AI warmongering, happiness crisis and a bit of a rant about my latest playthrough

[dan-the-man278]

Warning: bit of an unstructured rant incoming.

I’ve just had a very frustrating Antiquity Age playthrough and it has thrown up a few questions for discussion:

I was playing Machiavelli/Greece on Archipelago, Standard map (8 players), Sovereign difficulty. Spawned on a small continent I shared with Ashoka, with Ibn Battuta on the neighbouring landmass but separated by a thin mountainous strait and a bay.

(Confession - I declared one early war against Ashoka to gain a town that he had aggressively forward settled. In my excitement may have also taken his capital - it is possible that my main mistake was not eliminating him entirely)

To cut a long story short(ish), from this point every single AI that I met instantly hated me and declared war soon after. Friedrich and Napoleon were the other side of the map, I hadn’t even met them until the war was well over and we had no touching borders whatsoever, but they just kept constantly denouncing and DOWing - there were absolutely no alliances, I was just clearly the leader they all hated the most, so we had constant wars from about 30% age progress until the end. I was able to fend off some of Ibn’s first denouncements with my high influence but eventually couldn’t afford it (despite making the most influence per turn), so he too started random DOWs.

As you can imagine, being in 3-4 simultaneous, separate wars from 60% through to the end of the age tanked my happiness and economy just to be able to survive - since I was the victim of these DOWs, this felt a bit unfun. And then after the happiness crisis, four(!!) of my painfully defended settlements being flipped on LITERALLY the final turn of the age also sucked. In every war, I made peace with Friedrich and Napoleon as early as I possibly could and was nowhere near their cities - being penalised for this also sucked.

Sorry for the vague rant but I guess I have questions/thoughts about the following:
- in the Antiquity Age, I met 4 out of the remaining 7 civs all in the “old world”. I thought it was an even split: 4 old world, 4 distant lands. Is this a bug or is there just some unpredictability in the spawn of various players?
- are the AI more prone to playing aggressively on Archipelago due to having less space to expand? This is only my third playthrough so a very small sample size but this level of aggression seems crazy.
- does taking a player’s capital hit you with a relationship malus even with leaders you haven’t met yet?
- do the AI just literally hate some leaders on spec, even if played by the player? Like am I always going to have a rough time as Machiavelli regardless of how I play? If that is the case, I don’t like it.
- is there currently any way to see exactly what causes an AI to declare war? With the increased diplomacy potential in Civ7, I wonder if the game needs a “war goal” system similar to EUIV
- I hate, HATE the randomness of happiness flipping. I ended up with a random little town from Napoleon that was miles away from my capital. After taking even more of a happiness hit from being over the settlement cap during a war that I didn’t start and couldn’t end, with a town I didn’t want, I was eventually able to give it up in a peace deal - which of course did not improve our relationship at all. He then randomly ends up with one of my bigger cities at the very end of the age, and still hates my guts (along with everybody else) at the start of Exploration.

I think I’m going to abandon this playthrough but I am curious to see if anyone else has experienced frustration with some of the above and how you would see it fixed. I’m sure I could have played better but it felt like for most of the game my options were extremely limited due to being constantly on defense, despite not really playing aggressively at all.

Thoughts?

 

[evonannoredars]

- does taking a player’s capital hit you with a relationship malus even with leaders you haven’t met yet?
- do the AI just literally hate some leaders on spec, even if played by the player? Like am I always going to have a rough time as Machiavelli regardless of how I play? If that is the case, I don’t like it.
- is there currently any way to see exactly what causes an AI to declare war? With the increased diplomacy potential in Civ7, I wonder if the game needs a “war goal” system similar to EUIV

Wrt the 2nd one, no, I don't think so.
If you click on another leader's banner and go to the relationship tab, you can see why exactly they hate you

 

[evonannoredars]

- in the Antiquity Age, I met 4 out of the remaining 7 civs all in the “old world”. I thought it was an even split: 4 old world, 4 distant lands. Is this a bug or is there just some unpredictability in the spawn of various players?

