civfan_999
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2020
- Messages
- 99
Short Version:
AIs seem to focus too hard on aid requests, which is costing them valuable production and causing them to fall very far behind even on hard difficulties. The AI isn't building enough settlers, any wonders, or other important district buildings. This is an issue in apocalypse mod with endless aid requests that are constantly active.
Now for the longer story:
I was very excited to try out the new apocalypse mod. My boyfriend and I spent the weekend right after NFP came out hot-seating a game.
When we first began playing civ, we beat every victory condition on King. We always play teams games, so our next few games we tried setting each AI team to have one King and one Emperor player. This was a good balance for us as we weren't quite good enough for Emperor. More recently, we have played our last couple games with all the AI as Emperor.
I played my first game (solo this time) on Immortal a few weeks ago and lost by about 4 turns (just needed a few more turns to travel the light years, but the AI beat me to it). So I know that difficulty should be right where I'm at.
We set up our game for the weekend with six teams of two, ourselves being one team, and all the AIs set to Immortal (total of 12 civs).
In the early ears there were a few civs that were getting WAY ahead of us on tech and we were watching them, knowing they were going to be an issue. We were preparing to focus all our spies. We paid for open borders and were exploring their lands with scouts to find all the cites.
Then we reached the modern era and realized that we weren't even behind anymore. We actually ran out of tech boosts to steal really early.
The other big difference that we noticed was that the AI was not spamming settlers like normal. Usually, we are struggling to find space for new cities fairly early as the AI expands across every open area. This game, most AIs still only had 4-6 cities each in the modern era. One only had 2 cities!
Also, nearly all the wonders were available for most of the game. I build the pyramids around turn 80 because some how they were still available. Usually the AI steals all the early game wonders because they just get such a huge tech/civic head start on these harder difficulties.
So here is our theory: The natural disasters were endless. We also seemed to have 3 send aid emergencies active for the majority of the game. We opted to not even participate in the first two sets (6 total aid emergencies) having more pressing priorities. Meanwhile, the AIs were sending 2,400-4,000 in aid for EACH aid emergency. I'm guessing that is some money and mostly production to send aid projects. As a result, the AIs completely blew all their production (4-6 cities X 24 turns to get 4,000 X 3 active projects is alot of aid in relative to total production) on sending aid. And aid was endless. As soon as three emergencies would end, another three would pop up.
If our theory is right, this is a HUGE issue. The AI algorithm needs to change. Maybe only civs designed for diplomatic victories bother to go for those types of projects. Or maybe cap their production at X% of total. Or don't allow so many active aid emergencies. One at a time, more time between, ect.
This issue makes the AI even stupider and makes even hard difficulties seem easy. PLEASE FIX!
AIs seem to focus too hard on aid requests, which is costing them valuable production and causing them to fall very far behind even on hard difficulties. The AI isn't building enough settlers, any wonders, or other important district buildings. This is an issue in apocalypse mod with endless aid requests that are constantly active.
Now for the longer story:
I was very excited to try out the new apocalypse mod. My boyfriend and I spent the weekend right after NFP came out hot-seating a game.
When we first began playing civ, we beat every victory condition on King. We always play teams games, so our next few games we tried setting each AI team to have one King and one Emperor player. This was a good balance for us as we weren't quite good enough for Emperor. More recently, we have played our last couple games with all the AI as Emperor.
I played my first game (solo this time) on Immortal a few weeks ago and lost by about 4 turns (just needed a few more turns to travel the light years, but the AI beat me to it). So I know that difficulty should be right where I'm at.
We set up our game for the weekend with six teams of two, ourselves being one team, and all the AIs set to Immortal (total of 12 civs).
In the early ears there were a few civs that were getting WAY ahead of us on tech and we were watching them, knowing they were going to be an issue. We were preparing to focus all our spies. We paid for open borders and were exploring their lands with scouts to find all the cites.
Then we reached the modern era and realized that we weren't even behind anymore. We actually ran out of tech boosts to steal really early.
The other big difference that we noticed was that the AI was not spamming settlers like normal. Usually, we are struggling to find space for new cities fairly early as the AI expands across every open area. This game, most AIs still only had 4-6 cities each in the modern era. One only had 2 cities!
Also, nearly all the wonders were available for most of the game. I build the pyramids around turn 80 because some how they were still available. Usually the AI steals all the early game wonders because they just get such a huge tech/civic head start on these harder difficulties.
So here is our theory: The natural disasters were endless. We also seemed to have 3 send aid emergencies active for the majority of the game. We opted to not even participate in the first two sets (6 total aid emergencies) having more pressing priorities. Meanwhile, the AIs were sending 2,400-4,000 in aid for EACH aid emergency. I'm guessing that is some money and mostly production to send aid projects. As a result, the AIs completely blew all their production (4-6 cities X 24 turns to get 4,000 X 3 active projects is alot of aid in relative to total production) on sending aid. And aid was endless. As soon as three emergencies would end, another three would pop up.
If our theory is right, this is a HUGE issue. The AI algorithm needs to change. Maybe only civs designed for diplomatic victories bother to go for those types of projects. Or maybe cap their production at X% of total. Or don't allow so many active aid emergencies. One at a time, more time between, ect.
This issue makes the AI even stupider and makes even hard difficulties seem easy. PLEASE FIX!
