AIs almost never fight each other

[Lone Wolf]

Well, yes, BetterAI can work wonders with AI war tactics. However, I think that religion should matter less in AI war decisions.

 

[Arkatakor]

Firaxis: are you reading this thread? Hmmm?

 

[OTAKUjbski]

I'll add to this:

Last night, I built an expansion city right next to Alexander's capital to steal some copper from him.

A few turns later a Barbarian appears inside Alexander's fat cross. I'm thinking "hell yeah, pillage that shlt".

Except no.

The Barbarian Archer moves peacefully across two Greek cottages and a his Wheat farm straight to my city to pillage every improvement until I could get an Axeman over from my own capital.

I got pissed off and quit that game ... shlt like that makes me wanna quit Civ altogether.

I mean, seriously, how is that not cheating?

 

[UnspokenRequest]

I'll add to this:

Last night, I built an expansion city right next to Alexander's capital to steal some copper from him.

A few turns later a Barbarian appears inside Alexander's fat cross. I'm thinking "hell yeah, pillage that shlt".

Except no.

The Barbarian Archer moves peacefully across two Greek cottages and a his Wheat farm straight to my city to pillage every improvement until I could get an Axeman over from my own capital.

I got pissed off and quit that game ... shlt like that makes me wanna quit Civ altogether.

I mean, seriously, how is that not cheating?

A long time ago, I read that barbarians tended to focus a bit more on the civ with the highest score. I don't like this "rule", but that may be an explanation. It's still a situation which is very frustrating and asks for a great deal of "suspension of disbelief". I know it's a game and that it can't be entirely realist, but, still, there are some limits and a certain degree of realism is expected.

To new posters. Please read a bit through the thread before responding to my initial posts. Some of your observation have already been discussed. It is a bit tedious to repeat the same arguments over and over again.

 

[KMadCandy]

otaku that barb thing is indeed extremely lame. but i hope it doesn't drive you to quit civ, and if it does, please don't quit CFC!

there was an AI vs AI war in my game today and it saved my candyass. cyrus was #1 in power all along, i have been last by a long long long way forever. i'm aiming for culture; i know gunpowder but i have a single warrior in most cities, and the very best units i have are longbowmen that i got free in cultural flips. well, i did make one cavalry. cyrus, meanwhile, had infantry. if anybody, particularly cyrus, DoWd me it was over, even tho i had DPs with both neighbors. one hit and i was out. my strategy has been just keep everybody as pleased as possible, cyrus has been the only one that's been a pain as far that goes. so i'm keeping an eye on him, luckily he's far away, and i'm able to sign DPs with my neighbors, so hopefully that'll help if he wants to get violent.

and then i notice that he has too much on his hands, and i freak out. mansa and i were identical in modifiers for cyrus, so i really didn't know which of us was his "worst enemy", but there was no question that i was orders of magnitude lower on power. oh boy. well, luckily for me, he declared on mansa.

it was really interesting watching that war from far away. i could see it all without dealing with a globe cuz it's inland seas, and i had absolutely no concerns about being dragged into that or any other wars at the time. so i could just sit back and watch 'em. cyrus pillaged everything in the side of mansa's area bordering his own. i mean everything. there are no roads left, no cottages where there were towns, all 5 sugars no longer have plantations or roads ( i needed that health!). nothing is left but the cities. he took only 2 cities, right on his border, and they weren't even real nice cities. he didn't even try for the main cities! but he crippled the crap out of mansa by pillaging him back to the stone age. mansa's now below me on the scoreboard. and remember, i'm the woman with one warrior guarding the majority of my cities.

that sort of pillaging is what i do sometimes. it's quite effective at crippling the other guy, they usually never recover. but i've never seen the AI do it that systematically, that all-out, with that much focus and priority and so little emphasis on killing units and taking over cities. they do love to pillage, but what i always see is that they do it along the way while they're in the neighborhood and trying to capture cities, and while they wait for backup and wait to heal (when they ought not to wait to heal but just take my city when they have the chance *giggle*). i've never been able to just sit back and watch with this perspective before, but there are never only two messages about cities captured in wars that last this long when the guys are right next to each other! it was really funky.

i don't play with better AI, this was just normal warlords. as far as them fighting more on higher levels, this is a monarch game. it was like cyrus was aiming for a time victory, he wanted to slow down the enemy but didn't want to risk the domination limit by losing the buffer zone if he razed or captured cities . now if i could just convince him to do that to gandhi. i'm worried that he might launch before my cities hit legendary...

