Consensus on AI in Civ5

[Zombie69]

Hello guys. I haven't tried Civ5 yet because I heard the AI was terrible, especially when it comes to tactics in combat. What's the consensus on its current state with the latest patch? Also, are there mods to make it better?

 

[PhilBowles]

It's a strategy game. It's an AI. Of course it's terrible.

Is it better than it was before patches and the expansion? Yes.

Does it compare well to similar games' AIs? At this stage, fairly.

It's as combat-aware as you can reasonably expect an AI to be with the Civ V combat system, which means it isn't capable of challenging a human without a major numerical advantage - but then this is as true of more combat-focused games like Total War. It can now mass forces, use appropriate unit compositions, coordinate attacks on specific targets, hold reinforcements in reserve rather than committing everything, launch naval invasions (the one area where there's near total agreement that the military AI is an advance over any previous Civ game), and to some extent use air power effectively. Particularly in the context of the naval AI, many of these AI upgrades are introduced in Gods & Kings along with the new combat system, rather than in the patch (at least as I understand it), so you'll need the expansion to enjoy them. On the downside, Attila's AI firmly believes that Battering Rams work like Spearmen and are a good unit to mass around his cities for defence...

It now plays diplomacy moderately well, but as in previous Civ games it does so entirely with an eye to two powers' relative military standing and how much it likes/dislikes you, without very much concept of how a particular deal will affect its strategy (about the only exception being if it plans to go to war with you and so refuses declarations of friendship). There are stronger games in this department (for instance, in my Shogun 2 campaign I couldn't obtain military access with the "Very friendly" Sagara at any cost, and despite having a far superior military, because granting it would have given me access to the enemy province they were on the verge of recapturing - which the AI correctly "guessed" I wanted to reach first), but from recollection, not in the Civilization series. Some easily-obtained negative modifiers can still make AIs more prone to hostility than peaceful play, but you can form and maintain game-long alliances.

In overall strategy it's somewhat lacklustre, and only really seems able to compete for science or diplomatic victories - although I've seen AIs get very far along the culture path, and even prioritise accumulating all the cultural Wonders, so they may have some ability to pursue a cultural victory; I've just never seen it happen. I've also never seen them successfully win a diplo victory, but they have reached a point where they only lose if the player actively intervenes to steal votes. A favoured AI tactic in the late game, if you don't have a rival who can realistically achieve a peaceful victory, is still to pile on with the intent of wiping you off the map whether or not that would conceptually help the AI win (and trying for diplo victory tends to result in a lot of wars as well). There seem to have been some improvements - I no longer see Great People used offensively or sitting idle as was routine in Civ V vanilla. For some reason, even on high levels of play, my experience is that the AI on duel maps tends to be a rather passive pushover - in recent duel games with first AI Carthage (with me as Korea) and second AI Sweden (against Songhai) neither civ has really attempted to do anything much; also expect a duel map AI to assume you're always enemies, even if you aim for a peaceful victory.

EDIT: In fact the Sweden game was wholly peaceful even on a duel map (except when I pre-emptively invaded Warsaw, partly to preempt further successful Swedish coups but mostly to get the War Canoes achievement). Main AI oddity was that Gustavus kept denouncing me (not that he didn't have good reason to, since I invaded a city-state under his protection, bullied others, tried to convert him to Islam and otherwise was a fairly bad neighbour), which is a bit pointless when there are no other civs on the map. He actually showed some clever use of prophets, missionaries and spies - he did the usual tech steals, but the impressive thing was that the closer I got to diplo victory, the more he tried to forestall me - we did a lot of clandestine wrangling over KL (to the point that I moved my army to surround it in case of a last-minute coup before the UN vote), but he also redirected spies who had been on (successful, despite my countermeasures) tech steal missions to rig the last round of elections in Genoa and Budapest prior to the vote. My influence was too high for the influence reduction to cost me my allies, but it showed clever adaptation to my strategy.

He also targeted my CSes with his Great Prophet and missionaries several times (I didn't want to lose my tithes, so I promptly created prophets of my own and converted them straight back again); I didn't check his religious beliefs, but I suspect he may have had the one that provides an influence boost with city-states that share your religion.

He was pretty lousy generally and I was never sure what his win condition was, but he did at least try to interfere with mine pretty much as soon as I'd decided which to go for and from then on. Although I didn't detect him making any use of Sweden's UA to steal city-states from me, which was a lapse on his part.

I think by strategy game standards Civ V's AI has reached a point where it's above average, if not by much, and by Civ series standards it's actually pretty good.

But many game elements in Civ V are - from an AI's perspective - a lot more complex in terms of decision-making than those in previous Civ games; 1UPT combat is often singled out as the main "offender" in this regard, but the fact that diplomatic relations now revolve heavily around how you apply denunciations/declarations of friendship and other 'strategic' tools, and less around simple yes/no questions of the form "Is his religion/civic same/different?", "Has he spied on me?", "Are we trading?" is also a layer of complexity AI-wise above past Civ games, and the AI sometimes struggles to handle it as a result.

 

[BlackMoon450]

I think the AI is great, but it still has a little room to improve, like any AI. Nothing is perfect.

 

[headcase]

The AI is improved in G+K. It's still dumb sometimes, but for the most part enjoyable. The fact that all units have more health seems to have helped it. One complaint I have is on King and higher, AI units appear to level up at an alarming rate, giving itself lots of 50HP heals, but fair enough. It doesn't do this constantly, but can feel that way in certain situations.

 

[rezaf]

Comparison to a pretty similar game that came out just recently - Warlock - shows neatly the flaws and limitations of the Civ5 system.

And, to be fair, only parts of it can be blamed on the AI as such. A big part of the problem is caused by the 1UPT approach itself - as sound as the approach is by itself, it's just the wrong pick for a global scale civ game (at least in my opinion, many here disagree).
Most units, at least until fairly late in the game, have pretty low mobility (in Warlock, units can move much farther, and this alone makes a huge difference), yet - especially with the recent changes - you must bring a fairly large number of units to a war if you want to have any hope of winning (and capturing cities along the way).
This means, rather than Civ4's supposed (but in reality pretty rare) stack of doom, you now need a carpet of doom, with every unit taking part always standing in the way of other units, especially when there's need to rearrange due to enemy action or navigational hazards. Even a human player will constantly struggle with this, at least to a degree. Thus it's of course a big challenge for th AI as well.

Now, I have to admit, since the early versions, the way the AI handles this has massively improved. As PhilBowles explained, it's now capable of assembling it's carpet of doom and often manages to stage actual, fairly well planned assaults with it. It can move the units to a destination in tickles, amass them, and then launch a fairly coordinated strike.
From there, it often falls apart a bit, it often picks not the best priorities, concentrates on stuff it should ignore and vice versa, doesn't retreat units in time, positions units in a way that prevents other, better suited units from attacking or that puts/leaves vulnerable units in harms way. Like I wrote above, the low mobility of the individual units probably plays a big role here, though the AI isn't really a master of cavalry warfare either.

To sum things up, the AI is much better than in vanilla/early versions, but any halfway seasoned player will have no trouble beating it on even remotely even grounds. The game relies on HEAVY cheating to make things challenging for the player, and this does work, at least partially. If you have no issue of playing against enemies that are playing the same game by a different set of rules, things are at least okayish now. Not splendid, but okay.

The "strategic" warfare AI is still pretty horrible, or so i found. You can still be offered massive compensation for a peace treaty in a war the AI started and in which you never actually met let alone fought the offending force, and at other times the AI will still stubbornly refuse unfavorable terms even if you just wiped out their army and captured every single city of theirs except one. It's just braindead.

