Fall patch,AI was OK till.....

You mean the leader animations? I wasn't aware you could disable combat and movement animations.

 

Right? I feel like in Civ IV and Civ V the AI could do okay pretty much just by building everything in every city. This is horribly inefficient compared to human players who prioritize the important stuff, of course, but with the 100% or so production modifier for the AI, it worked OK. The key buildings (like, say, libraries) would get up eventually.

In Civ VI, even the Deity AI just can't do that. There's more stuff to build and I believe the AI's production bonuses are lower, which is one problem. But the bigger issue is that the game literally forbids you from building more than certain numbers of districts in their city. If the AI happens to pick useless districts like entertainment complexes or holy sites first, then that city is going to be totally worthless for a long time, and there's nothing the AI can do about it. Maybe the district limit wouldn't be a big deal if the AI cities grew much faster, but city growth seems to be a challenge for the AI. I think it doesn't understand the housing system. I'm seeing pop 7 or 8 Deity AI capitals in the late game, and I assume housing must be the issue there.

The other thing about the AI is it is really, really struggling with barbs. It is also struggling to escort settlers and to repair pillaged tiles. These things are all bad in combination.

 

Going to re-ask folks who play single player vs the AI why not try the AI+ mod. It's solving and solved lots of these issues.

 

Mind posting a link to the mod ? I'm lazy.

Generally I don't like playing Civ games with mods, unless I have a reason to. Civ isn't a city builder for me. I have tons of mods of city-skylines.

That said, I do consider mods once I feel the developers have completed working on the game. It's just off and wrong to me tbh to be using AI mods when the game will be patched and expansions added later on. But that said I'm not really opposed to using them, just don't think it's time to tinker with them yet, and yes, they are essentially tinkering as we never know if they would be compatible with a future patch in 2 months or 2 weeks' time or if they break something else we don't know about.

though I handily admit I'm likely not the majority in Civfanatic circles, I suspect most other people are like me on this issue.

 

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/ai.25439/

 

I think you are spot on. The game design intentions are great as they give a lot of options to specialize cities. Now, combine this with the policy cards to be used at the right times, districts placement crucial and the complexity is far too high for an AI to ever pose a challenge. Add 1upt and the punishing diplomacy, it's just too much. Sometimes, the best design intentions fall flat because 'keep it simple, stupid' is often better. A game such as civilization, which needs SP games as the foundation, will suffer. People used to play sim city for such a type of sandbox game.

 

thats of weird because civ 6 still keeps 1 unit per tile and it still has that civ 5 feel because of the hexes. Districts are fine, but not compliacated.

 

we should be careful to write off the AI as unable to compete. The AI+ mod is fantastic at fixing that. I'm in a very hard game right now with Egypt on prince Ill have a very tough time winning. Basically, the AI has been very intelligent about most things. It tried to invade me early like usual but the difference was the Chinese SHOULD have done it and they did. They had the right forces but I was ready, I saw them building up. Once it became clear they wouldn't win they did back off... and go right back to spreading their religion and cities. As it stands I'm 4th in points of 8 civs, and the other civs have strong development. If a modder can do this without having access to game code, I believe that the future updates coming will only help.

Now, if you wanted to opine about the AI's ability to deal with complex choices, that too can be tuned. It's all about weighting and making decisions based on whats out on the board. That's not as complex as you'd believe. Think of a game like Cities Skylines and SimCity with all those little sims, thousands of them.

Right now the game is fun, challenging, and with the right mods can be very difficult. But I'm also very aware of its shortcomings... don't get me wrong... I'm aware of them. I'm thinking long term with this game, patches, DLC, expansions.

As it stands my enjoyment with this game almost rivals BNW , which was a polished game. Mods have really made things interesting too. But I totally get the idea that mods shouldn't be required to make the AI act "properly"

 

VI throws questions at me every turn. V removed many of the questions that IV posed to players.

 

the ai seems to be exactly the same to me like it was pre-patch

 

Same here, civ 4 you could have hours without any wars but at that game even at prince/king (casual player) you could feel the threat in the air.
Plus AI didnt send in every war stacks of doom from the very start of the war.
The real issue is that (even with AI+ up and raising lvl) theres no threat in the air , AI cant keep up with tech lvl , wars are declared for no reason and conducted awfully and at the end theres no enjoyment....
They need to fix diplomacy (agendas are nice idea but confuse AI and can be exposed by players) , AI needs to expand more than 3/4 cities, be aggressive and give you the sense of a challenge.
Like the way it is game is dull and unplayable, hoping for an AI patch pretty soon.

 

I love many things about civ6 and I'm still playing it a lot. I love it, but let's face it.. The AI is ATROCIOUS. Like really bad, anyone who defends it is the worst kind of apologist.. It's a real shame because the game has so much going for it.

I'm not asking for it to be able to place it's districts properly.. Maybe just keeping units upgraded would be a total victory..

And seriously, even if the AI just suicide all it's units directly towards the city it would still be much better at combat than this mess..

I just keep remembering the AI battle royale where at the end the lead AI dev was laughing at how stupid the AI was behaving like three days before launch.... Yeah... Enough said really..

 

I'll preface this by saying I loved Civ IV (really, I've loved all of them since I started playing in III, for all their changes, quirks and each game individually).

But I do recall the AI being simplistic in Civ IV as well, the classic some difficulties were too hard and the difficulty level below it too easy (at the time I was still developing as a player and doing Immortal / Deity level seemed insane, but I played it much more casually than V and VI (where I've done almost exclusively Immortal/Deity). However, the war-time strategy that seemed to work best against the AI in Civ IV was simply turtling defensively with a stack that had a little troop variety for defensive bonuses and you'd simply wait out the stack of doom wave that'd come, then counter attack and pretty much insta win. I want to say I played a lot of Civ IV on the equivalent of Emperor level in Civ VI.

With stacks I think the big difference was that a lot of wars ended up feeling like WWI era trench warfare where forever you'd be stuck in one or two defensive tiles slogging it out for land against the AI, you also could have some pretty epic sieges of cities that lasted forever. In a lot of ways this 'trench warfare' feeling made for a more epic feeling war. 1UPT to me is a lot more mobile (even with the movement penalties in Civ VI) vs. Stacks and moving an army around, wars tend to be a lot quicker in decisive victories and combat and the AI just isn't as good at strategic warfare vs. just throw unit spam at the opponent. Lightning warfare is emphasized a lot more in 1UPT I feel like - early game archer bombard with warrior front line (or horses if you have them), replaced later by catapult bombard with crossbow / melee unit to attack and then battleships - bombards - musketman front line etc. The idea being destroy the walls and capture the city fast, corner the army and keep sweeping through the land as fast as you can, especially considering war weariness penalties (which aren't even a huge deal in most cases, it just takes forever to go away).

The person who spoke to the complexities of the new systems I think hit the nail on the head about why the AI is kinda nerfed. Additionally throw in the fact that a lot of us have been playing Civ for a long time and have developed working strategies with the addition that we can watch let's plays where someones strategy is fully shown, and we improve a whole heck of a lot quicker against the AI than we did in the past with Civ III / IV. I mean, it took what - a week? for a general idealic like build order for starting on deity to emerge?

 

Do tell which ones your using.