Does the AI need a SatNav?

[HughFran]

Seriously!! I have played two games recently at the hardest level because the other levels have been no challenge and in these two games, the AI seems to have gotten lost after declaring war on me.

For example, in the last game I had four factions declare war on me within turns of each other and I was all like 'yeah now its a party' but after rushing to prepare my defences I waited with anticipation for an invasion that never came. These AIs were literally next door to me and nothing attacked me. So I sent a few scout melee ships into their territory and found no military activity whatsoever. Getting bored waiting around, I decided to attack the nearest enemy naval city and took it with two ranged ships and one melee ship and got no response from the enemy.

In Civ 5 I find the highest difficulty level very hard to win (as it should be) but in BERT I seem to get left alone to my own devices. The funny thing is, the AI factions in my current game are taking each other's cities left, right and centre but all I have is tumbleweeds passing by my borders!! Are they getting lost on the way to my territory? Should I lend them a SatNav or light some signal fires?

Has anybody else had this issue in BERT where the AI declares war and then fails to appear for a fight?

 

[Gorbles]

Usually the enemy only declares war on me when it has a sizeable force it can wander into my borders in that same turn. I've only once had a war declaration from someone quite a way from me, and even then due to the lateness of the game he had a superhuge fleet that dominated the ocean for some time.

Until I killed it.

I regularly play up to Soyuz, not sure about Apollo.

 

[HughFran]

On Apollo level they declare war for no reason (as far as I can see) - I have no direct borders with anybody, I am not about to build a planetary wonder and even some factions with the same affinity as me have become hostile. Yet for all of their talk, they have yet to invade. I've seen armadas sail past my land and none have threatened directly. Any engagements I've had were very sparse and I won easily. I hope this is just a freak occurance and that this isn't a sign of things to come. It seems that the AI has become less threatening now that they also have the whole ocean to expand on and aren't limited to competing for land

 

[Gorbles]

It could well be that something is messing up in the Apollo AI code somehow, or it's just a combination of AI level, map size and whatever other options you have enabled.

Have you seen this playing at other AI levels?

 

[SupremacyKing2]

In my experience, it is usually the AIs that are far away from me that never bother attacking me. If they are close to me and they are not busy with another war, they will attack me.

I have noticed too that the AI seems to be coded to at least try to attack with sufficient force. So, often, the AI will wait, and then swarm me all at once with lots of units. So, it is possible that for whatever reason, the AI in your game never reached that "critical mass" where it felt it had enough units to launch an attack.

 

[kipwheeler]

In my experience, the most likely time for a distant AI to declare war on you is immediately after you do some serious Spy sabotage (especially right after you perform a coup). That's fine and dandy if the AI has other cities near the one it lost, as it will promptly try to reclaim the stolen city.

However, if you coup d'etat an isolated city, the AI may go to war and be completely unable to "find" you, it seems like--massing troops and then randomly moving them around rather than driving them where they need to go.

It's even more hilarious if the AI only knows the location of your capitol, but none of your nearby cities. Then, the AI drives its troops toward your capitol *through hostile terrain where your other cities snipe them*. It often will not stop to attack the closer cities in such a case and will blithely march them onward to your capitol--getting decimated or worse en route.

 

[Aea]

The only time I've noticed AI consistently declaring war (and not doing anything) is when the AI is super-weak. If they've got a decent strength they seem to eventually get around to attacking you, even if it's 10 turns into the war.

 

[Callonia]

In my experience, the most likely time for a distant AI to declare war on you is immediately after you do some serious Spy sabotage (especially right after you perform a coup). That's fine and dandy if the AI has other cities near the one it lost, as it will promptly try to reclaim the stolen city.

However, if you coup d'etat an isolated city, the AI may go to war and be completely unable to "find" you, it seems like--massing troops and then randomly moving them around rather than driving them where they need to go.

It's even more hilarious if the AI only knows the location of your capitol, but none of your nearby cities. Then, the AI drives its troops toward your capitol *through hostile terrain where your other cities snipe them*. It often will not stop to attack the closer cities in such a case and will blithely march them onward to your capitol--getting decimated or worse en route.

That.. explains so very much on what happened on some of my playthroughs!

 

[HughFran]

In my experience, the most likely time for a distant AI to declare war on you is immediately after you do some serious Spy sabotage (especially right after you perform a coup) .