The good thing is that Civ5 can be had for pretty cheap these days. Pick up a copy of the vanilla game without any DLC or the expansion during a sale and try it out running the newest version. You'll get a pretty good idea about how the game plays.
If you like what you see, you can consider the addOn, which features some mostly non-essential improvements and is generally MOTS, and if you're really fond, you can get the DLCs as well.

I picked up Civ5 and the expansion close to full price at time of release, and even though I feel these are the worst games in the series BY FAR, not even I regret the purchases all that much - getting the game for a few bucks should be a no-brainer, imo.
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rezaf

 

[PhilBowles]

Comparison to a pretty similar game that came out just recently - Warlock - shows neatly the flaws and limitations of the Civ5 system.

And, to be fair, only parts of it can be blamed on the AI as such. A big part of the problem is caused by the 1UPT approach itself - as sound as the approach is by itself, it's just the wrong pick for a global scale civ game (at least in my opinion, many here disagree).
Most units, at least until fairly late in the game, have pretty low mobility (in Warlock, units can move much farther, and this alone makes a huge difference), yet - especially with the recent changes - you must bring a fairly large number of units to a war if you want to have any hope of winning (and capturing cities along the way).
This means, rather than Civ4's supposed (but in reality pretty rare) stack of doom, you now need a carpet of doom, with every unit taking part always standing in the way of other units, especially when there's need to rearrange due to enemy action or navigational hazards. Even a human player will constantly struggle with this, at least to a degree. Thus it's of course a big challenge for th AI as well.

Now, I have to admit, since the early versions, the way the AI handles this has massively improved. As PhilBowles explained, it's now capable of assembling it's carpet of doom and often manages to stage actual, fairly well planned assaults with it. It can move the units to a destination in tickles, amass them, and then launch a fairly coordinated strike.
From there, it often falls apart a bit, it often picks not the best priorities, concentrates on stuff it should ignore and vice versa, doesn't retreat units in time, positions units in a way that prevents other, better suited units from attacking or that puts/leaves vulnerable units in harms way.

These are all the reasons an AI will always be worse than a good human player, regardless of system - and in Civ IV the stack of doom would also tend to feature odd unit mixes a human wouldn't make, attack across rivers or stick itself in vulnerable positions, attack with the stacked units in the wrong (to a human) order, and would often not withdraw until after it had lost more than a human would need to before being convinced it wasn't going to win. And in that game as in Civ V (and all other strategy games I'm familiar with) the AI's best approach is to outnumber its opponent, to compensate for the fact that it will lose units it doesn't need to through these kinds of mistakes.

I don't think these are flaws with the choice of system, although as in anything the more decisions you require an AI to make, the more it will get wrong. Then you really have to strike the best balance between the simplest possible system in order to optimise AI performance, and the one that presents the most interesting decision-making challenges for the human (and is consequently better for multiplayer play as well as being more enjoyable for the most part).

Like I wrote above, the low mobility of the individual units probably plays a big role here, though the AI isn't really a master of cavalry warfare either.

I still remember one game where Alexander (AI) handled companion cavalry better than I've seen most humans use Civ V cavalry (at the time when it was common wisdom here that cavalry isn't that valuable) - using them consistently to provide hoplites with the flanking bonus, then using their superior movement (and the fact that I couldn't push past his screening hoplites) to disappear back into the fog of war.

To sum things up, the AI is much better than in vanilla/early versions, but any halfway seasoned player will have no trouble beating it on even remotely even grounds. The game relies on HEAVY cheating to make things challenging for the player, and this does work, at least partially. If you have no issue of playing against enemies that are playing the same game by a different set of rules, things are at least okayish now. Not splendid, but okay.

Does Warlock handle this any better? I know that - for instance - Total War doesn't. Nor did previous Civ games. The Starcraft II AI appears somewhat better although very rigid, but that's because that game comes with a different set of considerations - it's almost stack of doom, where everything revolves around build orders, churning out, and attacking, with no tactics involved once battle is joined (other than retreating, which the AI script seems to handle on a timer - I've had it suddenly withdraw to recharge after wiping out my army when it's a position to take out my base, and conversely rushing to its doom because the "retreat now" routine hasn't been triggered)- it's just programmed to follow a preset recipe build. Tactical RTSes like Dawn of War tend to perform much worse, never retreating units when needed (which is a critical failing in that game) and engaging the wrong targets.

The difference between vanilla and G&K AIs I think can be summed up as follows: Vanilla AI played like an AI. G&K AI plays like a bad player.

The "strategic" warfare AI is still pretty horrible, or so i found. You can still be offered massive compensation for a peace treaty in a war the AI started and in which you never actually met let alone fought the offending force, and at other times the AI will still stubbornly refuse unfavorable terms even if you just wiped out their army and captured every single city of theirs except one. It's just braindead.

This has always tended to be the case in Civ games. And many others - Medieval II Total War seems to use basically the same calculation (military strength alone, regardless of contact with or losses to the enemy force, and counting allies' strength towards its own) to determine whether to accept peace, which routinely results in refusals to capitulate by powers that have lost entire armies en masse and cities to your forces.

The good thing is that Civ5 can be had for pretty cheap these days. Pick up a copy of the vanilla game without any DLC or the expansion during a sale and try it out running the newest version. You'll get a pretty good idea about how the game plays.
If you like what you see, you can consider the addOn, which features some mostly non-essential improvements and is generally MOTS, and if you're really fond, you can get the DLCs as well.

This may not be wholly reflective of the current AI, since as I noted I believe some of these AI changes are in coding only available through the expansion, not through patches (I've also had a sneaking suspicion that 'stealth' AI patches may have been introduced in DLC, since I experienced drastic improvements in pre-G&K AI over time without any official patches announced).

 

[rezaf]

I don't really now how to respond Phil, I'm not sure why you even decided to pick apart my post in the first place.

I was trying to be as fair as possible towards Civ5 - of course an AI will always have problems, a simple fact is that Civ5's AI was VERY bad early on, but has massively improved since. It's still not really good - even for an AI - but it gets the job done now, which is sufficient for the most part.
Comparisons to weaknesses of other (non civ) games AI's are pointless in my opinion, because we're talking Civ here.
About Civ4, of course it's AI wasn't remotely close to perfect, either. It played the game better on release, though, and was also improved a lot on the way (like Civ5's now), and many improvements came from work players started with the DLL release, a venue which is still closed for Civ5. Also, I feel the Civ5 AI is cheating much more blatantly and obviously, essentially - like I wrote - playing by a totally different set of rules. That's disappointing to me.

Regarding your Warlock question, first playing it my initial reaction was the notion that Warlock's AI is LEAGUES ahead of Civ5's. Later on, I realized it hat its weaknesses also, and a lot of the advantages to Civ5s AI stem from the fact that all units are much more mobile in that game - as it should be in a 1UPT game.
Compared with the most recent Civ5 AI, Warlock doesn't play much better I guess, but it hides its weaknesses better, until it falls completely apart when faced with certain situations. But I guess the Warlock devs are also working on fixing the issues it still has - haven't played with the latest patch yet.

In earlier Civ games, completely irrational peace offers were ... at least FAR less common than in Civ5.

This has always tended to be the case in Civ games. And many others - Medieval II Total War seems to use basically the same calculation (military strength alone, regardless of contact with or losses to the enemy force, and counting allies' strength towards its own) to determine whether to accept peace, which routinely results in refusals to capitulate by powers that have lost entire armies en masse and cities to your forces.

