Congrats firaxis (AI) you finally outsmarted me

[MrRadar]

Well, second deity game finished, second loss (entirely of my own making, of course ), but what suspense!
I have finally witnessed, for the first time, AI launching an exoplanet expedition and successfully completing it on turn 391. At least now I know AI is capable of it. And it wasn't the AI I originally thought it would be. Mongols got big in my game, and they were a tech leader and culture leader, with Brazil present in game too. They reached Mars first but then inexplicably they halted their progress and let Harald catch up and overtake them, launch exo first, win ISS on top of that and reach that distant planet before anyone else.

As for me, despite getting a very desert and very fit for Mali start as Wilhelmina, I was doing kinda ok, but in a moment of folly I did not renew my friendship with my neighbouring Mongols. One mistake, and it proved to be fatal... they rolled me with cavalry. I lost like 4 cities to them, but at that point they lost interest in conquering me. I got two cities flip back to me and peaced out, other two revolted to Free Cities and stayed like this. Second dow, now I was facing their GDRs, having only tanks myself, but they did not do much during 10 turns and then I peaced out again. That was my second and last war, but the damage was done, science wrecked, massive ww, but I still managed get my old cities back, get to second place for CV with a few rock bands only, and was about to launch an exo myself.

Mongol blitz, t224:

Spoiler :

4 turns later:

Spoiler :

They could easily wipe me out of this landmass, but some 20 turns later I got a rather interesting peace:

Spoiler :

Another 100 turns or so and another war later, back to normal, if we don't count a few sunken tiles

Spoiler :

Someone's been busy:

Spoiler :

There were plenty of inter-AI wars, but not much to show in terms of territorial gains. No one got eliminated, if we don't count CS - only 3 survived out of 12. And one city of Pedro got nuked like 20 times by Alex, I lost count at some point. Alex must've been pooped upon by a pigeon during an earlier state visit to that city or something like that.

 

[bitula]

Was playing on the weekend and was surprised how much stronger the AI became since vanilla.

Deity-Standard-Shuffle-Huge France vs. Indonesia

1) Ancient era: Indonesia attacked by Russia and Australia from behind – now I’d think it shouldn’t be a big deal to sneak attack from the front.

A) She still assigns sufficient warriors and archers for defense making my conquest not so trivial. As I attack she builds up walls slowing down attack significantly.

B) As soon as I pick off the initial group of defenders and the city is almost down a swarm of chariots arrive to help out – I’ve never seen this happen in any previous version.

C) They seem to replenish infinitely in a steady stream – she doesn’t give up on this otherwise quite insignificant city – this never happened before. Now I have to produce additional units in all my cities just to keep up with her.

D) Again, city almost down and…: catapults arrive. Now in all previous versions this was a sign for victory, since these just stand there idle. But no, they attack! And they are quite tough, not like in Civ 5 (Vox) where they can be simply taken out by a single melee hit. Here my warrior takes more damage than makes. Archers deal minimal damage as well.

2) Finally I managed to conquer, its now classical era.

A) City starts to flip back due to loyalty pressure. I am in Dark Age. Never been in dark age in any previous version so early. It was so easy to reach normal or golden age, that the problem was quite the opposite as so not being able to get into Heroic age. Now reaching normal age is not simple at all.

B) I conquer two cities simultaneously. Both cities start to flip…

C) She did not want to sacrifice any other city of hers in a peace deal – this wasn’t so with vanilla.

3) I gave up, since I wasted too much time on warring leaving my economy stagnant.

Second, I played a peaceful game, spamming cities constantly, allied almost every one. Bad tactic: everyone far outpaced me in every aspect… And I mean every one!

Result: lost 5 deity games (same settings) in a row. This never happened before. The deity level of the game was so easy in the past its like they added some undocumented patch to the upper difficulties or this particular setting. To be sincere the AI made very few mistakes, some chariots did not attack my warrior which could not have survived, but I noticed one of them had been escorting a settler, maybe it has to do something with that.

Maybe all this is a pure coincidence. But at least this lift my interest so I’ll keep on playing and see if this is just a matter of luck or due to patches.

If they would patch up the naval and air AI this could be a decent game I guess.

