large map on Prince, and I've noticed the AI is behaving very bizarrely/poorly in terms of even basic functions. On turn 3000, they'll leave cities completely undefended, have less than half their tiles developed with only maybe 3 or 4 workers for a huge empire of 11 cities, they won't spread their religion, and in wartime they'll suicide their units into a city with a 100% defensive bonus from across a river with their entire army until they're left with nothing, then just make peace. I've even went into the Worldbuilder to give several AI empires massive aid, but to no avail.

Is anyone else having experiences with very bad AI?

Did a recent version break AI? Isn't this mod supposed to have superior AI? What's going on here?

 

[superschokokeks]

Eternity? patience is a virtue....
No, I don't expierence the same stuff. They work as usual. They tend to suicide run more often than not sadly, but everything else works normally. Usually the AI don't suicide run a doomstack. So..

 

[dailyminerals]

Eternity? patience is a virtue....

Well it's not an issue of me expecting the AI to be further developed at an earlier stage due to game speed, if that's what you're saying. They've founded religions but don't actually spread them. They build wonders but not workers, they build units but just end up killing them. And it's not an issue of the AI having insufficient units, as I've gone into world builder and dumped a very large army in their lap with the funds to support it, and they just suicide it and sue for peace.

However, I had ranged bombardment on for both siege weapons and archers, and the moment I turned them off the AI started to behave somewhat more rationally with their stacks, but still not nearly as "intelligent" as I'm used to. I also have surround and destroy on, and I think that might in some way be confusing their logic about how to build and route stacks, but I'm just guessing.

 

[Charriu]

I can easily play against the AI at higher difficulty then compared to base BTS, even Deity is not terrible to play against. This does not seem right as I struggle sometimes on Immortal in BTS. Yes the AI is in front tech wise, but otherwise not capable. In addition to the things you noticed I experienced the following things.

1. When I attack the AI as soon as I enter their territory or start a siege on a city, the AI suicides their units except for some few units. They do that regardless of unit type. Last time the suicided 8 Longbowmen into my stack, which is ridiculous.
2. The AI sometimes settles far away places early on and then crumbles under revolutions.
3. The AI declares war on me, but did not show up with any units. Some turns later it offers peace.
4. It can't handle civics. As soon as it gets too Republic, most of the AIs go down with Republic, which then destroys their empire financially. It seems like it goes with every new civic even if it is worse.
5. It moves with a huge army around my territory, but does not even bother to pillage my one and only spice resource on our border.
6. In the beginning it sometimes wanders around aimlessly with it's settlers, before settling a (sometimes far away) city. This could be due to not revealed resources.
   
7. Later I tend to find settlers parked in some AI's city, which I don't remember finding so often in base BTS.

Also note that not all of these problems occur in every game. I even thought about getting into the code and xml and start working on the AI, but it looks like a daunting task, even to find everything related to AI.
I searched for other AI problems with this mod. If my research is correct then the AI performance worse with the following settings, which I disabled:

• Range Bombardment
• Start as Minor Civ
• Surround and destroy
• Great Commanders

These AI problems are really annoying and I remember that the AI could handle the game much better some 2 years ago.

EDIT: I just wanted to say that I really love this mod and all of it's features, which makes the AI problem all the more worse.

 

[rtt4a]

I also think that AI is maybe the weakest part of this otherwise great mod. If I wanna really play i choose for example K-mod, playing AND I know i always win but its just fun to play with all content
I have played all versions of ROM and ROM-AND since Zapparas first version and AI is definetly weaker now than years ago. I would say that AI got worst maybe 2-3 years ago..
Two most common problem what i have encountered is overall passive and stupid behaviour (AI build settlers but no cities etc) and terrible warfare skills (suicide attacks, undefended cities in wartime etc).

 

[dailyminerals]

Well at least I know it's not just me experiencing poor AI.

Does anybody know if this mod is still in active development with an intent to improve the AI, or is what we have basically the final version?

 

[rtt4a]

Yes mod is still active. Check forums, theres lots of activity.