Still doesn't explain away why an AI having lost it's entire empire, complete with armies and cities, still somehow values itself in a position to make or even resist demands.

This may not be wholly reflective of the current AI, since as I noted I believe some of these AI changes are in coding only available through the expansion, not through patches (I've also had a sneaking suspicion that 'stealth' AI patches may have been introduced in DLC, since I experienced drastic improvements in pre-G&K AI over time without any official patches announced).

Well, but wouldn't you agree that it allows someone unfamiliar with Civ5 to get an idea what he'll be getting into? A few more improvements might be in the books when getting the expansion or the DLCs, but the base game impresson remains unchanged, no?
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rezaf

 

[hobbsyoyo]

In earlier Civ games, completely irrational peace offers were ... at least FAR less common than in Civ5.

Still doesn't explain away why an AI having lost it's entire empire, complete with armies and cities, still somehow values itself in a position to make or even resist demands.
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rezaf

I just have to say that I agree with rezaf on this point. I was going to comment on it but I didn't want to have my comment broken down via thesis. Now that someone else has said it i'll jump on the bandwagon.

But Phil gave a pretty good break down of the AI.

 

[PhilBowles]

I don't really now how to respond Phil, I'm not sure why you even decided to pick apart my post in the first place.

Annotations and further comments putting the AI into the context of other Civ and related games rather than "picking apart" - I don't detect any particular points of disagreement in our assessments, other than perhaps a nostalgic attitude towards the previous system (or possibly the use of mods to improve Civ IV AI performance while I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone experienced with unmodded BtS).

The last couple of Civ IV - unmodded - games I played I was reminded just how commonly the AI will randomly throw three-unit stacks of Jaguar Warriors at your larger army, run around the map with armies consisting entirely of siege units, fail to respond appropriately to the presence of particular unit types in your stack, or use cavalry-heavy stacks to defend cities - all using BtS AI. These aren't isolated examples; in those games I rarely went to war, but when I did I encountered this behaviour consistently.

And yes, Civ IV's most ardent defenders won't claim it had the world's best AI by any means, even post-BtS, but my point isn't that the AI isn't any better than Civ V's, or that it's worse - it's that it gets things wrong in exactly the same way, irrespective of the differences in combat system - poor unit selection, poor target selection (in the sense that in stack play you can choose the order of attacks based on the way the system selects defenders, to limit your units' exposure to their counters), weakness on defence etc. That suggests strongly it's not an issue attributable to the 1UPT system.

Civ V certainly did have 1UPT-specific problems in vanilla which have no equivalent in stack play (unit placement relative to one another, coordinating attacks from multiple units, moving armies as a unit), but these are mostly the issues that G&K fixed to a large degree. This is also the point of bringing in other games as examples - despite significant differences in the mechanics, the consistent point of failure is in the execution of tactics in all these cases.

That's what I mean by describing G&K AI as a bad player, and vanilla AI as "playing like an AI". An AI doesn't know the rules; a bad player knows the rules but not how to apply them to best effect. The AI now "gets" 1UPT in the same way the earlier AIs "got" stacks - but it's never going to produce the best armies or use them to best effect, any more than Civ IV will do with its stacks.

I was trying to be as fair as possible towards Civ5 - of course an AI will always have problems, a simple fact is that Civ5's AI was VERY bad early on, but has massively improved since. It's still not really good - even for an AI - but it gets the job done now, which is sufficient for the most part.

I'd agree, although I came onboard with Civ V after it's early "VERY bad" phase, after the first big patch while I'm told did a lot to help the AI. Though I'd estimate its AI as being better than you give it credit for in comparison with other games - Civ games and non-Civ games alike; it handles more complex decisions than these previous incarnations in issues like combat and diplomacy, and for the most part produces comparable results.

Civ IV has a reputation for being harder than Civ V - based on things like the greater variety of management options to juggle, the more varied tech path options that can too easily lead to a wrong turn ... but not because it's notably harder to beat in combat, or because the AI is more likely to execute a clever winning move.

Comparisons to weaknesses of other (non civ) games AI's are pointless in my opinion, because we're talking Civ here.

Didn't you start with a comparison with Warlock...? As above, the point is to identify common elements where AIs err regardless of mechanics. Arguing that Civ AI isn't comparable to Total War AI because the games are mechanically different is no different from claiming Civ V AI is immune to comparisons with Civ IV AI because the combat mechanics are different, and plainly you don't accept that premise any more than I do. And in cases like the diplomacy system, the mechanisms the AI uses to determine whether and on what terms to accept peace are essentially identical between older Total War games and Civ.

About Civ4, of course it's AI wasn't remotely close to perfect, either. It played the game better on release, though, and was also improved a lot on the way (like Civ5's now), and many improvements came from work players started with the DLL release, a venue which is still closed for Civ5. Also, I feel the Civ5 AI is cheating much more blatantly and obviously, essentially - like I wrote - playing by a totally different set of rules. That's disappointing to me.

Describing an AI as "cheating" is nonsense. It has no motives, and didn't ask for any special favours. It simply gets bonuses to compensate for being a weaker player than its likely human opponent, and does so for the benefit of the human, not the benefit of the computer - if that's cheating, getting a handicap in golf is cheating. And whatever the "feel", Civ V's AI-bonus-by-difficulty setting isn't any different from the systems in the previous Civ games.

Regarding your Warlock question, first playing it my initial reaction was the notion that Warlock's AI is LEAGUES ahead of Civ5's. Later on, I realized it hat its weaknesses also, and a lot of the advantages to Civ5s AI stem from the fact that all units are much more mobile in that game - as it should be in a 1UPT game.

My first impression on playing Total War games post-Civ V was similarly that the TW AI was one of the best I'd faced, but that turned out to have more to do with my inexperience with the system than the AI - quite simply it's always going to be harder to beat an AI that "knows the system" better than you, even if that AI isn't any better objectively than the AI of a game with which you're more familiar. By this point I'm of the opinion that the most recent TW instalment is comparable if slightly weaker than Civ V AI at using that game's combat mechanics effectively, but is somewhat stronger on the strategic and diplomatic fronts - while the older TW games are simply weaker across the board than Civ V.

Your point about mobility may well be a good one - the AI seems to use late-era mech inf/modern army fairly well, and I've already noted one strong play I've seen with AI cavalry.

Compared with the most recent Civ5 AI, Warlock doesn't play much better I guess, but it hides its weaknesses better, until it falls completely apart when faced with certain situations. But I guess the Warlock devs are also working on fixing the issues it still has - haven't played with the latest patch yet.

We can hope that this is also the case with Civ V. The game may yet have one more expansion in it, and almost certainly further patches are planned.

In earlier Civ games, completely irrational peace offers were ... at least FAR less common than in Civ5.

Hmm, unless your below is an exaggeration it sounds as though you've experienced them more in Civ V than I have. The Civ V AI is more prone to extremes - it's more likely to either demand everything or give everything. But I haven't noticed much difference in the situations where the AI would offer or accept a silly deal across Civ's incarnations.

Still doesn't explain away why an AI having lost it's entire empire, complete with armies and cities, still somehow values itself in a position to make or even resist demands.

I've seen them resisting demands in that situation, but even in Civ V vanilla I didn't often find them making demands if they were down to their capital or if their army was gone. The positive thing about a system based entirely on military strength assessment is that the AI will usually be willing to accept peace once it perceives its military is weaker than yours, and that's been my experience.