 

[Naismith]

Something like Better AI is the best hope for making Civ4 a more interesting game in regards to AI vs. AI wars. I really appreciate the time people spent developing Better AI, but it looks like nothing more is being done on it, at least not the last time I looked. Unfortunately, I think they never quite solved the AI vs. AI war problem.

I played the Better AI mod one game. Small map, inland sea, normal speed, default + 1 number of Civ's. There wasn't one AI vs. AI war declared the entire game. Since I kept my power rating up, there wasn't one AI vs. human war declared. Granted, it was only one game. But still. I read that the last release of Better AI had a problem where the AI's were passive, and that certainly fit my experience in this one game. When I declared war and invaded, the AI's had a lot more units than usual, but they just sat in the cities, waiting for my stack of siege and city raiders to come and take them down, one by one. Ugh.

 

[T.A JONES]

otaku that barb thing is indeed extremely lame. but i hope it doesn't drive you to quit civ, and if it does, please don't quit CFC!

there was an AI vs AI war in my game today and it saved my candyass.

Not to take away from that story, IT was rather rivating an a good read to tell the truth

However one observation stood quite alarming to me, a player of both games
As for me coming of Civ3 latly, AI war is so common I could not possable recall correctly all the examples where AI Vs AI joint efforts had saved me a ton of grief.
It sounds like your occasion was special to you due to the rarity in occurence and not just the nature of the strange circumstances

I wish these stories were all the more common, INdeed, Its a shame how they broke this part of the game. But I like to hear the postive veiw of this mistake too, so thanks for you upbeat attidude!

 

[KMadCandy]

Thats mainly why if you happen see about 3-4 AI's clustered on the same continent, all belonging to same religion, there will not be ONE war between ANY of them in the ENTIRE game (6100 years). Totally unrealistic not to mention boring.

i play civ4 to have fun, i don't care about realism, and boredom is of course in the eye of the beholder. to me, that sort of situation can be part of a suspenseful game. i'm going along, beating people up, vassalize a neighbor, whatever. and then i meet the other continent and find out it's happy hindu lovefest land ! they've been trading techs nonstop while i've been killing off some of the folks i could have traded with. we've had different priorities, and they've been speeding up each other's tech pace. i'm really far behind on some branches of the tech tree in cases like that. and i never know it until i meet them. if they are best pals, how exactly do i catch up from here? on the plus side, trading is easy, i don't have to worry about worst enemy stuff. but if i want to cripple or eliminate one, i have to figure out a way to do it without the other 3 jumping in to defend their friend, or have a plan cunning enough that i can survive it when they do jump in. even tho the ai sucks at intercontinental warfare, once i take over a city or three on their land, then they can reach me, and four at once trying to reach me ... ugh. so, that scenario can be wicked fun for me *giggle*.

@ T.A:
there are definitely not nearly as many AI vs AI wars as there were in civ3. but i do get a real kick out of the diplomacy in civ4. it drove me crazy at first, how different it was, and i thought i'd never understand it. but now i have fun manipulating the political scenery, seeing if i can make folks hate each other without resorting to outright bribes or asking for embargos, that sort of thing. send brand X missionary to so-and-so, send brand Y missionary to such-and-such, watch sparks fly, it's spiffy. so when i'm playing one of those games, i probably see more AI vs. AI wars than other people see, but i encourage them to happen, so of course they don't count as the kind of wars that you want to see. it's been a long time since i played civ3, but i don't remember having options like that, so much flexibility about how to approach that kind of stuff.

that's obviously a playstyle issue. some people don't give a flip whether the AI likes them or not, since they intend to kill the AI right away no matter what . i always care at least a little bit. even in the games where i'm going to make myself go to war ASAP, i hope to be able to work it out so that i'm the one to decide the timing of the war declaration, it's much safer that way. i'm a girl, i want my wars to be safe (for me, not the bad guy), is that so wrong? i completely agree with the point that several have made, about the fact that whenever an AI leader is pondering something, "is this the human player?" is given far too much weight in their decision. mind you i have no idea how to make the AI smarter, i just wish it was.

today's war stuck out to me mostly because of how cyrus fought the war as pillage festival 2007, but also because it was one of the wars where i didn't do a darned thing to nudge the two parties towards disagreement. i'm glad you enjoyed the read .

 

[OTAKUjbski]

A long time ago, I read that barbarians tended to focus a bit more on the civ with the highest score. I don't like this "rule", but that may be an explanation. It's still a situation which is very frustrating and asks for a great deal of "suspension of disbelief". I know it's a game and that it can't be entirely realist, but, still, there are some limits and a certain degree of realism is expected.