Oh also I believe the split is 5 old and 3 distant lands. Designed that way so that there's still room to colonise the new world when you find it.

 

[RockTheCazbah87]

I'm on my sixth full playthrough and I've noticed plenty of this behaviour, and in only one game was I wilfully going to war and inciting the AI (a Trung Trac game). In one game on Immortal as Catherine, I had significant wars with everyone I'd met barring my game-long ally Confucius (who easily crushed my yields per turn but didn't focus on winning the game).

Part of me thinks it's just about playing more, cracking the code of the right balance between building defence and focusing on the victory condition you're looking for. I do agree though that when this does happen, the game becomes a huge slog to get through. I don't mind playing from behind, but it's just not as fun if all of your progress is a) doubled by the leading AI, and b) halted by a particularly pernicious declaration of war.

 

[Fluffball]

I am probably on full game 5 or 6, working my way up the difficulty and currently at immortal. Only time I have been dog piled or experienced arbitrary hate from the AI has been when I neglected my military...I assume they always know your military strength. Sounds like the AI saw you as weak and picked on you so I would suggest focusing more on military in the early game.

You usually have to build a reasonable military for roaming IPs but guess this didn't seem important on an island map.

In my current game (immortal) started on a continent with 4 other civs, 3 of which I have a direct border with yet I are more than willing to be my allies. This is also with me aggressively taking city states they were trying to get thus -40 relations for each AI.

Only time the alliances broke down is when they went to war and I refused to join, then they kept spamming to redo the alliance which inept refusing as I didn't want to join the war. In previous games they would hated me forever for not supporting them, instead they just kept begging to be my best friend.

I only remember once being able to declare a formal war without having to denounce the AI first to avoid the war weariness on my side so in my experience you generally need to work to make the AI annoy you. I try not to be too friendly with at least one AI who i will target with spy actions...as you can only be doing each action once at a time anyway and usually that AI is at least neutral.

I haven't seen any sign that taking a civs capital or even wiping them out has any impact on other civs. I think some civs do have some traits around certain war/expansionist aspects but never paid a huge amount of attention.

The only downside i have found to wiping out a civs it it adds era score and I try to prolong eras.

Overall I find civ 7 extremely lite on the AI hate unlike previous games where trying make any sort of friendship was actually just a trap as you would inevitably get denounced by a friend then everyone would hate you...often for a problem they caused such as the AI forward settled you and then hated you because your borders were too close or they coveted your land.

I have never seen a city flip from happiness yet although I do turn off crisis which sounds like the main time it might happen and what happened for the OP and sounds like another good reason to turn it off.

The crisis just seems to be designed to annoy you into rushing to end an era rather than add any actual interesting gameplay. I turned crisis off after my first two games and never missed or regretted it. Crisis only seems add some random micro and lack of communication to make it even more annoying...never autosave scummed so much as when I got plague crisis and kept getting notifications a unit had died but no notice it was taking damage so I could prevent it and got bored of constantly having to baby sit and shuffle units around to make sure they weren't standing in plague which I could often only tell was there as I inspected them as saw they were damaged or studiously moused over each tile and checked the tooltip.

Devs obviously realised crisis wasn't that interesting either as they actually took the time to add an option to turn off (when they didn't have time to add so many other basic UI features)

After being in the negative end of high war support I tend to rush gate of all nations and particularly if going to war I pick as many plus war support bonus as possible and have had as high as 6 war support in my favor (-6 for the AI). Even then I haven't seen any cities flip from unhappiness.

 

[dan-the-man278]

Thanks for all of these thoughts - glad I’m not alone with some of the frustration!

I find some of the relationship modifiers confusing and exaggerated. What does -42 for “sanctioned another civilization” actually mean? I haven’t sanctioned anybody!

 

[RockTheCazbah87]

I find some of the relationship modifiers confusing and exaggerated. What does -42 for “sanctioned another civilization” actually mean? I haven’t sanctioned anybody!

I think it's generally accepted that those modifiers actually reflect AI actions towards you — that sounds like an AI denounced you 7 turns ago (as I believe it's a -60 relations hit over 10 turns).