Well, but wouldn't you agree that it allows someone unfamiliar with Civ5 to get an idea what he'll be getting into? A few more improvements might be in the books when getting the expansion or the DLCs, but the base game impresson remains unchanged, no?

I'm not so sure - for a start the 100 HP system isn't in the patch (which I've played in multiplayer with G&K disabled before my group members all had a copy), it's in Gods & Kings, and I think that does make a substantial difference to the AI's combat performance. Also, while the AI plays diplomacy in much the same way in both versions, it feels very different in Civ V (EDIT: In G&K, I mean of course), not because of AI improvements, but because the types of game-long relationships, tripartite relations etc. that you could routinely form in vanilla with sufficient effort are much more accessible and easier to form for less experienced Civ V players following the expansion.

 

[rezaf]

Thanks for the clarifications Phil.

The last couple of Civ IV - unmodded - games I played I was reminded just how commonly the AI will randomly throw three-unit stacks of Jaguar Warriors at your larger army, run around the map with armies consisting entirely of siege units, fail to respond appropriately to the presence of particular unit types in your stack, or use cavalry-heavy stacks to defend cities - all using BtS AI. These aren't isolated examples; in those games I rarely went to war, but when I did I encountered this behaviour consistently.

And yes, Civ IV's most ardent defenders won't claim it had the world's best AI by any means, even post-BtS, but my point isn't that the AI isn't any better than Civ V's, or that it's worse - it's that it gets things wrong in exactly the same way, irrespective of the differences in combat system - poor unit selection, poor target selection (in the sense that in stack play you can choose the order of attacks based on the way the system selects defenders, to limit your units' exposure to their counters), weakness on defence etc. That suggests strongly it's not an issue attributable to the 1UPT system.

Let me put it this way then, I felt many of Civ4's weaknesses only surfaced when you played on very high difficulties. The often lamented SoD was practically never to be seen unless you played at King or higher. And if the AI had smaller armies and stacks, the problems you describe were much rarer, thus the issues were better concealed.

I gotta say, though, that I felt a catapult in a stack attacking at the wrong time in Civ4 was much more bearable to me than the AI maneuvering the largely defenseless catapult right in front of my knight or something like that in early Civ5.

Civ V certainly did have 1UPT-specific problems in vanilla which have no equivalent in stack play (unit placement relative to one another, coordinating attacks from multiple units, moving armies as a unit)

Agreed.

That's what I mean by describing G&K AI as a bad player, and vanilla AI as "playing like an AI". An AI doesn't know the rules; a bad player knows the rules but not how to apply them to best effect. The AI now "gets" 1UPT in the same way the earlier AIs "got" stacks - but it's never going to produce the best armies or use them to best effect, any more than Civ IV will do with its stacks.

Disagreed.
I find that an AI will always play like an AI and never like an actual player. A bad AI can also be an AI that is fully aware of the rules and how to employ them to full effect. Since i isn't meant as a direct comparison, I'll quote a totally different genre as well here: Imagine a racing game where the AI knows the "ideal line", exactly when to shift gears, how much and when to break before a curve and so on, a game where the AI employs all this knowledge of the "rules" to full effect. The AI player would always run perfect laps, to great frustration of a human driver. (There were actually racing game AIs that worked like this.)

An AI always must know the rules of the game, if it does not, it's merely broken.
Early Civ5 AI was. By know, this has largely been addressed.

I'd agree, although I came onboard with Civ V after it's early "VERY bad" phase, after the first big patch while I'm told did a lot to help the AI. Though I'd estimate its AI as being better than you give it credit for in comparison with other games - Civ games and non-Civ games alike; it handles more complex decisions than these previous incarnations in issues like combat and diplomacy, and for the most part produces comparable results.

Combat is now more complicated, I'll give you that, but older Civ AIs had to deal with more complicated mechanics in other areas, imo. But overall, yeah, the results of the AI looked at in isolation aren't particularly bad these days, I think I already admitted that several times.

Didn't you start with a comparison with Warlock...? As above, the point is to identify common elements where AIs err regardless of mechanics. Arguing that Civ AI isn't comparable to Total War AI because the games are mechanically different is no different from claiming Civ V AI is immune to comparisons with Civ IV AI because the combat mechanics are different, and plainly you don't accept that premise any more than I do. And in cases like the diplomacy system, the mechanisms the AI uses to determine whether and on what terms to accept peace are essentially identical between older Total War games and Civ.

Well, I guess you have a point there. I brought in Warlock because it is so similar to Civ5 that it can, at first glance, pass as a Civ5 mod.
Maybe instead of Civ-games I should've written turn based empire building strategy games or something.
I just think a StarCraft II AI is faced with mostly very different problems than the Civ5 AI. Also, it manages to solve it's problems in a much more timely manner - one of the biggest issues I still have with Civ5 are it's IMMENSE turn times in the later ages.

Describing an AI as "cheating" is nonsense. It has no motives, and didn't ask for any special favours. It simply gets bonuses to compensate for being a weaker player than its likely human opponent, and does so for the benefit of the human, not the benefit of the computer - if that's cheating, getting a handicap in golf is cheating. And whatever the "feel", Civ V's AI-bonus-by-difficulty setting isn't any different from the systems in the previous Civ games.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this point, I guess. Maybe cheating isn't the correct word to use (I believe it to be, but I'm not an english native speaker, as you probably have noticed), but I STRONGLY dislike it when an AI needs this kind of "support" to function in a challenging way.
And giving it a few extra resources is one thing, but making cornerstones of the game design not apply to it is just over the top in my book.
In Civ5, the 1UPT meant there should be less units present on the map. A lot less, being ground combat units can no longer be stacked in any way.
So, to address this, and to prevent ICS, the global happiness was introduced.
Fair enough.
But as early as in Prince difficulty, you can notice in Civ5, that the same restrictions placed upon the player are OBVIOUSLY not present for the AI. The computer can found tons of cities and grow them all to gargantuan size, and still end up WAY ahead of you in happiness polls.
In turn, this of course means the AI has much higher income (plus bonuses), it can build and support more troops, it can build more improvements, it generally plays a different game than you do.
To me, this is such an essential part of the game mechanics, it's as if you gave a Chess AI a full row of Queens instead of Peasants, to even the field a bit, because hey, it's just an AI and needs a hand.

We can hope that this is also the case with Civ V. The game may yet have one more expansion in it, and almost certainly further patches are planned.

Maybe. For reasons that totally surpass my ability to comprehend, many people love the heck out of things in Civ5 that I feel are a massive step backwards for the Civ series, which has given the game a level of success that may yet warrant another expansion. We'll see.

But I haven't noticed much difference in the situations where the AI would offer or accept a silly deal across Civ's incarnations.

Well, I have. Though one has to admit this was always a pretty weak area in Civ games, I feel it's worse in Civ5. War resolutions aside, another example is how the AI often makes totally outrageous suggestions for research treaties from which it will benefit just as much as the player. What, you want half my per-turn gold, half my iron, a third of my horses and all my coal to sign up for this? Lemme show you to the door...

I've seen them resisting demands in that situation, but even in Civ V vanilla I didn't often find them making demands if they were down to their capital or if their army was gone. The positive thing about a system based entirely on military strength assessment is that the AI will usually be willing to accept peace once it perceives its military is weaker than yours, and that's been my experience.

I used the term make demands a bit liberally, the AI often "demands" a white peace in these situations. But it keeps actually demanding stuff at times when it's very clear that it's going to lose, and it keeps resisting white peace offers until it's empire is damaged beyond repair. I have a feeling it doesn't evaluate it's actual military power only, but also hypothetical stuff and possibly even wonders in cities and whatnot - things that play absolutely no part in a military conflict.

