Does the AI know how to use their cultists?

I used a combination of Eleanor's ability and cultists to snatch tons of Scottish and Mayan cities. The Maya could easily get some of theirs back, but it seems they don't know how to activate their cultists. They just... sit there.

 

The answer is No.

The developers are releasing an expansion full of content that the AI is incapable of handling.

 

Cultists are being classified as Support Units rather than Religious Units.

AFAIK, there are codes limiting AI's religious units spam currently - religious spamming was much worse in vanilla and R&F - but there isn't any limits or caps regarding support units. So AI will just spam them.

As a result I usually enable the Unit Limit Enforcement mod when playing Secret Societies, in which the number of support units are based on the number of Encampments, and the max cap is based on map size. I nearly begin to treat this mod as a must-have now.

 

They do use the cultists, but are unable to do so efficiently. For purposes of generating relics, the AI does mostly just fine.

 

They use them very efficiently, as roadblocks.

 

"Use" in the sense of trying to reduce loyalty of others city or only, as Tech Osen points out, in the way of positioning them around cities and waiting to have them killed for relicts? I have never witnesses an AI cultist using a load for loyalty reduction, but I could be easily wrong as I played only a few games in the mod and I also don't know if the following patches changed any behaviour. For me it would be already an improvement, if the AI would use the loads for loyalty reduction at all - at least that should be possible to code, IMO. And even if they still miss the last efficiency in actually bringing doen loyalty enough to take the city, they would be still better of than with just that blocking behaviour (for relic generation it doesn't matter how the cultists are taken from the map and reducing loyalty still hurts ressource yields of an enemy city)

 

When they are patched to reduce loyalty they will bring a big twist to games with Secret Societies. Opponent with a cultist army will be a big danger!

 

Just like a lot of other features in civ6, AI don’t know how to use these things properly...

 

If the AI knew how to use cultists properly there would be 300 decibel screams for a nerf. They would be terrifying.

 

maybe they know how to use it, calculate the required numbers of unit to convert a city, then go "huh" since it's mostly useless without accumulating summoning ritual project and just use them for relic generators and roadblocks