Simple Improvements to AI

[Naismith]

Lots of people have observed the AI is not very smart, and complained that on higher difficulty levels, the AI is simply given more units to start with to compensate for its stupidity. There has been a lot of debate on how difficult it would be to improve the AI to be more competitive with human players.

I believe that it would be a very difficult programming project to try and improve the AI to be as good as, say, a human player who can win consistently at even the Noble level. But I do believe there are some glaring AI deficiencies that could easily be remedied without undue difficulty. I have my short list below. Feel free to comment, criticize or add your own.

1) Commerce is the name of the game. The AI builds way too many farms, and not enough cottages. Not all Civ leaders should behave exactly the same in this regard, but simply making them all more likely to build cottages would make a big difference.

2) The AI places a ridiculously low priority on researching Alphabet, which gives the human player a great trading advantage at the beginning of the game, when it is most important.

3) This one might be more difficult than I think: The AI should build more seige weapons, and use them more effectively to bombard cities and create collateral damage. Once you are past the first part of the game, waging wars effectively requires the use of seige weapons. While I don't expect the AI to match the human player, the AI truly sucks in this area. At the very least, the AI should be programmed to build more seige weapons than it does now.

 

[DrewBledsoe]

On your number 1) Very weird, cos I always find the AI builds FAR too many cottages (even on hills) and therefore suffers from a distinct lack of production..

Maybe it changes behaviour via difficulty levels

2) seems a valid point to me.

3) Seems a good idea, even though on the flip side, siege weapons are the easiest to destroy, maybe it sees them as weaker units (pure speculation)

 

[MrCynical]

There are a few other obvious flaws in the AI that I can immediately think of.

1)The AI does not recognise that founding a city that is not coastal, but has many sea tiles in its radius is a bad idea.

2)The AI also doesn't recognise that icebound coastal cities do not in practice have sea access, and so build ships that can never leave the city.

3)After its initial attack, the AI tends to just send units into enemy territory as they are built during a war, rather than building up an attacking force. This makes it very easy to pick them off one at a time.

4)The AI keeps far too many units just sitting in its cities while enemy troops are in its territory. This means it can often suffer major damage from pillaging while forces that could easily destroy the invaders sit idle. This is especially bad with sea units.

5)The AI never removes naval units and great people from cities in iminent danger of being captured.

There are quite a few more, but these are some of the most obvious ones.

 

[The Tyrant]

Another one that should be easy to fix: Don't replace a town with a farm, only to replace that farm with a cottage. In fact, don't replace a town with anything unless it is necessary to access the only available source of a strategic resource (like coal or oil).

 

[Naismith]

On your number 1) Very weird, cos I always find the AI builds FAR too many cottages (even on hills) and therefore suffers from a distinct lack of production..

Maybe it changes behaviour via difficulty levels

2) seems a valid point to me.

3) Seems a good idea, even though on the flip side, siege weapons are the easiest to destroy, maybe it sees them as weaker units (pure speculation)

1) If so, this may be a bit more complex than I thought. I haven't had the experience of seeing Civ's overuse cottages. I use cottages a lot, and I do have early game production challenges because of it. But you can (and should) get a least a couple of cottages in each city very early on Prince. You can't completely hose up your production capabilities in the process, however. If they modified the AI logic to favor building cottages, they would have to be careful not to overdo it. The AI would have to take into consideration what kind of production capabilities it had. IMHO, building cottages on hills and plains is not too bright, at least not most of the time. It shouldn't be too difficult to change that logic.

I find that I end up doubling the GNP of the closest Civ (as shown on Demographics screen) around the time I'm researching tech's like Civil Service and such. That's what happened on my last game, small world, inland sea, standard number of Civ's including Quinn and Catherine. That's ridiculous, and it wouldn't be possible if they were building as many cottages as they should. I was playing as Isabella. During the course of the game, I took down Quinn, Catherine, and Caesar. Their use of cottages was pathetic.

3) Yes, who knows what kind of logic they use for build choices on military units? But since seige weapons are critical, they really need to address this. If they can't address it, maybe they should consider going back to more of a CIV 3 style war model, where it was still possible for the AI to fight wars more effectively without the intelligent use of seige weapons. I don't think that would be an improvement, by the way. Bottom line, they need to level the playing field for the AI, somehow.

 

[Naismith]

3)After its initial attack, the AI tends to just send units into enemy territory as they are built during a war, rather than building up an attacking force. This makes it very easy to pick them off one at a time.

I'd like to believe that addressing this one would substantially improve the AI's military skills, without a huge development effort. It could at least wait until it had 4 in a stack before sending them off to war. Not particularly smart, but relatively easy to program and it would be an improvement. Maybe even use some lame logic to make every 4th unit it built a seige weapon or something. (For me, seige weapons would make up at least half of an attacking force.)

Another thing I don't understand - the AI declares war on you, but has no units to send at you for several turns. Would it be that hard for the AI to decide it was going to declare war, prepare a modest stack and send it somewhere close to your border, and then declare war?

I guess it's easy for me to say, and the Civ programmers are rolling their eyes right now, but still...

 

[Armorydave]

There are a few other obvious flaws in the AI that I can immediately think of.

1)The AI does not recognise that founding a city that is not coastal, but has many sea tiles in its radius is a bad idea.

2)The AI also doesn't recognise that icebound coastal cities do not in practice have sea access, and so build ships that can never leave the city.

3)After its initial attack, the AI tends to just send units into enemy territory as they are built during a war, rather than building up an attacking force. This makes it very easy to pick them off one at a time.

4)The AI keeps far too many units just sitting in its cities while enemy troops are in its territory. This means it can often suffer major damage from pillaging while forces that could easily destroy the invaders sit idle. This is especially bad with sea units.

5)The AI never removes naval units and great people from cities in iminent danger of being captured.

There are quite a few more, but these are some of the most obvious ones.

Couldn't agree more wholeheartedly on all these points. At least some of them seem relatively simple to address via a patch and would make the game far more enjoyable. AI timidity is still the biggest problem in the game. Using a 3 or 4 promotion frigate to hold up 20 naval units in a city is ridiculous. Even if they had to lose three or four too break out it is better than having them all scuttled when the city falls.

 

[DrewBledsoe]

Recent game, India was doing far to well, way ahead of most of the world in science, so I sent a pillage army of 15 Samurai to put a stop to that..I completely pillaged every square of 4 big cities then approached Delhi and saw a stack so big it wouldn't fit on the screen just sitting in its capital...

This behaviour is probably the dumbest I've ever experienced, (it even built 2 settler galleons which I sunk) while just sitting there and happily let me completely wreck its whole cottage spam..without any comback, with a huge army just sitting less than a dozen tiles away..