This kind of behavior can actually help many a game, though - when wars are going on in which the player participates is where Civ5 really shines. As an empire building game, it's pretty boring and dull, and a giant leap backwards from previous civ games.
So more battles (longer wars) usually mean, more fun to be had.

I'm not so sure - for a start the 100 HP system isn't in the patch (which I've played in multiplayer with G&K disabled before my group members all had a copy), it's in Gods & Kings, and I think that does make a substantial difference to the AI's combat performance. Also, while the AI plays diplomacy in much the same way in both versions, it feels very different in Civ V (EDIT: In G&K, I mean of course), not because of AI improvements, but because the types of game-long relationships, tripartite relations etc. that you could routinely form in vanilla with sufficient effort are much more accessible and easier to form for less experienced Civ V players following the expansion.

I agree, 100HP is a big improvement, and the AI feels less erratic in G+K than it did in early Civ5, but I still think you can get a good rundown of the basic game by picking up Vanilla only, at a MUCH reduced price tag.
If money is not an issue, by all means, get the complete package, with all DLCs and G+K.
_____
rezaf

 

[gozpel]

The same rabble as before.

No improvements whatsoever.

Only a over-hating AI or an over-loving AI. The rest are just Neutral or most of the time guarded for no reasons at all. Only to make our time on civ more difficult.

 

[PhilBowles]

Thanks for the clarifications Phil.



Let me put it this way then, I felt many of Civ4's weaknesses only surfaced when you played on very high difficulties. The often lamented SoD was practically never to be seen unless you played at King or higher. And if the AI had smaller armies and stacks, the problems you describe were much rarer, thus the issues were better concealed.

I can't remember if I was playing on Prince or Noble when those came up, but they were certainly noticeable.

I gotta say, though, that I felt a catapult in a stack attacking at the wrong time in Civ4 was much more bearable to me than the AI maneuvering the largely defenseless catapult right in front of my knight or something like that in early Civ5.

I suspect that's what makes the difference. The same mistake in stack play isn't as critical to the outcome of the battle as that mistake in 1UPT play - but that's surely the point of implementing 1UPT in the first place. You can hardly have a tactical combat system in which tactics aren't critical to the outcome... So it comes down to the old "should the combat system be tactical?" chestnut rather than an issue of AI limitations.

An AI always must know the rules of the game, if it does not, it's merely broken.
Early Civ5 AI was. By know, this has largely been addressed.

Sounds as though once again we've converged on the same point and described it in different ways.

Combat is now more complicated, I'll give you that, but older Civ AIs had to deal with more complicated mechanics in other areas, imo.

That depends whether you're defining "complicated" from a human or an AI perspective, I suspect. Civ IV's mechanics tended across the board to have more binary answers - "I'm specialising for production, do I want a windmill on that hill? No", "Does X share my religion? Yes", "Is my unhappiness nearly equal to my happiness? If yes, build appropriate building" - which suit an AI. In diplomacy, for instance, there was nothing resembling the denunciation mechanic that made the AI need to consider who it should denounce rather than just whether it should. Very often these are decisions that will be trivial to a human, and many people feel that this is more generally the case in Civ V than Civ IV, but they're harder for an AI to process.

I just think a StarCraft II AI is faced with mostly very different problems than the Civ5 AI. Also, it manages to solve it's problems in a much more timely manner - one of the biggest issues I still have with Civ5 are it's IMMENSE turn times in the later ages.

I'm used to playing Total War games (with animations enabled), so even later-age Civ turns seem lightning-fast...

And giving it a few extra resources is one thing, but making cornerstones of the game design not apply to it is just over the top in my book.

Which elements are these? I know the AI gets extra gold, happiness, units and an early tech or two at higher levels, but I'm not sure what other bonuses it receives.

In Civ5, the 1UPT meant there should be less units present on the map. A lot less, being ground combat units can no longer be stacked in any way.
So, to address this, and to prevent ICS, the global happiness was introduced.
Fair enough.

I don't think these are related - Civ IV tried to remove ICS by essentially making it impossible; its maintenance-by-distance plus the 7-square city placement limit was aimed explicitly at doing this, and was a "harder counter" than global happiness (indeed some have complained about the return of ICS). Civ V allows the strategy but makes it less viable than alternatives.

But as early as in Prince difficulty, you can notice in Civ5, that the same restrictions placed upon the player are OBVIOUSLY not present for the AI.

I don't think this is a case of "rules don't apply", as a case of a ruleset in which the same mechanic that limits city growth is also one that can be added as a bonus to the AI - so it gets more happiness with these corresponding advantages. You can't really give a Civ IV AI a "maintenance bonus" in the same way.

It's possible this is something that should be looked at or that wasn't well thought-through when allocating the AI bonuses - but for that to apply the AI would actually need to play as though those bonuses give it enough of an advantage to be challenging, which many players feel isn't the case. It hoards its extra gold, it doesn't improve tiles to best effect, it places its extra cities poorly.

And to be honest I haven't noticed the AI having large numbers of gargantuan cities - in my Emperor games the AI capital routinely level-pegs with mine in the early game in its population size, and G&K has either reduced happiness bonuses or curtailed the script that prompts the AI to found cities. Sure, in my last duel game Gustavus had far higher happiness than I did - but until 1810 AD Stockholm was his only city, and that was smaller than Gao (my capital), while I had 3-4 other moderate-size cities.

So, I've noticed the bonuses (how do you get 54 happiness with just one city and no CS allies, again?), but not at a level drastic enough in terms of the way the AI plays to make it feel it's "playing a different game". It seems to squander its excess happiness in much the same way it does its excess gold (I've read that the AI doesn't get Golden Ages, so it's not even holding onto excess happiness usefully).

it can build and support more troops,

Which it needs to compensate for losing more of them.

it can build more improvements,

Although it rarely does...

Well, I have. Though one has to admit this was always a pretty weak area in Civ games, I feel it's worse in Civ5.

Oh, I wouldn't disagree - I was just making the same point that it's a pretty weak area in Civ games generally. You're losing the war and have lost cities and armies but still have a military? Make demands - same in Civ V as in Civ IV. The Civ V AI will just make somewhat more outrageous demands. The essential problem - that the method used to calculate war success is flawed - is the same across all the games, Civ V just exacerbates it by also having an AI that struggles to understand what is or is not a good deal (a general problem with Civ V AI trades).

War resolutions aside, another example is how the AI often makes totally outrageous suggestions for research treaties from which it will benefit just as much as the player. What, you want half my per-turn gold, half my iron, a third of my horses and all my coal to sign up for this? Lemme show you to the door...

In fairness, I've mostly noticed this when there's a tech imbalance in which the player will gain more from the RA than the AI because the player's in the lead technologically to begin with. The AI will usually offer a more favourable deal if it's the tech leader because it similarly considers it will benefit more than the player.

This kind of behavior can actually help many a game, though - when wars are going on in which the player participates is where Civ5 really shines. As an empire building game, it's pretty boring and dull, and a giant leap backwards from previous civ games.
So more battles (longer wars) usually mean, more fun to be had.

I don't think I'd agree. I don't think you can separate the war and empire-building elements - no, it's not Sim Empire, and it may be telling that a lot of Civ V's critics favourably compare Civ IV with games like Sim City which I found interminable and somewhat pointless - to me it feels more a game and less a management tool. War's part of that, diplomacy's part of that (and as weak as the AI may be at utilising it, the DOF/Denunciation system represents in my mind a great advance over previous games' almost wholly trade-based diplomacy system) and, of course, so is the actual building part.