Funny thing is, I was not performing any covert ops - my spies are currently set as counter-spies in my own cities. I can't think of anything I done to provoke multiple war except that my 'war score' was low. Weird though as my military wasn't neglected and I am also being Brasilia who have improvements to their war score. Either way, I am currently sitting with a nice cup of tea and chilling waiting on this invasion which doesn't look like it's ever going to come!!

 

[kipwheeler]

Funny thing is, I was not performing any covert ops - my spies are currently set as counter-spies in my own cities. I can't think of anything I done to provoke multiple war except that my 'war score' was low. !

Maybe your counter-spies killed some of the AI's spies, and that triggered its outrage?

 

[HughFran]

Maybe your counter-spies killed some of the AI's spies, and that triggered its outrage?

Possibly! I am not fond of the new Diplomatic system - at least in the vanilla version they would speak to you about a spy that was killed or tell you that your affinity annoyed them. Now all you have is respect and war score and while I think they are not bad, they should have been integrated into the existing diplomacy system instead of replacing it

 

[fotonut]

Don't alliances cause automatic war declarations, and perhaps ones that the faction wasn't prepared for? Don't know if that's part of what you're seeing.

In my current game (Apollo), most times the AI declared war on me there was a fleet of ships at or near my borders, and some did manage to give me a hard time.

Of course there are goofy things still. For instance a terribly weak INTEGR declared war on me. Her single city was nowhere near any of mine, and our forces never encountered each other. Even after many turns with a "0 - 0" war score she still claimed "we haven't even begun to fight yet," before asking for peace a couple of turns later.

Seriously!! I have played two games recently at the hardest level because the other levels have been no challenge and in these two games, the AI seems to have gotten lost after declaring war on me.

For example, in the last game I had four factions declare war on me within turns of each other and I was all like 'yeah now its a party' but after rushing to prepare my defences I waited with anticipation for an invasion that never came. These AIs were literally next door to me and nothing attacked me. So I sent a few scout melee ships into their territory and found no military activity whatsoever. Getting bored waiting around, I decided to attack the nearest enemy naval city and took it with two ranged ships and one melee ship and got no response from the enemy.

In Civ 5 I find the highest difficulty level very hard to win (as it should be) but in BERT I seem to get left alone to my own devices. The funny thing is, the AI factions in my current game are taking each other's cities left, right and centre but all I have is tumbleweeds passing by my borders!! Are they getting lost on the way to my territory? Should I lend them a SatNav or light some signal fires?

Has anybody else had this issue in BERT where the AI declares war and then fails to appear for a fight?

 

[Callonia]

Well I have played on Apollo where I set the number of AI opponents to two. Both of them declared war on me, the far off one took like 100+ turns to find me because elodie only knew where my capital is and has yet to explore the map.

While the nearby neighbor the china one, attacked me the when she had the affinity advantage over my units hitting me with tier 3 units while I was fielding tier 2 units. Despite this, I was able to defend against the onslaught by churning out alot of tier 2 units and using traits to my advantage.

Apollo is probably the only difficulty where AI has a chance of killing me, soyuz seem bit too easy. Not sure though need more play throughs, but I'm currently playing on this civ5 map atm.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

The situation described by the OP is probably a result of the new diplomacy system.

On Apollo the AI has an early game lead in all areas, so you are constantly losing respect. Depending on their traits that will continue during the mid and late game and once their respect drops too low they auto-declare war on you. It can also happen on Soyuz, but it's much rarer due to the fact that the player can catch up much faster and usually stop bleeding respect before it's too late.

My assumption is that the strategic AI (the code responsible to gather units, create formations and mobilize the army against certain targets) isn't updated properly after these auto-DOWs. It either keeps targeting other CIVs that have been made out as targets before the auto-DOW or it doesn't bother to move anything if the player isn't threatening the AI's territory. The latter is probably the reason why distant enemies never bother to send an army your way.

 

[Ryika]

Yeah, the issue is that declaring war and actually trying to attack a player are no longer interconnected. When you drop too low for too long an AI will declare war, even if they don't have an army and no flavors towards offensive play. So you may very well get a DoW with no military consequences whatsoever.

 

[Kevin Rohrer]

Has anybody else had this issue in BERT where the AI declares war and then fails to appear for a fight?

Lots of things have improved with the recent patch, but the AI's aggressiveness is not one of them. I just won my first game at 150-hours of play at a lower level due to the AI declaring war but only attacking each other.

Something is wrong.