Civup v2.3.2, Gem v1.12.2 AI priorities are bugged

gdwitt

Prince
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Sep 27, 2010
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Playthrough on Regular Gamespeed and Normal Size (I played 9th add-on). Stopped at turn 160.
1) Scout tag-team is back. Because of the long research times relative to short building times, the AI was pumping out scouts. I fought with Askia and the Chinese and both had 50% scout armies. Scouts from the other tribes were running about my corner and into the ocean even at turn 160.
2) Germany, Ethiopia, Russia, Rome Askia did 1-city tortoises until about 100 turns. At that point, they made 1-2 settlers each.
Meanwhile, Persia, China and Ottomans did the regular settler spam. Not surprisingly, the low scores were the hermits. It appeared that the hermits were chasing and losing wonder races. Persia won most of the wonder races.
3) Askia and China spammed archers well into the middle ages. Askia perhaps because he had Artemis and 1 city.
4) Ottomans had a navy of about 18 Liburna pirate ships. Whenever I took a city, he would attack it with the ships and take it right back. I think you need to deactivate this pirate-marine thingy.
5) Negative income prob due to unit maintenance. Only Persia was running + 120 a turn by turn 160.
6) MIssionary spam starting around turn 100. I think they should be limited somehow. The lag created by the movement of 50 odd missionaries is bad.
7) Too many Great Generals. About 1 every 9 turns during war. Not bad as they're useful.
8) Policies: it seems that policies are too hard to get at an avg of 30 turns each. If it wasn't for workaround of killing barbarians for honor, it would be untenable.
9) I think this mod is getting better all the time. Overall performance is faster than last year on the same computer.

If anyone else sees any of these, please post which number you see below.
 
In version .2, I haven't seen any of what you describe in the 3-5 games I've played/started. Exceptions below.

Regarding 4: I haven't seen Suleiman so I couldn't say (well, I did, but both his cities got conquered by Greece early; neither was coastal).

Regarding 5: Have seen this. Definitely seems to be a lot of negative/low income. Nobody can buy my luxuries.

Regarding 8: I haven't played the mod much since G&K (until now), but I also notice that policies are typically 20-30 turns away, and that barb hunting is necessary to keep them coming regularly except when going for a cultural victory. I remember a post somewhere that it was changed a bit. I'm not sure it's a terrible thing right now. It seems I get more policies in the medieval/renaissance/industrial eras now and fewer in the ancient/classical. I like it better this way if that is, in fact, the case.
 
No, i haven't seen much of the things you describe. I just fought an extensive early war against Rome which had 5 cities + 1 conquered CS + 1 allied CS. They had a sane army composition with many comp-bowmen, some spears and the occasional Legion/Ballista. They also had great generals in their frontier cities and understood when they had to retreat (after about 60-70% losses they stopped their offensive).

The only thing I found disturbing is that they didn't use their 6+ Liburnae to attack my coastal cities for many turns. I blocked a narrow coastal stripe with a liburna and a trireme. They parked within sight range and ignored the fire from the trireme for 3-4 turns before they finally wiped them away and attacked. They could easily have taken my nearby island city and maybe even my capital, but they only used 3 ships of their significantly larger navy, so they failed.

Overall, while I still don't fear an AI army until I'm at least 2:1 outnumbered, they act well enough to keep some immersion intact.

The other AI's also expanded in a reasonable manner and upgraded their units well (with maybe a bit to many scouts running around, I agree, but might also just be a feeling). Most of them could have used a few more workers, however. Their empires were rather under-developed.


This was on Emperor, BTW. I remember particularily bad hermitism from a King game I played some time ago.
 
This was on Emperor as well.
Russia, Rome and Germany are usually somewhat expansionist and aggressive.
That's why I chose them them as opponents.
What can be done to improve their performance?
It is very disappointing to spend at least 6 hours and realize that the was going to be only a 2-player match and I couldn't go to war against my only trading partner.
I am fairly certain that the Scout spam had something to do with the negative income.
I modded the Handicaps file to have Research percent at 120% rather than 100%.
Maybe they didn't know what to do with production or gold once there were no more buildings allowed by technology. Maybe they would be a scout whenever available gold reached 60.
It would be wise to introduce Gold or Research as a production opportunity earlier in the game. It would reduce the spam of huge armies.
I was last in military manpower according to Infoaddict even with 7 cities.
 
