Chess with a monkey?

[Levgre]

Here's my story of horrible AI. I was playing on difficulty level 6 (emperor?), 2 above prince.

I was rome. I attacked Russia around 500 BC, I remember thinking that could be a bad mistake, I delayed my attack by taking out a city-state first, but it led to me having more scorpions for the Russia attack.

So I attack with 2 scorpions, 4 legions, 2 chariot archers, and 1 horseman, hoping that would still be enough. Russia saw me coming and mentioned it, so I thought they might be built up.

Russia had 2 cities. I decided to take out the small one first, to make sure none of my units got stuck being bombarded by 2 city defenses.

A scorpion annihilated an archer on a hill, and a chariot archer finished him off. The other scorpion hit the city and the horseman took it over. I turned the assault towards Moscow, dissapointed that I had set up my artillery to take out a small target, when they could have headed right to moscow.

Moscow had no units for defense. I shot at it 3 times with archers, attacked with 3 legions, and took it over in 1 turn of assaults. The city-state had almost put up a better defense.

Recap of Russia's army, 1 archer, and 1 spearmen and 1 warrior I took out outside the borders. Pitiful. I guess 'very hard' difficulty is way too easy, time to play diety, where only the 'best players in the world can win'


Furthermore, Arabia gave me 1700 gold, 30 turns of 2 different luxuries, and 30 turns of horses for a peace treaty, in a war I had never actually fought in. Japan asked me too, and I thought 'why not'. Quite a big reward for almost 0 effort. I proceeded to make 26 culture a turn, with my 18 extra happiness being converted into culture.

 

[Venereus]

Yeah, I couldn't tell you. However, consider this.

In Starcraft 2 (yes, I know it's an RTS but this is actually a fairly similar comparison) the AI functions based on a few criteria:

1. The number of strategies it knows increases as the difficulty raises (essentially 3, but I digress).

2. The actions per minute increases as the difficulty raises (from some 10 to something like 500).

3. The AI only has an economic advantage on the highest difficulty (where it has 500 or so APM).

On the easiest setting, the AI has no economic advantage, has a very very low APM, and exists primarily as a means to learn to play the game.

On medium, the AI knows two strategies (that's two above the easiest), has about 120 APM or so, and, while still incredibly easy to anybody who has played an RTS before, can pose a challenge to those who aren't familiar with Starcraft 2.

On Very Hard (the second highest), the AI knows all three strategies, has about 300 or so APM, and can pose a challenge to those who aren't diamond level players.

On Insane (the highest difficulty), the AI has 500 APM and has an economic boost.

Essentially I see it as being very similar here. It's a very unrealistic expectation to expect an AI to be able to beat an experienced player. This is why we have to allow the AI to cheat in order to have a challenge.

I used to be the same as you. You could try forcing the AI to ally through the custom game options as an alternaitve to a cheating AI like I used to do in games like Warcraft, but I've gotten over it.

Can't I has "normal" game?

 

[Matte979]

Seems like you used a big army against somebody with 2 cities. I personally added more civs to the game and upped the difficulty + raging barbarians + more city states. The AI seem slow at expanding so if you have few AI players some will be crippled by their slow expansion rate, but you will have others with 10 cities and lots of troops. I am playing some more without any changes but I suspect the AI just dont have enough troops to be a challange when they dont have enough cities. You can address this yourself by playing on a higher difficulty or edit the XML files to give them more production bonuses and growth bonuses (Happiness). This will surely be addressed in the first patch.

 

[Bad Brett]

I've only played the demo, but for some reason barbarian boats always moved back and forth on my coast so that I could shoot them down completely with my cities after a few turns. There was nothing to destroy, so it was just suicide missions.

 

[Shackel]

I hope youre being ironic.

Have you seen his other posts?

 

[Silver44Guy]

I agree the A.I. is really poor at decision making when it comes to attacking. My experience in the part with Civ games is I can normally beat 2 below the top (emperor) but immortal would be too hard. In Civ5, I beat immortal on day 2.

 

[Hawaiian]

Good news regarding the funky AI! I heard somewhere that they might do something called an "up" date later. That means it might get better or something. Crossing my fingers!

 

[tinstaafl]

Don't have the game yet. So i don't know about the AI. But in any case...

I have nothing against AI bonuses. In any civ game to date, dedicated players had to play AI production bonus levels to make the game a challenge. But the thing is, it usually took a while. In fact, on cIV, even winning monarch consistently took me a while. Still am somewhere between emperor (winning most games) and immortal. So, there always was a learning curve. And that learning curve, the whole process of climbing through the levels and relearning the game, that's a big part for some civ players.