 

[RohirrimElf]

Was playing on the weekend and was surprised how much stronger the AI became since vanilla.

Deity-Standard-Shuffle-Huge France vs. Indonesia

1) Ancient era: Indonesia attacked by Russia and Australia from behind – now I’d think it shouldn’t be a big deal to sneak attack from the front.

A) She still assigns sufficient warriors and archers for defense making my conquest not so trivial. As I attack she builds up walls slowing down attack significantly.

B) As soon as I pick off the initial group of defenders and the city is almost down a swarm of chariots arrive to help out – I’ve never seen this happen in any previous version.

C) They seem to replenish infinitely in a steady stream – she doesn’t give up on this otherwise quite insignificant city – this never happened before. Now I have to produce additional units in all my cities just to keep up with her.

D) Again, city almost down and…: catapults arrive. Now in all previous versions this was a sign for victory, since these just stand there idle. But no, they attack! And they are quite tough, not like in Civ 5 (Vox) where they can be simply taken out by a single melee hit. Here my warrior takes more damage than makes. Archers deal minimal damage as well.

2) Finally I managed to conquer, its now classical era.

A) City starts to flip back due to loyalty pressure. I am in Dark Age. Never been in dark age in any previous version so early. It was so easy to reach normal or golden age, that the problem was quite the opposite as so not being able to get into Heroic age. Now reaching normal age is not simple at all.

B) I conquer two cities simultaneously. Both cities start to flip…

C) She did not want to sacrifice any other city of hers in a peace deal – this wasn’t so with vanilla.

3) I gave up, since I wasted too much time on warring leaving my economy stagnant.

Second, I played a peaceful game, spamming cities constantly, allied almost every one. Bad tactic: everyone far outpaced me in every aspect… And I mean every one!

Result: lost 5 deity games (same settings) in a row. This never happened before. The deity level of the game was so easy in the past its like they added some undocumented patch to the upper difficulties or this particular setting. To be sincere the AI made very few mistakes, some chariots did not attack my warrior which could not have survived, but I noticed one of them had been escorting a settler, maybe it has to do something with that.

Maybe all this is a pure coincidence. But at least this lift my interest so I’ll keep on playing and see if this is just a matter of luck or due to patches.

If they would patch up the naval and air AI this could be a decent game I guess.

Naval and Air AI could need some help indeed. Especcialy naval.
But what i like to see most is more aggression from the AI in the second half of the game. Preferably 1 or 2 big coalitions against each other. Like the first and second world war in 20th century. The first half of the game always has been the most exciting. Exploring and early wars. The later half of the game could be so much fun with aircraft, drones and artillery. But most of my games result in pressing enter for 60-100 aimless till victory. While climate change can be ignored. (Just my experience from two emperor games).

 

[Jkchart]

Naval and Air AI could need some help indeed. Especcialy naval.
But what i like to see most is more aggression from the AI in the second half of the game. Preferably 1 or 2 big coalitions against each other. Like the first and second world war in 20th century. The first half of the game always has been the most exciting. Exploring and early wars. The later half of the game could be so much fun with aircraft, drones and artillery. But most of my games result in pressing enter for 60-100 aimless till victory. While climate change can be ignored. (Just my experience from two emperor games).

Agreed.

I actually HAVE seen a couple effective uses of Battleships by the AI, but it is still very rare.

I've also had some really good/challenging mid-game wars that the AI started. Usually late game is of my volition, not theirs, but at least they're not pushovers most of the time. In my Victoria game I had three massive wars with China, and my ally Brazil. First war was ancient era, and we defended his capital but it was long and difficult. Second was similar, and I made gains, but unfortunatley I wasn't able to do enough to defend his capital in the emergency. Later, I declared war after a long military build up between both of us and my objective was to liberate Rio. Brazil befriended me after a period of more tense relations and we had a joint operation to liberate Rio, which was successful, and we largely dismantled the Chinese empire.

War is in a much better state than before. I do agree air, navy, and late game war/coalitions need a bit more work, but I'm actually having good wars finally so I'm very happy.