To new posters. Please read a bit through the thread before responding to my initial posts. Some of your observation have already been discussed. It is a bit tedious to repeat the same arguments over and over again.

Hopefully, I wasn't one of those reposter guys you were referring too. If there was something of barbs mentioned, I missed it.

As far as the score, it was a quasi-isolated start, so he and I were our only contacts. He was leading in points. I was leading in power.

Maybe it was the case they were 'targeting' a more strategic locale, but I can't tell you one single time a barbarian has ever skipped over one of my improvements on his way to another city -- not even one of my own. The only time barbarians don't stop to pillage is when they're next to a city or unit, because then they attack it.

To add to / repeat everything else:

I've seen AI wars before, but the majority of my games don't see AI vs. AI wars unless I instigate them. Working as intended? Who cares ... I still don't like it.

 

[Arkatakor]

I'll add to this:

Last night, I built an expansion city right next to Alexander's capital to steal some copper from him.

A few turns later a Barbarian appears inside Alexander's fat cross. I'm thinking "hell yeah, pillage that shlt".

Except no.

The Barbarian Archer moves peacefully across two Greek cottages and a his Wheat farm straight to my city to pillage every improvement until I could get an Axeman over from my own capital.

I got pissed off and quit that game ... shlt like that makes me wanna quit Civ altogether.

I mean, seriously, how is that not cheating?

It IS cheating; Its called anti-human bias. This is the kind of crap that only seems to happen in Civ4. And it goes further in emphasizing the level of anti-human bias in this game which is frankly pathetic.

My feelings are the same - when i see shlt like this, coupled with small if not inexistent inter AI wars, I just follow my first instinctive reaction: uninstall the game.

I will re-install Civ4 if and only if Firaxis bothers to address the issues being discussed in this tread, because I have mentioned it before, Civ4 is a great game but AI seriously screwed it up and the issues are on a scale which is frankly too much for me to put up with. It took the thread starter just one game in 6 months to be reminded of why he stopped playing in the first place.

Whats being discussed here is serious and needs to be addressed.

 

[Combat Ingrid]

i have fun manipulating the political scenery, seeing if i can make folks hate each other without resorting to outright bribes or asking for embargos, that sort of thing. send brand X missionary to so-and-so, send brand Y missionary to such-and-such, watch sparks fly, it's spiffy.

I usually play that way and in return I see lots of AI-AI wars in most of my games, it's great entertainment

 

[Rusty Edge]

In my current game ( I'm not choosing or spreading any religion) Qin and Osaka have been to war 2 or three times and I've stayed out of it, other than selling techs. It's about 1200 AD.

 

[clblabin]

My feelings on this are mixed, but I side (mostly) with those who are defending the game. I concur with with those who say it's better to play with lots of civs. At first this whole thread confused me because it goes so contrary to my experiences, and I've never played with Aggressive AI. But I don't think I've ever even considered playing with the default number of civs: it's just too low to make the game interesting. My games are FULL of AI wars, not just one or two, but lots. Extended periods of world peace do happen, and like the OP, there have been times where I wanted to yell at an AI civ: "You're neighbor is vulnerable! Take him out!" Especially when the more powerful civ seems to think its resources are better spent "caravel rushing" me from the other side of the world.

I think the main thing is that its pretty much guaranteed with 18 civs that you'll get lots of warmongers starting next to the more peaceful types. I've seen Mansa Musa with a "-12 You Declared War on Us!" against Monty, for instance, when I first ran into him on another continent, (eventually, with my help, Mansa WIPED OUT Monty). There was a series of long, bloody Industrial/Modern-Age wars between Louis and Shaka and their (allegience-shifting!) allies which left half their continent pillaged back to the stone age -- I sat back and watched the fun with my spies. Ragnar once sneak-attacked his neighbor Elizabeth and took London on the same turn (both of them were near the bottom of the score graph). These are just a few examples that I remember off the top of my head because they had a major impact on my own strategy.

I do see these annoying super pacifist AI games still, sadly, but they're definitely a rare exception. I should note that for the most part I'm playing with Better AI on Prince.

 

[Ambreville]

Occasionaly a more agressive civ will try to attack me. However, AI's will almost never attack eachother. On mid levels, as soon as I win my first war, I usually can easily hold on to my lead and I win the game without any further events. The AIs should try to compete with me and gain power by attacking the least powerfull among them. They never to it!!! It's boring.

