Has Civilization become a game for the pokemon go crowd (aka AI is immersion breaking bad,it hurts)

[ThERat]

What a poor choice of title for yet another "the AI is bad" thread that adds nothing of value to the discussion.

Good thing your comment added lots of value

 

[Deaga]

As others have said, in this one case attacking the city might not have been a good move at all. However, the AI really should value pillaging more. Pillaging districts can really harm a player, so if it sees that taking the city isn't an option, leaving it with no districts or improvements should be the gameplan. Just shuffling around is pretty bad design.

From my aborted 1st try on Immortal, China asked for open borders and I stupidly agreed. it proceeded to march up his army with 3 catapults, shuffled around for 2-3 turns then attacked.
He wiped the floor with me, even my superior unit management couldn't save my capital. Lesson learned.

Never trust AIs like that. If they station an army around your citites, make sure to have an army of your own ready to defend them.

 

[TrailblazingScot]

I think the AI refuses to attack if they are injured by your counterattacks. They shuffle out and became rather incompetent at taking cities. But if you offer no resistance, the AI can and will take your city. It happened to me once when my city was totally undefended due to settler and exploration rush.

Which means that if you offer even the slightest bit of resistance, the AI will most likely fail.

He was attacking with 5 warriors. I had a warrior defending the city and counterattacking. He still attacked and kept on attacking even though his units were damaged. All the AI were annoyed with my settler stealing antics, so perhaps rage is a factor?

 

[Znabel15]

From my AW game under stories section.


Guess what happens next? (I am the owner of Kyoto, no it doesn't have any walls, no units insides, no units nearby. Yes, there are three English knights that sneaked in).

After pressing enter, I want to cry. Is the AI programmed to NOT ever take a city. Did the testers actually ever play a game where the AI attacked them? This is civ-sim it seems.

Well. Yesterday I lost a city to 8 warriors and catapult from Amsterdam!! Maybe they should swap the city state behavior with AI Civ behavior?

 

[dexters]

Well. Yesterday I lost a city to 8 warriors and catapult from Amsterdam!! Maybe they should swap the city state behavior with AI Civ behavior?

China took my capital in my 1st immortal game after I stupidly agreed to open borders.

AI can take cities once they get in position so the AI does know the basics. The issue is in a war they'll never be able to position their units perfectly. They also are too quick to retreat damaged units. An improvement over civ 5 where the AI won't heal red lined units and would suicide them but a bit on the opposite extreme.

With some tuning I think that both can be fixed. AI needs to attack sooner and be a bit less predictable by camping and waiting sometimes buy not others. Retreating damaged units should also be more situational . Maybe marking sone units as fodder internally would work. These units will be sent in to die with more important units maneuver into position.

 

[Stilgar08]

another "The AI is pretty bad"-thread? How refreshing!

Agreed, the AI should be more agressive and if it isn't it should withdraw instead of waiting to get slaughtered. It should be possible to pose a real threat. It doesn't at the moment (or at least it seldom does...). It should get improved...
Will it? Yeah! Will it be tomorrow? Nah!
Will it be by the devs or the community? I don't know - A bit by the devs. A bit later and more thoroughly by the community, that's my guess.

Does the game suck because of the AI issues? Maybe for you but not for me, although I agree it could be better... Personally I'm quite sure they (Firaxis) or the modders (not me - I'm too thick for that) will help us out... Next time wait before getting the game and you'll be fine!

P.S.: Thank you for the opportunity - I will now happily copy/paste this, maybe do a few adjustments and post it elsewhere, where they deal with the same topic...

 

[Zuizgond]

I read in other forums that quite a sizeable % of people play the game on really low difficulty settings. I think civfanatics overestimate the masses and their capabilities to play a challenging game. And it's those guys that will fill Firaxis coffers. Look at the sales of Civ5 versus Civ4 (which was a much deeper gaming experience). Civ 5 and especially 6 offer a lot of flashy stuff.

Don't take the pokemon go literally, but it represents a huge portion of potential buyers of the game

Agree with you. Big companies have high costs so they need to get all possible crowds buying their game, which is done through shiny stuff and animations. But in the end their audience is so large that they can't please everyone and you can't tell who are their targeted players anymore.

 

[redwings1340]

The AI seems to only pillage districts and not improvements, for reasons unknown to us. At first in wars I would send all my units to the edge of my territory, afraid of everything getting pillaged, until I realized I really didn't need to, and now I just protect districts that are close to my borders.