I think it's a mistake to think of Civ V as a game that forces or encourages you to go to war rather than build peacefully throughout, in the same way that it's a mistake to think of chess as a game that forces you to move your pieces - I don't feel Civ was ever meant to be large-scale Sim City, and that the game should be designed around the concept that empire building includes all four Xes, rather than presenting you with options to leave one or more of them out.

So in that context perhaps the passive construction phase does seem somewhat dull - it's felt dull to me in all incarnations past the early game, so I'm not particularly in a position to judge - but that's because it's designed as part of the whole system rather than as a gameplay option unto itself. A chess game in which both players only moved the pawns would also be a bit dull... In the same way that chess is about moving more than just the pawns, and using different tools (pieces) in ways that complement one another to achieve victory, so is Civ V about using the different elements of empire-building together.

Only a over-hating AI or an over-loving AI. The rest are just Neutral or most of the time

Even that's an advance over vanilla's "everyone says they're Friendly, but most aren't really" descriptives - I'm glad that to a large extent you can now rely on the attitude description given as being accurate.

 

[rezaf]

Somebody rename this thread "Phil and rezaf talk Civ" already.

I can't remember if I was playing on Prince or Noble when those came up, but they were certainly noticeable.

I guess it depends how you define SoD. Just a number of units stacked into an army? Yeah, happened all the time, even on Noble or lower.
A gargantuan stack that you basically know you have no chance against, no matter how many defenders you railroad in from other cities or how much you weaken it by artillery or whatnot? This was pretty rare in general, and I've only seen it on King and above. Except in mods, that is.

That depends whether you're defining "complicated" from a human or an AI perspective, I suspect. Civ IV's mechanics tended across the board to have more binary answers - "I'm specialising for production, do I want a windmill on that hill? No", "Does X share my religion? Yes", "Is my unhappiness nearly equal to my happiness? If yes, build appropriate building" - which suit an AI. In diplomacy, for instance, there was nothing resembling the denunciation mechanic that made the AI need to consider who it should denounce rather than just whether it should. Very often these are decisions that will be trivial to a human, and many people feel that this is more generally the case in Civ V than Civ IV, but they're harder for an AI to process.

Well, earlier Civ5 showed just how much thought the AI puts into things like denouncations. I don't really see these evaluations as all that complicated.
It's still only a bunch of variables being computed.
How big is the other player? How powerful his army? Do we have a conflict of interest (close borders etc.)? Maybe stuff like "are we competing for the same City State"?
These are put into a calculation, and there you have it, denouncation.
I don't see this being very hard at all.

I'm used to playing Total War games (with animations enabled), so even later-age Civ turns seem lightning-fast...

Heh, is that a serious remark? Just because someone else does an even worse job doesn't mean you should do a bad job, imo.

Which elements are these? I know the AI gets extra gold, happiness, units and an early tech or two at higher levels, but I'm not sure what other bonuses it receives.

I think I explained it pretty well, to me, the huge happiness boni effectively make the AI play a different game.

I don't think this is a case of "rules don't apply", (...)
the AI would actually need to play as though those bonuses give it enough of an advantage to be challenging, which many players feel isn't the case.

All you're saying there is that you don't mind the chess AI getting a full row of queens because it isn't using them to full effect. I say, I don't want the AI to have a row of queens, because I want to play chess, and I want the enemy I play against to ALSO play chess, by the same rules.

And to be honest I haven't noticed the AI having large numbers of gargantuan cities - in my Emperor games the AI capital routinely level-pegs with mine in the early game in its population size, and G&K has either reduced happiness bonuses or curtailed the script that prompts the AI to found cities. Sure, in my last duel game Gustavus had far higher happiness than I did - but until 1810 AD Stockholm was his only city, and that was smaller than Gao (my capital), while I had 3-4 other moderate-size cities.

So, I've noticed the bonuses (how do you get 54 happiness with just one city and no CS allies, again?), but not at a level drastic enough in terms of the way the AI plays to make it feel it's "playing a different game".

I've seen a few civs (mostly India) stick to a sincle or very few cities until the Renaissance or later, but many others (Germany, Persia and England in my last game) go totally nuts even on Prince. When I could just bairly sustain five moderately sized cities, with two allied food-CS's, ALL natural wonders explored, seven luxury resources plus (iirc) four more via trade and even a few happiness-boosting policies and beliefs, germany alone boosted more than TWENTY cities - all self-founded, no conquests (i.e. no puppets), at least half of which were bigger than my biggest city. And yet they were #1 in happiness polls. How's that playing the same game?

Which it needs to compensate for losing more of them.

I'd be on-board for support-free units and boosted production (both of which the AI also gets, I believe) on higher difficulties.

Although it rarely does...

Suppose you've never had a game where a Civ stole EVERY wonder you attempted to construct AND built a larger army than you ever could hope to field?

In fairness, I've mostly noticed this when there's a tech imbalance in which the player will gain more from the RA than the AI because the player's in the lead technologically to begin with. The AI will usually offer a more favourable deal if it's the tech leader because it similarly considers it will benefit more than the player.

Maybe, but I had other, even more backwards AI's offer a 1:1 research agreement on the same turn, so it can't be all.
This has troubled the AI since at least Civ3, though - should I accept a very fair 1:1 trade for a resource with a human player who has a much larger army than mine and could just waltz in and seize my city if he wanted to, or should I make some outrageous demand prompting him to actually do just that? Hmmmm....

I don't think I'd agree. I don't think you can separate the war and empire-building elements - no, it's not Sim Empire, and it may be telling that a lot of Civ V's critics favourably compare Civ IV with games like Sim City which I found interminable and somewhat pointless - to me it feels more a game and less a management tool. War's part of that, diplomacy's part of that (and as weak as the AI may be at utilising it, the DOF/Denunciation system represents in my mind a great advance over previous games' almost wholly trade-based diplomacy system) and, of course, so is the actual building part.

Civ is not remotely similar to SimCity in my book. And warfare is an important part of Civ, no doubt about it. Maybe, in Civ4, a good player was able to have too many too well-developed cities in the end, that's probably right, but in Civ5, city and empire development has taken a clear backseat behind warfare, which I find very unfortunate.

I think it's a mistake to think of Civ V as a game that forces or encourages you to go to war rather than build peacefully throughout, in the same way that it's a mistake to think of chess as a game that forces you to move your pieces

A more fitting analogy to me is that Civ5 is a soccer game that actively encourages you to foul as much as possible and rewards fouling over actually scoring goals or playing well as a team.
_____
rezaf

 

[gozpel]

I just had a thought...there is a Private Message function.

Kicking the ball over the fence repeatably, without any definite proof is fun, but completely useless.

Both what Phil and rezaf is saying is true in some sense and I could jump on the bandwagon and say something differently, and that would be true too.

It's basically back to square one, how do you play the game...or rather how do you like this game to be, when you play it. The grey-area is pretty big.

 

[PhilBowles]

Somebody rename this thread "Phil and rezaf talk Civ" already.



I guess it depends how you define SoD. Just a number of units stacked into an army? Yeah, happened all the time, even on Noble or lower.
A gargantuan stack that you basically know you have no chance against, no matter how many defenders you railroad in from other cities or how much you weaken it by artillery or whatnot? This was pretty rare in general, and I've only seen it on King and above. Except in mods, that is.