 

[Thandor]

I have aslo noticed Archer Bombard makes AI less agressive because it tends to use it too much instead of standard attack, but I hate the all of nothing combat in this game so I will keep using it until I mange to mod combat mechanics to make units last more than one battle without killing or being killed (like in Civ VI).

Here is a pick of one of my games.. I'm using 5 upt and as you can see the AI is defending its cities, but even when it has much more units than me it is only trying to invade with small armies instead of using all its forces

https://imgur.com/a/tczdGok

As far as I remember the AI use to pillage improvements, maybe it does it randomly, but sometimes I have to guard some zones to avoid being pillaged regularly.

About the Settlers I have aslo found some of them in cities, but usually its because there is no safe zone to send them

 

[superschokokeks]

@dailyminerals No, I was just impressed you have the patience for this game speed. Especially when the turn processing time cranks up to eleven..

 

[ElderWolf]

Playing on Noble difficulty and snail speed with 40 civs on large map I noticed that all of the ai are a republic and have max 1/3 cities. After 1000 turns most of the ai was still a republic and still most of them had only 1-4 cities. I tried diplomatically changing them to monarchies but after several turns they just went back to being a republic. I noticed most of them had a settler or workers just sleeping in their cities while there was space to expand and tiles to upgrade. I was so fed up with everyone being a republic i went to world edit and gave everyone 2-4 more cities hoping it would make some civs change to a different civic other than a republic since it increases costs of number/distance of cities by 250%!! But nope nearly all of them are still republics. 5 or 6 of them somehow manage to be ahead in techs from me by maybe 4 technologies even though I have 13 cities 1 of which gives me almost 300 science! I just don't understand.

 

[rtt4a]

Playing on Noble difficulty and snail speed with 40 civs on large map I noticed that all of the ai are a republic and have max 1/3 cities. After 1000 turns most of the ai was still a republic and still most of them had only 1-4 cities. I tried diplomatically changing them to monarchies but after several turns they just went back to being a republic. I noticed most of them had a settler or workers just sleeping in their cities while there was space to expand and tiles to upgrade. I was so fed up with everyone being a republic i went to world edit and gave everyone 2-4 more cities hoping it would make some civs change to a different civic other than a republic since it increases costs of number/distance of cities by 250%!! But nope nearly all of them are still republics. 5 or 6 of them somehow manage to be ahead in techs from me by maybe 4 technologies even though I have 13 cities 1 of which gives me almost 300 science! I just don't understand.

I have also seen problems with civics, AI wont always use best ones for some reason. sleeping settlers I see almost every game, its big problem.
Weird thing is that some AIs do expand pretty fast 5-6 cities but theres always many of them which build settlers and they just keep them in city. Ai has troops to guard and theres lots of space to expand but no

 

[Thandor]

I have also seen problems with civics, AI wont always use best ones for some reason. sleeping settlers I see almost every game, its big problem.
Weird thing is that some AIs do expand pretty fast 5-6 cities but theres always many of them which build settlers and they just keep them in city. Ai has troops to guard and theres lots of space to expand but no

I use to play with moded handicaps so the AI dont get too much advantage, it does train faster and get more gold, but building and science are more even.. and in my games I use to be allways behind in military strength, science and have less cities until I start fighting the AI and destroying and capturing their cities..

I use to play Extra-Gigantic Maps on Marathon, starting as minor civs and barbarians become civs.., In my last game I have 42 cities (after destroying 1 civ and crippling 2-3 more) and the AIs behind 30 and 25, even then, they have more military and are slighty more advance on science

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

For those who find the mod too easy, I suggest trying both Flexible Difficulty and Flexible AI. That should make it more a challenge.

 

[Tobiyogi]

Well, I didn't notice stupid behavior like leaving their cities undefended. When I am at war with someone, he will always stack as many units as possible in the city next to me. So when I limit the number of units per tile to 5, there will be 5 archers or 3 archers/ 2 axes in the city. Maybe it depends on the civ/ leader, if they are more or less prone to build units...?

