Can the AI keep up after renaissance ?

[cobbaut]

Yeah Storyteller and later Bards can help with education since you said you have plenty of gold.

Thanks. I decided however to not build anything, focus on "meager research" and get to Writing. Because with Writing I could use my 200 or so captured animals to generate education. All cities got to +700 education this way.


Some more updates on this game:

turn 1681:
- One city of the Mongolian has a cultural revolt, it fails.

turn 1699:
- This city joins my empire, yeah! This is a huge break. It is a large city (to my standards just below my capital). I didn't mean for this to happen, I was only building culture in my two neighbouring cities to prevent my cities from revolting to the Mongolian.

turn 1871:
- Mansa Musa has "Medieval Lifestyle". I am at least 58 techs behind him.

turn 1979:
- I get "Classical Lifestyle", but I skipped a lot of techs to get here.

Mongolia and Persia are taking turns attacking each other (each destroying a city). Arabia stays at war with Mongolia forever. All the others are (warmongering) on other continents, they have all met me. Here is the current scoreboard. I am 100 points ahead of Arabia now.

I am really enjoying this game!

 

[Trantor]

AI is good till you get tanks... somehow AI does not fight that well in modern era

 

[Septentrion]

AI is good till you get tanks... somehow AI does not fight that well in modern era

It's a different era each update. Sometimes, it's Caveman2Carriers, other times it's Caveman2Cannons or Caveman2Castles.

Aren't their usually a huge number of planes players wield along with tank stacks? Invasions feels silly at that point.

 

[Septentrion]

Is this game still going? I've having doubts about the current AI. Its early success seems arbitrary, and still contingent on settings.

In the last big update, I think there's a problem with how the AI decides IF to settle. There was just one AI that decided to expand whenever it could and it's godlike compared to everyone else.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Is this game still going? I've having doubts about the current AI. Its early success seems arbitrary, and still contingent on settings.

In the last big update, I think there's a problem with how the AI decides IF to settle. There was just one AI that decided to expand whenever it could and it's godlike compared to everyone else.

Are you playing with the SVN version? Was my understanding a lot of work has just recently been done and the AI is going gangbusters on expanding.

 

[cobbaut]

Is this game still going?

I only played twice the past two months, too busy with other stuff. But it will go on.

 

[Septentrion]

Are you playing with the SVN version? Was my understanding a lot of work has just recently been done and the AI is going gangbusters on expanding.

No SVN. I have heard the AI is better at expanding. It does seemed improved for the previous main release.

It broke with Raging barbs and Bard world, with Size Matters being a possible mark against it. Seemed too incapable of hunting.

 

[Thunderbrd]

No SVN. I have heard the AI is better at expanding. It does seemed improved for the previous main release.

It broke with Raging barbs and Bard world, with Size Matters being a possible mark against it. Seemed too incapable of hunting.

ah... a lot has been done in that dept.

 

[JosEPh_II]

No SVN. I have heard the AI is better at expanding. It does seemed improved for the previous main release.

It broke with Raging barbs and Bard world, with Size Matters being a possible mark against it. Seemed too incapable of hunting.

Living in past versions is sooo passe`, lol
C'mon man the SVN is not hard to use and you get to stay fairly up to date on progress made. To continue to to judge the Mod on only "official" releases... well... to be honest not a fair assessment.

 

[Septentrion]

I didn't realize how long it's been since the last update.

This team has proven better at improving the AI than most professionals, guess there isn't much more to do with this version.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I didn't realize how long it's been since the last update.

This team has proven better at improving the AI than most professionals, guess there isn't much more to do with this version.

@flabbert has helped tremendously in that department!

 

[cobbaut]

So turn 3000 (Snail) passed, here's an update after 300 hours in this game.

The score is very misleading, I conquered a lot of cities but I am still around 40 techs behind Solomon, and not in the top 8 advanced nations (of 13).




Some history since the previous update:
- Around turn 2000 or so I decided to take one city from the Mongols each time they attacked me. This got me two (or three?) cities.

- Around turn 2400 I decided to stop being peaceful and conquered Mongolia (in two wars). This gave me a *ton* of technology. I got on average four or five full techs for each city (spread across eight or ten techs or so, can't remember exactly). I think I was 75 or 80 techs behind the leading AI before turn 2400.

- At turn 3000 I was starting in Renaissance Era. Turn 3017 Solomon got to Industrial Era. This is my first game where I am not the first in Renaissance Era, so goal achieved!



- The demographics proves I am really behind in gold (best indicator for research? I wish beakers would be included here or in the graph.)



- In turn 3087 I saw the option to build a World Wonder for the first time. All World Wonders were built before I could start building them until now.



Conclusions:
- An AI with a 50 tech advance can still be conquered by building a stack of doom (with more than half of it being siege units) and taking every one of his cities one by one.
- It is easy and cheap to keep the AI's fighting among each other. They go to war for 3000 gold, when they have +1 million available.
- I will probably win this game, but will continue anyway because it has been ages since I got this far in the tech tree and there is lot's of cool stuff here that I never saw before.

 

[Septentrion]

The AI was horrible at conquering any cities in my most recent game, only doing so before minimum defense requirements came in. I wonder if there's a point in the tech where the AI has enough tools to take cities, but the clockpunk planes didn't help it do that.

Mongolia was the only Asian nation in your game and that World Wonder is the result of that. It's not a result of "catching up."

 

[Galadrion]

I wonder if there's a point in the tech where the AI has enough tools to take cities, but the clockpunk planes didn't help it do that.

The "clockpunk planes" (ornithopters, I believe you mean) are not units which will work for aggression. Even early on in their availability, they aren't notably strong units and you can't really field them in effective numbers for a war of the skies. As far as I've been able to determine, they are much better employed as scout units, particularly defensive scouts: station one or two in a city on a historically troubled border, and send them out on recon missions every turn - you're looking to spot incoming trouble, not explore new territory. Do this in all cities where you have reason to expect incoming trouble, and then back them up with solid defensive forces! Knowing that trouble is on the way does you no good if you can't do anything about it.

The clockpunk "fighting unit" is most likely the Da Vinci tank - it's quite potent for its era. It doesn't take a particularly large stack of them to start flattening opposing armies. Combine that with some siege weaponry, a few mechanics, and maybe a leader-type or great general (maybe attached to one of the DV tanks?), and you can start steamrollering cities - although you probably will need one or two of your own cities cranking out garrison troops to hold those cities; the aggressive force I've just described will take ground quite well, but won't hold it anywhere near the same standard.

I'd say that Clockpunk could be considered a game-busting tech, but once you're there the Age of the Gun is just about to open, which will mean that the only unit which is likely to remain dominant in its role is the ornithopter, as a recon unit. It gives the person who achieves it an exploitable advantage, but not a huge one.