Granted, I'm comparing stack play in general to 1UPT play in general, rather thana stack of doom. As you say, once you reach critical mass in stack size in earlier Civs it makes very little difference how badly put-together said stack is, since the numerical advantage is just too great.

Well, earlier Civ5 showed just how much thought the AI puts into things like denouncations. I don't really see these evaluations as all that complicated.
It's still only a bunch of variables being computed.
How big is the other player? How powerful his army? Do we have a conflict of interest (close borders etc.)? Maybe stuff like "are we competing for the same City State"?
These are put into a calculation, and there you have it, denouncation.
I don't see this being very hard at all.

The thing is, it is a "bunch" of variables. Not just one binary yes/no answer. The system needs some way of calculating how much each of the input variables should be weighted, and some way of determining in context whether competing for the same city state outweighs 'superior military strength' or vice versa. etc. etc. This is why the AI - in pretty much all Civ games, and many other strategy games - uses a military evaluation calculator as basic as "Is the other army bigger/smaller?", and comes up with often idiotic results. I had a discussion in another thread a while back about ways to modify the calculation to produce better results, but all of them necessarily involve weighing multiple variables that are each going to differ in importance by context. There were a lot of contentions that it should be easy enough to produce an index to accommodate this, but no one suggested any specific indices capable of doing so.

Or look at how the AI selects religion - I've yet to see an AI religion whose beliefs can obviously be distinguished from a random pick of the available options, nor have I seen beliefs selected to suit a particular strategy.

Heh, is that a serious remark? Just because someone else does an even worse job doesn't mean you should do a bad job, imo.

Not entirely serious, no. But it does provide me with a different perspective of what's "tolerable", and possibly some insight into the reasons for slow turn times. TW games have numerous factions, all taking turns in sequence. Civ V does much the same - every city-state needs a turn, regardless of whether it does anything or not, and with CSes in play a game has over twice as many factions in play at one time as any previous Civ game, and as in any turn-based game one faction's turn has to be resolved before the next in case anything that happens affects factions that have yet to play.

All you're saying there is that you don't mind the chess AI getting a full row of queens because it isn't using them to full effect. I say, I don't want the AI to have a row of queens, because I want to play chess, and I want the enemy I play against to ALSO play chess, by the same rules.

What I'm saying is that a bonus that isn't being used isn't a bonus. If an AI chess opponent had a rule "Your queen gets two lives", but the chess computer routinely removed it after being taken like any normal queen, how is it not playing by the normal rules?

And with any game that is in essence a form of solitaire, the key thing is for the game to be a challenge - I'd rather play chess against an AI with extra queens that put up a fight as a result than against, say, Battlechess AI playing the game normally and being a dull walkover.

Once again with the Total War comparison - the Shogun 2 campaign makes it explicit with advisor comments at the start that, once the player gets to a certain point, the AI plays by different rules. All AIs will gang up to attack you if you're close to grabbing the Shogunate; they won't do the same for an AI in the same position (for instance I'm playing a "short" campaign as the Shimazu, where the goal is to capture 25 provinces including Kyoto. The shogun declared me an enemy of the state, which starts the war decs rolling, when I'd claimed 17 provinces, although the Oda (who surrounded Kyoto and did, in fact, capture it two turns later) had 22 and hadn't had universal war declared against them.

In this case I do feel it spoils immersion somewhat, but because the justification given storywise for this mechanic (that other clans will leap to defend the status quo - which they'd be equally likely to do against an AI competitor as a human one in principle, notwithstanding that by the time Oda declared war on me he'd already disrupted the status quo by wiping out the old shogunate - at least I could justify that as Oda wanting to crack down on challenges to his new rule) doesn't sit well with human-AI asymmetry.

But frankly I prefer it gamewise - it prompted me, for instance, to quickly offer diplomatic marriage to the Sagara (who are dangerously close to my lightly-defended core territories) so that I have a bit longer to build up my army before their influence deteriorates sufficiently for them to declare war, it means I face challenges to keep my sea trade routes open on multiple fronts, I have to defend against naval invasion in territories my main Oda rivals (who don't have much of a fleet) can't reach. As opposed to the alternative if the AI was playing fair, in which I'd just have one nominal war against a faction that can't reach me, I could just walk up to Kyoto and capture it with a backstab war dec, and then do the same for the Sagara territory Higo (another victory province I need to claim).

Even now the AI's doing a pretty dreadful job - none of Oda's provinces between me and Kyoto are defended so I've just walked straight in and the army's carried on, its fleets are wandering around without landing forces that could have taken several of my provinces by now (and usually where my fleets can pick them off), but at least I'm having to consider and plan for attacks on multiple fronts, I'm having to deal with Takeda agents bribing or stalling my armies in the middle of Oda territory, and while armies and fleets are individually weak I have many more of them to deal with from four surviving opponents (and one ally I know to be temporary) than from one or two.

Of course this may be part of the frustration, both for you with Civ and to some extent for me with Total War - the AI can be given a different set of rules to play with in TW, or excessive bonuses in Civ V, but if it still isn't challenging enough all the player sees is the rule that's being "broken", not the reward in a more in-depth gaming experience.

Suppose you've never had a game where a Civ stole EVERY wonder you attempted to construct AND built a larger army than you ever could hope to field?

Ah, I was thinking "improvement" as in "tile improvements".

Civ is not remotely similar to SimCity in my book. And warfare is an important part of Civ, no doubt about it. Maybe, in Civ4, a good player was able to have too many too well-developed cities in the end, that's probably right, but in Civ5, city and empire development has taken a clear backseat behind warfare, which I find very unfortunate.

That's rarely been my experience. I'd say that warfare in Civ V is more viable, simply because it's a more engaging playstyle than it was in past civs, and sure the game is aimed at doing its best to ensure that at some stage wars will break out during most games. But then all other aspects of gameplay are also relevant in most games - if anything I'd say diplomacy is much more relevant in Civ V than in my experience of the "open borders, trade and forget" modifier-accumulation diplo of Civ IV and similar systems in the earlier games. And my experience has been that whatever my playstyle - and perhaps particularly if I want to go to war, or get caught up in war, bad city development will doom me.

I think what you're interpreting as other elements taking a "backseat behind warfare" is rather an attempt to magnify the importance of game elements that mitigate the chances of warfare or improve your prospects of success. The basic Civ engine, from games 1 through 5, is very non-interactive - there are a small number of ways you can disrupt an opposing strategy, mainly by stealing Wonders, but mostly the winner is the one who rushes to the finish line first, and little can be done to fundamentally derail a runaway civ ... except go to war with it.

It follows from that that if you want to make a game element relevant, it has to improve your chances of beating the guy who goes to war with you to stop you winning - simply because that's the only sanction anyone has against a winning civ, and the winning civ in turn is necessarily going to be one that's ready for the big push when it comes.

How to make diplomacy relevant? Make other civs predisposed to declare war on you unless you engage in diplomacy to prevent it.

How to make city development focus relevant? Punish players whose city placement and development strategy isn't good enough by making them more likely to lose in warfare - slow production times and consequently slow reinforcement mean you need focused production cities and sufficient units to withstand an attack, and minor lapses (one too few production cities, production city in the wrong place, wrong units produced, too few units produced can be fatal). Insufficient gold cities mean you can't support a large enough army or rush-buy units as you need them, and so on and so forth.

In other words, I think you're seeing as the game's focus its main sanction against you for getting things wrong - back to my chess analogy, it's akin to arguing that in chess, strategy takes a backseat to getting or avoiding checkmate. The two simply aren't separable.

