A Medium Rant

[DrewBledsoe]

Ok, settings Huge/Shuffle/Random Civ/Monarch/Marathon/Aggressive AI/No Cheating..I'm the Greeks..here's a snapshot of the world as I know it in the 15th century:-


Ok I'm not very advanced, but having just met Caeser from the rest of the world, this is still very winable..

THE POINT:- why I hope and pray the expansion fixes this, cos the AI just won't fight...its utterly and completely coded for its science fix..if you look at my world map, I've hardly had a break from war for my entire history, to get the land I have.

But even with a huge scientific advantage, the AI still virtually refuses to build troops..well thats not quite true..its so obsessed with science and / or GPs that lets say a typical prime land AI city..middle late game..20 squares 5 hill/ grasslands/ 4 water tiles/ 11 grasslands / 4 on river.

Most likely you'll find 16 cottage improvements...

Why?

Why has the AI been coded this way? I can understand if its just one commerce city out of say a dozen, but if the AI has a dozen cities like this they will all be the same.

So when you attack after the initial few spare troops counterattack, thats it..they have no way of producing any counterresponse, because they basically have no production (but masses of commerce).

The last war against the Germans, I had at best Swordsman, and Horse Archers against Knights, Longbowmen, Macemen and Crossbowmen...and I won hands down, beacuse once I withstood the initial counterstrike, that was it..8 pure commerce cities don't produce troops..so Germany has best part of a dozen techs on me (but won't trade any for peace..thats another thread though) and only 4 cities left...couple of hundred years to knock that tech lead back.

If a human had been playing Germany, I would have been completely game endingly destroyed in the last war, and by this I don't mean tactics, just the vastly superior army that Germany had the potential to build...but couldn't, cos the five hills that should have been mined were cottaged, as were the 4 river squares that should have been farmed to balance the mines, (that would have left 7 cottage tiles which is plenty), there's utterly no point in spamming cottages and therefore tech, if a motley army of neerdowells can come and knock your city down with ease.

My one hope from this post for any expansion, is that the AI can go cold tech turkey for a while, and actually learn to fight for land before its too late.

 

[DrewBledsoe]

Guys , you're alllowed to comment btw...

 

[Rex Tyrannus]

There are so many things the AI does wrong. Building cottages where farms or mines are better. Trickling two-troop stacks into a war instead of attacking in strength. Founding a religion in 1500BC but never building the shrine.

It burns me that the AI doesn't get any smarter in higher dificulties, but rather gets advantages that only make the game less fun.

That said, the truth of the matter is that it's hard to program an intelligent-acting algorithm in a game this complex. As you said, one or two cottage-spammed cities would have been a good idea, but not all. So you have to program a threashold. At a certain cut-off, the AI assigns a city to be financial/science. However, an AI with low science would be boring, so they set the threashold low.

The result? Cottage spam with no emergency troop production. It's getting better, but the AI simply isn't human.

 

[The Great Apple]

Once you've worked out that a city should specialize in a particular thing, and how heavily it should specialize, the rest isn't to bad. It's the original decision which is the tough bit.

What determines precisly how a city should specialise. It seems to me that there are all sorts of factors... I'll list a few:

• The plots
• The fresh water supply
• What specializations other cities have got
• The civilization's current standing against other civilizations
• The tech level
• What improvements are currently available, and what will be available in the future based on changes such as civics and techs, taking into account their time to build, what improvement they make, as well as any upgrade times...
• Same as above, but a bit simpler, for buildings/projects/wonders
• What improvements/buildings/projects/wonders the city currently has
• Probably a few more things.

The code for deciding then has to be written generically enough to be able to handle many different mods, with different improvements and building types, and has to not take too long deciding, as the code will have to be re-run for every city at least every few turns to make sure everything is going right.

At the moment this sort of thing is in my long-term todo list... if anybody can assign weighting numbers to the above then please feel free

 

[uncarved block]

Cottages? In my games on Noble, the big AI flaw is farming too much. Send a Spy around in the late game and it becomes really noticable. Only the Financial civs will cottage, and everyone else builds farms and windmills. On a guess, it's because population is part of the score, and the AI is programmed to maximize its score.
Also in my games, the Aggressive civs are decidely NOT emphasizing science; it's rather common for me to trade Caesar Alphabet for money a tech or two after I get Currency, and the same goes for Tokugawa and even Alex at times. But the capital has a nice SoD sitting there, just waiting for . . well, I don't know, really

 

[armchairknight]

I guess there's an upside to being one of the lesser skilled players of the game. The AI does pretty well against me. I've seen many multi-unit stacks of doom thrown at me and many waves of smaller stacks, that are more annoying to me, but less effective at taking my stuff. Their cities do seem less well developed than mine, but I spend most of my time building my cities up, so I just thought it was due to their more aggressive policies. Maybe it's the programming? In any case, improving the AI certainly can't hurt the game, just my score.

 

[Grinder]

I play for diplomatic or cultural victories mostly and always get attacked, but generaly later in the game after Monty or whoever gets really ticked of because I haven't joined in their war.

Probably the oddest reason for a war I've had was Monty requesting about 4500 gold in tribute (despite him being miles behind in tech and population), and then getting mad when I didn't cough up.

 

[Older than Dirt]

I have not noticed these problems that the OP mentions happening with regularity. I have looted many a farm and mine but I sure would rather pillage towns.