The last 2 games I played, as America and Egypt, I encountered huge armies of scouts and also the spamming of settlers.

Thought it just a quirk of my playing style;). Apparently not.
 
It's possible that the 5 hermit states above were losing their settlers by trying to migrate to the far coast where the resources were. Their large scout teams alerted them to the distant resources.

There needs to be a way for the AI to prioritize local settlements around the capital.
I had Germany and Russia intermingling their 2-3 cities each.
China and Suleiman were sending scouts all around the map. but not filling in the area around their capitals.

The armies of scouts would be fine if they attacked. They are quite effective even on offense with their terrain bonus. However, they nearly never attack and just sit on the sides in a crouch. They rarely help in defense either.

I think that the AI priorities given to sentinels might have been accidentally applied to scouts as well. The AI failed to upgrade this scouts even by turn 160.
 
1. Yep. Scouts litter my games at all eras
2. Seen that too (with Attila no less!), though not sure if I have for the .2 versions (and I'd have to keep an eye on individual leaders); now most seem to settle everything and, early on, far away from the capital
3. Not sure
4. Had that with Askia and most other civs too; naval stuff is now much more dangerous/fun. Air combat on the other hand, yikes.
5. This happens in pretty much all my games; RAs are largely a thing of the past
6. I hate this too, really hate it. I will start wars just to get those missionary pests away from me
7. I can never have enough GGs! (Plus, enemy ones make for good target practice)
8. I do OK will SPs because I usually go domination and it speeds up quite a lot, under 20 turns easy. Never try for cultural tall victory or whatever, so maybe it would be bad there
9. Agree. Loading times are good, especially given that civ V in general is rubbish speed-wise
 
The first two problems are likely due to November's change of unit/tech priorities for the "Good for" parts of tooltips. The game core Firaxis wrote makes bad decisions from the information seen there. I plan to work around this by creating a separate GoodFor table for AIs, so I can modify what it sees independently from humans. I expect to get this in within 1-2 updates.
 
You see scouts in the Renaissance? It shouldn't be possible for them to get scouts after Sentinels... :think:

Edit: Thank you Tomice! Your midgame comment made me realize what's going on. :goodjob:

I purchase AI explorers because they're too dumb to know what units to get. The problem is I purchase scouts... instead of vanguards! The AI upgrades the scouts to sentinels, then doesn't have enough scouts, so they get more scouts, which they upgrade again... :lol:

I'm now editing the code to create and check for vanguards, instead of scouts. I will include this in the hotfix update coming up in a few days. This might have also caused the strange AI gold income people have seen, from upgrading and maintaining all these scouts.
 
After upgrading to CivUp 2.4.1 & Gem 1.13.1 I am still facing strange AI actions.

In a protracted war with Mongolia, where we were the only players left, I would constantly find him sending out unprotected Settlers to try and land on the last unsettled land on the map.

All the while he would try and invade with artillery and submarines. Wave upon wave of Mongols die before the artillery can even land and setup.
 
I once spent a day experimenting with ways to get the AI to protect its settlers. It doesn't appear to be possible with simple data edits. There must be some mistake somewhere in the core AI, which would take too long to figure out.

I don't believe there is a practical way to change the AI's invasion code either.
 
I once spent a day experimenting with ways to get the AI to protect its settlers. It doesn't appear to be possible with simple data edits. There must be some mistake somewhere in the core AI, which would take too long to figure out.

I don't believe there is a practical way to change the AI's invasion code either.

That is both great and sad.
Great that you are looking at the problem and sad that an immediate fix is not likely.

Still, it does make it easier to defend if the AI rallies forth with massed forces of "Settlers".:crazyeye:
 
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