 

[rezaf]

Phil, I appreciate your opinions and the time you take to put them into writing, but I really feel we've taken this thread FAR too much off-topic, so I'll no longer respond to your posts here in-depth.

I'd love to discuss that stuff further, so if you want to do that, think of a good title and open up a new thread, and maybe a mod can then even move our posts from this thread to the new one, so this becomes less cluttered.

Anyway, I believe it boils down to that, in the end, we probably agree about many aspects in one way or the other, but ultimately possibly want the series steered in different directions.
I agree with many of your analyses, but I felt the solutions to the problems at hand Civ5 attempted were all wrong.
_____
rezaf

 

[lollibast]

Phil, I appreciate your opinions and the time you take to put them into writing, but I really feel we've taken this thread FAR too much off-topic, so I'll no longer respond to your posts here in-depth.

I'd love to discuss that stuff further, so if you want to do that, think of a good title and open up a new thread, and maybe a mod can then even move our posts from this thread to the new one, so this becomes less cluttered.

Anyway, I believe it boils down to that, in the end, we probably agree about many aspects in one way or the other, but ultimately possibly want the series steered in different directions.
I agree with many of your analyses, but I felt the solutions to the problems at hand Civ5 attempted were all wrong.
_____
rezaf

you still are a patient one, respect
lets make Phil head of CivF debating society though, good to see so much passion and dedication
thread name suggestions:
non-discussion
therapy thread
knockout argument anthology

 

[Callonia]

Shogun 2 eh.... total different beasts compared to Civ and shogun 2 is really different. Its not really fair to compare the two.

I remember when I was playing as the pro imperials, my armies got decimated because my faction got singled out by four massive pro shogunate factions but I won because I pulled off heroic victories where it counted and prevented different factions from battling together in same battle against my armies by subterfuge.

There's agents that can delay your armies for like a turn, and that single turn can make a world of difference enabling you to fight like 3k vs 10k instead of fighting 3k vs 20k.

And there's agents that go run around murdering generals turning the army into rabble and basically for each dead general, you eliminate a unit from a army because a general have a royal cavalry accompanying it.


And retreating units to safety is far easier in civ compared to total war series. If your unit get caught out in bad position, escape isn't really a option, you have to fight your way out. Whereaby in civ you can basically see a bad position and retreat simply unless you got caught sleeping on post xD


Wars is basically alot more destructive in total war compared to relative safety of civ.


I could potentially throw two warriors into a horde of 10 barbarians and have them survive somehow. But terrain is a huge factor on that. Because of the crazy bonuses we get against barbarians.

And for rebels... rebels in total war series is actually rebels. Whereabout civ rebels is really just barbarians. =.= Bad firaxis, bad. That's just lazy.

 

[Jabberwockxeno]

We'll have to agree to disagree on this point, I guess. Maybe cheating isn't the correct word to use (I believe it to be, but I'm not an english native speaker, as you probably have noticed), but I STRONGLY dislike it when an AI needs this kind of "support" to function in a challenging way.
And giving it a few extra resources is one thing, but making cornerstones of the game design not apply to it is just over the top in my book.
In Civ5, the 1UPT meant there should be less units present on the map. A lot less, being ground combat units can no longer be stacked in any way.
So, to address this, and to prevent ICS, the global happiness was introduced.
Fair enough.
But as early as in Prince difficulty, you can notice in Civ5, that the same restrictions placed upon the player are OBVIOUSLY not present for the AI. The computer can found tons of cities and grow them all to gargantuan size, and still end up WAY ahead of you in happiness polls.
In turn, this of course means the AI has much higher income (plus bonuses), it can build and support more troops, it can build more improvements, it generally plays a different game than you do.
To me, this is such an essential part of the game mechanics, it's as if you gave a Chess AI a full row of Queens instead of Peasants, to even the field a bit, because hey, it's just an AI and needs a hand.
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rezaf

Firstly, your english is perfect; never would have guessed you weren't a native speaker.

Cheating is the right word here. They get an advantage that you don't have.

Now, is it an UNFAIR advantage? That's the distinction between cheating and an handicap.

If I'm racing against a snail, is the snail cheating if it gets a 100 meter head start?

(Personally, I DO think it's unfair. Certain things, anyways.)

 

[PhilBowles]

Shogun 2 eh.... total different beasts compared to Civ and shogun 2 is really different. Its not really fair to compare the two.

They're similar in the key respects under discussion - certain AI limitations, and the "different rules apply for AI and human" that's being characterised as "cheating" in Civ.

I remember when I was playing as the pro imperials, my armies got decimated because my faction got singled out by four massive pro shogunate factions but I won because I pulled off heroic victories where it counted and prevented different factions from battling together in same battle against my armies by subterfuge.

Yes, but this is the point - the human can do this and can beat the AI pile-on. If the AI didn't play by its own rules - if you didn't have the "realm divide" counter that turns everyone hostile towards you and automatically has your enemies stop their own wars and ally against you without any need for diplomacy or subterfuge on the AI's part - then you'd be doing exactly the same thing, only against only one or two factions; you wouldn't even need heroic victories to win.

This AI "cheat" is, in fact, the only way the AI can actually win the game against the human - indeed I just lost my Shogun 2 campaign at the 11th hour to exactly this (and buying the Takeda off didn't have any effect as they joined in the war against me immediately anyway), because both the Takeda and Oda attacked simultaneously and my funds were too low to bribe their armies away.

If the AI and the human played by the same rules, then either (a) realm divide would affect the AI as well as the human, in which case Oda would have been the first target of the pile-on and I'd have fewer opponents to deal with, making victory easier, or (b) there would be no realm divide mechanic and the same wars etc. would be going on as had been through the game to that point. In that case I would have had free reign to walk up to Kyoto and capture it with a back-stab attack, and since Oda's army would have been eliminated in the process, the Takeda wouldn't have had the ability to recapture it within the time limit.

Either way, the AI needs to "cheat" to win. Do I consider this a bad thing? No - the campaign was actually starting to seem too much of a walkover before the stacks of doom appeared, since the AI is much worse at defending its provinces than Civ V's is at defending cities.

There's agents that can delay your armies for like a turn, and that single turn can make a world of difference enabling you to fight like 3k vs 10k instead of fighting 3k vs 20k.

Yes, I've used this to very good effect. In one instance I declared war on the Bessho, who instantly sent their large army out from their only province to attack my adjacent province. My ninja sabotaged the army while I walked into his province with my own army - and the Bessho army vanished as the clan was destroyed (a shame, actually, I'd prefer it if an army without a surviving clan turned into a rebel army).

Of course this wouldn't work if TW had a half-decent AI that realises it's a bad idea to leave your only province undefended when you face enemies superior forces who can reach your town next turn, but that's another issue...

I could potentially throw two warriors into a horde of 10 barbarians and have them survive somehow. But terrain is a huge factor on that. Because of the crazy bonuses we get against barbarians.

Yes, I'm not sure why a bonus against barbarians is needed - they could always add it to the Honor opener, but it's unnecessary for units generally.

And for rebels... rebels in total war series is actually rebels. Whereabout civ rebels is really just barbarians. =.= Bad firaxis, bad. That's just lazy.

Well, not really. "Rebels" is just the TW generic name for the barbarian-type AI, they function in basically the same way, they typically spawn as a result of unhappiness, and they make no effort to expand their territories, just sit in one spot and periodically spawn armies that will attack you. The only functional difference is that their captured provinces work like any other province, and if the province is captured that band of rebels is gone for good, they don't have temporary encampments. So you could as easily say that rebels in TW are really just barbarians...