Does the AI bribe other Civs into war?

[Jorunkun]

Was wondering wether the AIs actually ask or pay tech to one another to start or join in a war against a third party, or to stop trading with them. They never get any "you brought in war ally" or "negotiated a trade embargo" with each other, but does it mean they don't do it? Anybody know how this is handled?

J.

 

[Dirk1302]

They do this but not frequently. I declared on some financial civ once and after warring for some time some other opportunistic civ declared on me without earlier notice of having enough etc...Reloaded one turn earlier because i was curious made peace with the civ i was at war with, no declaration next turn, so it can happen but its rare (this being the only occasion i met with this behaviour).

 

[obsolete]

It really annoys me you cant tell who bribed who on you. The AI has a cheating advantage in this matter. It is psychic, yet you are left to guess. This is not how the game was designed, but it is how things are currently.

 

[Jet]

How was the game designed?

 

[biggamer132]

How was the game designed?

In that the AI knows everything you do but the same isn't true for the player.

To be quite honest, if the AI is going go have that information, they might as well react when you refuse to cancel trade with them, declare war on them, etc. Something like a new diplomatic bonus, where you could get up to +4 points for not cancelling trade/declaring war when asked ("You refused to side against us!") would be nice.

 

[obsolete]

I used to wonder about that myself, but figured firaxis wanted to ensure there was more negative than positive forces, thus ensuring there was a tendency for the AIs to war against you more than expected. In essence, it's rigged so the human can't come out ahead.

 

[Jet]

When obsolete said the game was not originally designed with psychic AI, my question is, how was it originally designed? (I'm also curious how obsolete knows how it was originally designed.)

 

[Astromancer]

Oh god Jet, give it a rest. What's with the negetive vibes on these forums? It's pretty simple to understand what he meant by 'originally designed': the AI knows exactly what you're doing but you do not know what they are doing. Yes, perhaps he could have phrased better, but who gives a toss yeah?

Go start up an Emperor game or something.

 

[obsolete]

Alright.. here's maybe what he's looking for...

 

[Jet]

If obsolete meant something like "Civ 2 was not designed with psychic AI but Civ 4 was", I had no idea he meant that, maybe partly because I never played Civ 1/2/3. I thought he might have been saying he was a Civ 4 beta tester and saw them change the design, or something.

A couple other interesting cases of psychic/non psychic come to my mind:
* An AI doesn't see any diplo modifiers from the human player, so (another poster has hypothesized) makes a lot of requests/demands in order to cultivate an appropriate attitude toward the player.
* To compensate for the AI's total absence of programming for predicting where units will move, aside from just knowing their range of possible movement, the AI sees a few tiles farther into the fog of war than the human.
I'm not necessarily trying to argue that the AI needs to be psychic, just to point out that it has interesting subtleties.

 

[obsolete]

I was not a beta tester for Civ IV, but I was in contact for a while with one of the programmers who worked on the civ III project.

Actually, he worked on the last Civ III release, I believe it was called Conquests. And to be honest, it wasn't firaxis that worked on it, which is what people are lead to believe. Firaxis outsourced it to another company (which he worked for) and they did the modifications after a few months of piling over the source and getting the hang of it.

There was a big beta call for that, which I believe they recruited a LOT of beta testers from gamespy. Unfortunately, only a fraction of these accepted testers even bothered to submit anything in.

I seem to have missed all the beta test for the civ projects, and I don't even know if there was a PUBLIC beta for any CIV IV release. But I have ALL the civ packages in my library except for civ I, and I've spend half a lifetime it seems playing them.

Oh yea, I had the FreeCiv project too. And sometimes I still visit their lobby now and then.

 

[AThousandYoung]

Oh god Jet, give it a rest. What's with the negetive vibes on these forums? It's pretty simple to understand what he meant by 'originally designed': the AI knows exactly what you're doing but you do not know what they are doing. Yes, perhaps he could have phrased better, but who gives a toss yeah?

Go start up an Emperor game or something.

Jet has a very good question. Why are you giving xym a hard time?

 

[Naismith]

They do this but not frequently. I declared on some financial civ once and after warring for some time some other opportunistic civ declared on me without earlier notice of having enough etc...Reloaded one turn earlier because i was curious made peace with the civ i was at war with, no declaration next turn, so it can happen but its rare (this being the only occasion i met with this behaviour).

I don't think you can assume the second Civ joined the war because of a bribe. Sometimes another Civ will declare on you while you're at war because of the "dogpile" logic. That is, they decide you are vulnerable because you are at war, and determine it is a good idea to declare.

 

[obsolete]

Actually, I remember years ago during a Firaxis chat one of the members mentioned they put in modifiers to PREVENT dogpiling. This is because without it you'd get all the civs piling in on one of the leaders before 0 BC.

 

[Arnesson]

Actually, I remember years ago during a Firaxis chat one of the members mentioned they put in modifiers to PREVENT dogpiling. This is because without it you'd get all the civs piling in on one of the leaders before 0 BC.

In my first Warlords game I was winning by a handy 100 point margin with 5 turns remaining for a Time victory when THREE civ's declared war on me in the same turn. Coincidence? I don't think so.

 

[Naismith]

In my first Warlords game I was winning by a handy 100 point margin with 5 turns remaining for a Time victory when THREE civ's declared war on me in the same turn. Coincidence? I don't think so.

There is definitely logic used by AI's to determine whether they should dogpile someone (human or AI, I believe) who is currently at war. There is a property in the leader heads info XML file (search for "dogpile"), and I've seen references to it on the BetterAI forum, where some of the logic is discussed in detail.

@obsolete - What you are saying doesn't surprise me. Depending on how it was implemented dogpiling could get pretty intense.