Has the AI learned how to do sieges yet?

[Brenador]

I stopped playing Civ 6 and went back to Civ 5 when I realized that the AI can't capture fortified cities and becomes incapable of conquest in the latter part of the game. Has this been fixed yet?

 

[iammaxhailme]

Pretty much no.

 

[Peserwin]

Well, they do attack cities with siege units. Saw Gorgo attack a Japanese fortified city with a huge army. She lost almost her whole army in the process but managed to destroy the walls with her catapults (at least ten of them) and captured the town center with knights. A lot of dead warriors returned on their shield that day. The fact everyone was in industrial era and clearly the AI still won't update their units properly doesn't mean they don't know to do sieges. They do it with sheer numbers rather than tactics but still...

Heck, I barely dare to share this, but even I lost a walled city once by Rome who came to me with catapults and legions.

 

[Kruos]

Yes. The AI is still very mediocre on overall, but it now can capture a walled city and surprise you sometime.

 

[bbbt]

Sort of? As noted above, earlier eras are more likely, for both unit upgrade and warmongering reasons.

It theoretically knows to use siege units, surround the city with melee units to prevent healing, etc.

But has issues with coordinating the movement of multiple units at once, which tends to throw a wrench in things. Frankly I'm not even sure it does coordinate, but just moved each independently and then gets confused when unit 1 is now in unit 2's way.

So 'sieging' a city can often result in just re-arranging troops in the crossfire while you shoot at them. Of course "let me sit here with my archers while the AI suicides against me" was also how 5 worked as well.

 

[Haig]

Yes and no. I've lost twice my capital after the latest patch, I guess the diff. level was too high for me.. and I've seen them cap cities from AI empires more.

It's not brilliant but getting better!

 

[UWHabs]

I find they're pretty good early game. I've had more than one game where I'm basically warrior rushed and just gotten ruthlessly destroyed. Of course, a lot of that is the fact that at that point they have a ton of units and most of the time I just don't defend well enough. I do find that their defense actually isn't that bad in terms of being able to pick off my units. They're certainly a little better than they used to be - more often than not I need at least one or two troops as a "standing army" on a border, or else they might actually be able to surprise me enough to take a border city. But if I at all anticipate them and have even probably half the troop strength that they come at me with, I can defend almost any city.

 

[Takfloyd]

Sort of? As noted above, earlier eras are more likely, for both unit upgrade and warmongering reasons.

It theoretically knows to use siege units, surround the city with melee units to prevent healing, etc.

But has issues with coordinating the movement of multiple units at once, which tends to throw a wrench in things. Frankly I'm not even sure it does coordinate, but just moved each independently and then gets confused when unit 1 is now in unit 2's way.

So 'sieging' a city can often result in just re-arranging troops in the crossfire while you shoot at them. Of course "let me sit here with my archers while the AI suicides against me" was also how 5 worked as well.

The AI moves all its units at the same time, which means it's incapable of understanding the concept of moving a unit out of the way so another unit can take its place. It just looks at where every unit is at the start of the turn, and makes a single decision at that point on where to move all its units. This is obviously to make their turns go quickly and require little processing power. So if they have a wounded unit in front of your city and healthy units behind it, they'll move the wounded unit away to heal, but they won't move the healthy units in to attack, since when the move decision was made, the wounded unit was in their way.

Pretty sad when you consider that as far back as in Civ III, the AI moved its units one at a time and was much smarter about using them, but now that we have one unit per tile and it's actually IMPORTANT to move one unit at a time, they don't.

 

[Rosty K]

I don't think they move them at the same time. Yes, animations are shown simultaneously, but that doesn't mean that the processing is done in the same way. I'd think that they first calculate the turn and the resulting positions, and then show animations... Well, hopefully