 

[rtt4a]

For those who find the mod too easy, I suggest trying both Flexible Difficulty and Flexible AI. That should make it more a challenge.

Yes you can do that but its kind of stupid.. higher difficulty only gives AI unfair benefits. I think it would be much better if AI could be fixed to atleast understand basic warfare.
Leaving cities empty in war time and waisting all units for single unit suicide attacks against 100% victory changes is just something what really should not happend. I have even seen that AI removes defending units from city when war begans. And its AI who is declearing war.. right now AI is much much weaker than basic BTS and light years for example k-mods level. I undertsand that lot of content makes it difficult but it shouldnt be like this.

Does anyone know how AI is doing in C2C? There use to be lots of same code and maybe developers have done something what can be used also in AND.

 

[Charriu]

For those who find the mod too easy, I suggest trying both Flexible Difficulty and Flexible AI. That should make it more a challenge.

Well it's one thing if the AI is good or bad and a totally different thing when the AI just does plain stupid stuff, like rtt4a already said. And I have to say that again, I did not notice this behaviour from the AI two years ago.
About Flexible Difficulty and AI. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I understand those just raise or lower the difficulty at fixed time intervals. So Deity is the hardest it gets, right? Well in that case this not a solution for the AI problem.

 

[dailyminerals]

K-Mod has some pretty good AI. I just finished a game with it and it's tactical behavior is far better than any mod I've experienced thus far. If this mod combined itself with K-Mod's logic, it would be just about perfect. But I'm not too sure how likely that is to happen.

 

[Charriu]

Well in that case you still would need to teach the AI all the components that are not in K-Mod.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Well it's one thing if the AI is good or bad and a totally different thing when the AI just does plain stupid stuff, like rtt4a already said. And I have to say that again, I did not notice this behaviour from the AI two years ago.
About Flexible Difficulty and AI. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I understand those just raise or lower the difficulty at fixed time intervals. So Deity is the hardest it gets, right? Well in that case this not a solution for the AI problem.

It raises and lowers the difficulty for both you and AI depending on how you and AI are performing. The problem is that in such a big mod as RAND, it's almost impossible to have AI perform well in every situation because in different stage of civilizations development the logic behind a move might be totally different. Flexible difficulty is a way to help AI adapt to how good a human player is. The better you perform, the easier it gets for AI to build/train/research and so on. Granted, difficulty doesn't make AI any smarter: not in RAND nor in other mods that I'm aware of (not to mention vanilla civ). But it gives AI some advantages/handicap depending on how you play to avoid a steamrolling effect. It's obvious that if you start with some advantage and start building all the wonders, it can only get worse for AI, no matter its strategy. Flexible difficulty is meant to avoid this steamrolling effect and keep all players more or less on the same level. In fact, sometimes you might see a tiny civilization with few cities and huge armies. IMHO that's much more realistic (and fun) than simply building everything you can before AI does, which gets easier and easier as the game goes on.

 

[ElderWolf]

It raises and lowers the difficulty for both you and AI depending on how you and AI are performing. The problem is that in such a big mod as RAND, it's almost impossible to have AI perform well in every situation because in different stage of civilizations development the logic behind a move might be totally different. Flexible difficulty is a way to help AI adapt to how good a human player is. The better you perform, the easier it gets for AI to build/train/research and so on. Granted, difficulty doesn't make AI any smarter: not in RAND nor in other mods that I'm aware of (not to mention vanilla civ). But it gives AI some advantages/handicap depending on how you play to avoid a steamrolling effect. It's obvious that if you start with some advantage and start building all the wonders, it can only get worse for AI, no matter its strategy. Flexible difficulty is meant to avoid this steamrolling effect and keep all players more or less on the same level. In fact, sometimes you might see a tiny civilization with few cities and huge armies. IMHO that's much more realistic (and fun) than simply building everything you can before AI does, which gets easier and easier as the game goes on.

Any place i can read about different difficulty bonuses/handicaps? I remember in vanilla civ higher difficulties gave ai advantages in battles and if its like that in rand then I'd rather avoid it.