 

[Joch]

In my current game on "King", AI Sumer declared war early, rushed in with units and attacked my capital from three sides with "War Carts" without any hesitation. Fortunately, I was able to rush in units and rescue it, but it came close to taking it.

A bit later, I saw AI Rome conquer a city from AI Egypt.

So yes, the AI will attack cities.

The AI has always been a bit unpredictable whether in Civ5, CivBE or now Civ6. Sometimes it is very aggressive and can rush in with a large force and capture one of your cities if you are not paying attention, sometimes it is passive. I have not noticed that the AI in Civ6 is noticeably worse than in previous games.

 

[Karmah]

Civ6 workig with differences and not ratio and , as far as I've seen , +5 is already a lot. (I remember my apostle with 105 getting trashed by effective 110 opponents) . Here the cav are working at -7 , with the river that must be ...another 5 or 10 ? -12 or -17 ?
I'm not sure I would attack with those odds.

 

[Gumbolt]

To be fair on Civ 4 the AI can be just as random. Stack of 20-30 units but only 1 catapult. 2-3 defenders. What does the Ai do?? It spends the next 25 turns bombarding. In fact one of the best way to slow an AI attack on a city on civ 4 is to build/whip a castle/ city wall.

Remember your playing against a computer. There is only so much code you can give for an Ai to launch an attack. On Civ 4 the computer had to go into war mode before it even thought about attacking. Sometimes leaving a city empty didn't work on civ 4 if it knew you had other units nearby. Maybe this could be similar for civ 6. All in the code no doubt. Units coded to do certain things.

I agree on fact this is a 2 week old game. It will get patched soon enough. (2-3 weeks?) Just have to be patient.Rome wasn't built in a day. I think the game makers would of been under pressure to get this out before Christmas. They would of most likely known a patch would arrive a few weeks later. Most games would have a patch by Christmas

Better to patch after the release as you always miss stuff. Guessing most games don't have such active forums as Civfanatics.

 

[chazzycat]

I wonder if they are just waiting for the rest of the force to arrive. Knights are so fast...but a few of them is not generally a strong enough force to conquer AND HOLD an opponent's capital. Maybe the infantry & catapults are still en route??

 

[Haggbart]

How did you go from "AI is bad" to Pokemon Go? How about using one of the many other threads where the AI is discussed? There is also a screenshot-thread somewhere.

 

[johnnybaseball]

Here's my take - I love this game Civ, but I'm not as good as a lot of players here. I think part of the issue is that the developers aren't as good at their own game as the community is. The community identifies issues through their skill that the devs aren't capable of finding. I know that when I play, I just go along, doing whatever, and the game is reasonably challenging. Then I come here and am amazed at the way players here approach the game and impressed with the stuff they come up with.

As to AI, they are very unfriendly. I really liked the idea of agendas, because I thought they would guide what the AI tried to do, like Teddy would protect civs on his own continent, or Victoria would try to colonize other continents. I didn't think they would be diplomatic modifiers that just make the AI hate you if you're doing anything well.

 

[Stringer1313]

I support the hypothesis that the AI is more cowardly in later eras. I had a Prince game where Victoria swarmed my city with warriors in the Ancient / Classical Era (and I had units to stop them) and took over my capital. But I haven't seen an AI attack cites, much less declare war, in later eras.

 

[Disgustipated]

The lower the settings the less chance they actually attack a city. On Prince they just sit outside the city and look dumb. Emperor they attack most of the time and Deity they attack all the time. From my experience at least.

3 knights can't take a strength 51 city I'm guessing. Maybe 5 can.

 

[Baleur]

Its not no counter attacks, when you attack a city it defends as if you had a copy of the most damaging melee unit you have previously built.
If you have had swordsmen, your cities will defend with the strength of swordsmen (and the graphic of them), as well as damaging the attacking unit respectively.
Same applies for city ranged attacks, based on your strongest built ranged unit.

 

[Herakleides]

Essentially, the OP is saying the game is more about flash over substance. There is meat in this game but it suffers from a bad UI and a bad AI. I still enjoy playing but the game is testing my patience with these idiotic computer moves.

I had Pericles construct a huge army of horseman to attack me. They literally were sitting near my border, waiting to attack. I was prepared but what came next was underwhelming. He spent more of his time being attacked by a city state than caring about using his army effectively. This huge army was being stymied by a small city state firing arrows at him. nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn34rStupid, stupid.

Good mechanics but AI is terrible.