This seems to be the case in most randomly generated games. You might want to try my scenario if you like the Renaissance/North American genre. The AI Civs do very much fight each other during much of the game. Then again, it is a scenario and the CIVs are designed to be somewhat aligned to almost guarantee warfare. With 18 CIVs in play, there is almost always a war going on somewhere on the map, not to mention that many of the CIVs become vassals of each other or make defense treaties at least.

 

[Underdawg]

This seems to be the case in most randomly generated games. You might want to try my scenario if you like the Renaissance/North American genre. The AI Civs do very much fight each other during much of the game. Then again, it is a scenario and the CIVs are designed to be somewhat aligned to almost guarantee warfare. With 18 CIVs in play, there is almost always a war going on somewhere on the map, not to mention that many of the CIVs become vassals of each other or make defense treaties at least.

Indeed. Play 18Civ Maps with Aggressive AI on. If you feel really lucky, play on these settings on a Pangea map.

 

[Arkatakor]

Indeed. Play 18Civ Maps with Aggressive AI on. If you feel really lucky, play on these settings on a Pangea map.

It seems that you the last 3 or 4 people who posted here are totally missing the point:

We should not have to adjust our settings by increasing the number of Civs / choosing aggressive AI just in order to increase the chance of there being warfare. This is basically proof that something is fundamentally wrong with the game.

What is being discussed here is the AI in default settings being WAY too pacifist towards each other. Please play a few games with default settings and go ahead and play Civ3 with default settings and proceed to make your judgement based on that.

The lack of inter AI wars and need to come up with strategies on the fly to counter Civ swalling warmongers has made the game outright BORING. Yes, this issue has made Civ4 a boring game. I hate to be so blunt, but my other friends feel the same way because of the same reasons.

I am also very disappointed that Firaxis has not bothered to address this issue, because its an easy fix - just tweaking numbers and percentages on the diplomacy front and reducing diplomatic bonuses that same religions give. Hell, they can do this from a script file (I am a games programmer), its such an easy fix.

This is why I refuse to play this game any further - there are too many other decent alternatives to pass.

 

[Naismith]

My feelings on this are mixed, but I side (mostly) with those who are defending the game. I concur with with those who say it's better to play with lots of civs. At first this whole thread confused me because it goes so contrary to my experiences, and I've never played with Aggressive AI. But I don't think I've ever even considered playing with the default number of civs: it's just too low to make the game interesting. My games are FULL of AI wars, not just one or two, but lots. Extended periods of world peace do happen, and like the OP, there have been times where I wanted to yell at an AI civ: "You're neighbor is vulnerable! Take him out!" Especially when the more powerful civ seems to think its resources are better spent "caravel rushing" me from the other side of the world.

I think the main thing is that its pretty much guaranteed with 18 civs that you'll get lots of warmongers starting next to the more peaceful types. I've seen Mansa Musa with a "-12 You Declared War on Us!" against Monty, for instance, when I first ran into him on another continent, (eventually, with my help, Mansa WIPED OUT Monty). There was a series of long, bloody Industrial/Modern-Age wars between Louis and Shaka and their (allegience-shifting!) allies which left half their continent pillaged back to the stone age -- I sat back and watched the fun with my spies. Ragnar once sneak-attacked his neighbor Elizabeth and took London on the same turn (both of them were near the bottom of the score graph). These are just a few examples that I remember off the top of my head because they had a major impact on my own strategy.

I do see these annoying super pacifist AI games still, sadly, but they're definitely a rare exception. I should note that for the most part I'm playing with Better AI on Prince.

Thanks for the info - I'm definitely going to try this. Up to now, I have avoided really crowding the map because it substantially increases the chance you won't be able to access a critical resource (horses, copper, iron). By the way, what build of Better AI are you using?

 

[Vizzini]

A few turns later a Barbarian appears inside Alexander's fat cross. I'm thinking "hell yeah, pillage that shlt".

Except no.

Barbarians will ignore AI Civs if they can get at the Player. If Barbarians are enabled you are their target unless they physically cannot reach you. Then and only then will Barbs go after AIs.

 

[rabidveggie]

I personally don't care how much the computers fight each other all though it does spice up a game when it does happen. What I hate most is when I bribe or get dragged into an AI war on their request and then they make peace or vassal five turns later.

 

[Arkatakor]

Barbarians will ignore AI Civs if they can get at the Player. If Barbarians are enabled you are their target unless they physically cannot reach you. Then and only then will Barbs go after AIs.

Yup. Pathetic. No barb has ever passed thru my territory without pillaging. I hate being special. Game uninstalled!