Now. From what i hear ciV is different enough from cIV. So you'd expect the learning to take a while. Then, if people are beating Immortal already, despite being unfamiliar with the game, surely that says something about the AI.

What i am afraid of is a situation like the one with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, where AI bonuses on the highest difficulty were not strong enough. Even experiments with modding a transcend+-mode (free treefarms from day one in all AI cities) weren't good enough. You would still run away midgame.

In Alpha Centauri, the AI just never understood the economic part of the game correctly. The trouble being that the AI designers apparently did not understand it either. It was never patched to a state where it did.

So yeah. Hopefully, I will get the game tomorrow, and after reading the forums for a bit i now hope i suck enough to at least lose my first game on king. Then again, if it really is too easy, i am not done with cIV in any case just yet.

 

[ashmizen]

First, disclaimer- I stayed up to 5am last two nights, so I am addicted to Civ5.

But second, yes, the AI is dumber than a rock, and this shows (I'm playing on King, so I imagine this is their "best AI" script already, without +100% research and +100% product bonuses).

If things go according to plan, the AI seems to do ok (expand, build city, build army, attack). But Japan, for example, was boxed in by my borders on chokepoints. Instead of building on plenty of rich land inbetween my chokepoints and his capitol city (I later built 2 cities there, so it wasn't bad land, it was quite rich), the AI seemed to have gotten stuck on trying build a city PAST my choke. Their settler just wandered back and forther near my border, I guess trying to cross it, for like 30 turns. Japan fell way behind all the other civs and I later killed him.

Also, when you invade a city, the archer and the city will shoot different targets. Really?

I do think the AI is bad, I agree with the OP, and I disagree with everyone who says, "just play on deity!". Any AI is good if you let it cheat. Heck, If you gave AI's a +10000% bonus in product, tech, and gold, you only need a 4 line AI - "research random tech, build best unit, explore/attack, repeat" to kick everyone's ass. Is it a good AI? No, it only has one city, and just send out random units to attack. Will it win? Sure, with 100x research speed, its going to be sending out tanks to attack your spearmen cities, there's no way to stop it.

A good AI is very hard to write, and companies cover up their bad AI with extremely large cheating bonuses. The fact that King (AI gets small bonus) in Civ5 is easier than Prince in Civ IV (no bonuses) means that the AI is worse than Civ IV, as it can't complete with the human player on a level playing field.

 

[ashmizen]

Yeah, its the basics that concern me. Sure, programming unit chess might have been hard, but there are so serious flaws that (I as a programmer) can see fixed in one line.

Current bug - if the computer sues for peace, if will give you, the Player, EVERYTHING, even if you have never attacked him or even have a unit anywhere close to his border. Most likely, the computer that asked you to declare war on him is the one that did all the work.

Fix - in the condition when the AI script sues for peace, check the combined military value of enemy armies near/inside border, and offer everything you own perportionally.

Result - At war with France (human player) but France doesn't have a single unit in sight, while Germany has 4 units in range of the capitol? The AI will offer everything to Germany, since Germany has 100% of the military units that are threatening it. France? Offer a peace treaty with nothing attached, because France wasn't really threatening it to begin with.

This would be far more logical, and I'll stop getting these 500 gold and lux resource windfalls from wars I NEVER ACTUALLY FOUGHT.

 

[Venereus]

Yeah, its the basics that concern me. Sure, programming unit chess might have been hard, but there are so serious flaws that (I as a programmer) can see fixed in one line.

Current bug - if the computer sues for peace, if will give you, the Player, EVERYTHING, even if you have never attacked him or even have a unit anywhere close to his border. Most likely, the computer that asked you to declare war on him is the one that did all the work.

Fix - in the condition when the AI script sues for peace, check the combined military value of enemy armies near/inside border, and offer everything you own perportionally.

Result - At war with France (human player) but France doesn't have a single unit in sight, while Germany has 4 units in range of the capitol? The AI will offer everything to Germany, since Germany has 100% of the military units that are threatening it. France? Offer a peace treaty with nothing attached, because France wasn't really threatening it to begin with.

This would be far more logical, and I'll stop getting these 500 gold and lux resource windfalls from wars I NEVER ACTUALLY FOUGHT.

But, since the AI wants to win, it makes more sense that it gives away it's bonuses to the least threatening civ. The lesser of two evils.

 

[Lanstro]

Yep, AI seems to make very dumb moves, especially at the tactical level. I would expect this to be improved dramatically in future. The Civ4 vanilla AI was pretty stupid too and got patched up over time. Even then, BTS 3.19 AI still loses to an army 1/2 or 1/3 its power.

Until the AI patching, it'll still be fun to figure out how to game it on immortal / deity.