 

[bitula]

Well I guess I'll have to revoke my positive review.
6th-game: Gandi Vs Peter.
Occupied his first 2 cities like playing on settler difficulty. Essentially no defending army, no walls even after long time of warring. And no loyalty pressure. This must be a bug. Or a hidden agenda "Pacifist: Does not build military units and structures neither at peace nor during war. Likes civs who do not defend themselves and enjoy to be conquered."
I imagine someone buying the game and gets into this bugged situation at his first play-through. He decides that AI is complete brain dead and shelves the game. But as seen in my previous post it is not, it can be quite decent. So this situation is really unfortunate.

 

[Disgustipated]

Barbs outsmarted me yesterday. Ended up with 2 woke camps on either side of my capital, one a horse camp. They would have took it if barbs could take your capital. My mistake building Lavra early. That's the problem with those very early districts, hard to build them without being overrun by barbs. No one mentioned this problem in the elimination thread. I'm starting to regret voting Lavra so high. Hard to build stuff like this, expand, and defend yourself.

That was a restart, I fell too far behind. Next game Mongols started taking over everything, don't think I can stop them. But hey, I have the almighty Lavra, right?

 

[Victoria]

Just played a classic England deity where I built a bunch of ships and took out the Netherlands to gain experience against Phoenicia just to find that despite them having 6 Cothon they had 1 Bireme parked in a port.
The sea game is not harder, I miss the old GA’s.
So I went arial with an early flight and it was just simple.
I used to rush flight for tourism, domination is just simple.
Yeah land battles the time and effort has paid off, that’s where it ends.

 

[Jkchart]

Just played a classic England deity where I built a bunch of ships and took out the Netherlands to gain experience against Phoenicia just to find that despite them having 6 Cothon they had 1 Bireme parked in a port.
The sea game is not harder, I miss the old GA’s.
So I went arial with an early flight and it was just simple.
I used to rush flight for tourism, domination is just simple.
Yeah land battles the time and effort has paid off, that’s where it ends.

Agreed. If you're a significant sea/air power, you generally are THE significant sea/air power.

Really pleased with land battles, so here's hoping a future update can fix the sea/air to be more of an AI priority.

(I did have one game vs the Mapuche where we had three massive naval wars, and their submarine armadas when i was in a Golden Age were no joke, probably the best naval wars I've ever had, I had to nuke their major ports to stop production/them killing my carriers)

 

[MrRadar]

So, while my PC was in repairs, I played one game on freshly released PS4 version (thanks for making Civ6 inescapable, FXS&Aspyr!). And witnessed for the first time an impressive snowball by deity American AI, where it won a SV on turn 286 or so (on standard speed&size continents), achieving 6 light year speed of exo expedition. I have never seen AI build laser stations before, but this time Teddy was spewing them out two a turn. And he had like~12 tech lead over the closest contestant. He had Australia and Rome as neighbours, and easily kept them in check, even took Australia's capital.
(My position was rather difficult in this game - Sweden under mighty America, connected by 1-2 tile isthmus to Teddys' part of the continent, on a peninsula half covered in tundra and snow, and having a very mountainous and difficult terrain border with America in the north, I had little chance for an early rush, as his tech lead never diminished, but kept increasing.)

So it seems, now deity AI is capable of getting under t300 CV, mostly via aggressive Rock Band spam, and it can win SV again.
It still never really goes for DomV, push for RV usually peters out, as they lose interest in building religious units, but how about Diplomatic Victory? This seems to be doable for the AI, have you seen it winning one?

 

[Bangau]

where it won a SV on turn 286

Wow, I've never seen them even close to this. Think the AI on the PS4 is improved over the PC one? Hoping it is and we'll get the update soon for PC. I've been playing deity for about 10months or so now and have once seen an AI 'nearing' a diplo victory (Mathias was at about 16), I've once lost to a religious victory (was in my early deity days...). I've seen maybe two or three times a runaway culture AI, but they never persisted. I've seen maybe 5 to 10 times where an AI was doing ok on science, but never lost to one cause they always slow down after the second or third rocket... Only real loses to the AI are early rushing that I forgot to prepare for properly. I always wait for them to finish me of, or retire if it takes to long so there are at least a dozen loses in my HOF. If only to remind me that you can actually lose. In V and earlier there were a lot more loses in my HOF, and not only/mostly very early game. Hoping for some AI love in a future update!