How can they make the AI smarter?

[RickAucoin]

Screens from my current Prince level game. I'm India, Persia has pretty much wiped everyone else out due to their refusal to stop bickering amongst each other and focus on the Persian threat.

So Persia is going after the City States near me now, of course. Darius and myself get along fine, we have nice cooperation treaties and research projects together, all nice and friendly.

He sure is having a hard time taking out the city state Belgrade which I'm allied to. He even came to apologize to me for attacking Belgrade, for which I graciously accepted is apology and told him no problem, I understand, these things happen.

I'm the green troops on this, he's the red ones. It's been like this for dozens of turns now...





Now what, exactly, can Firaxis do to fix this problem?

 

[lissenber]

Wow, the AI isn`t doing this to me on King difficulty. I see you still got some gold on you. Maybe build a wall and a citadel?

How did you get into that situation anyway? The AI does not really cheat when it comes to prince difficulty.

 

[Earthling]

Nothing in the above post appears to understand what the OP posted.

This is not the player defending his own city from some ridiculous AI problem.

He's defending a city state from an AI just because he can; the AI is unable to attack the city-state, and the AI is not at war with the player.

The answer would be to remove 1upt; never have one unit per tile in the game in the first place as anyone realistically knew things like this would result. Otherwise, it's extremely hard to make an AI with decent pattern recognition and ability to keep up in tactics. But again, everyone should have known that, and it's already set in place now.

This specific situation is probably fixable/will be fixed in a patch eventually though - the AI should just start accruing large penalties to units (the player's) getting "in its way." This could of course lead to trouble elsewhere but there's no way around it and that's definitely at least more fair. So here it would just end up DoW'ing the human pretty soon, in other words.

 

[RickAucoin]

Well, my dear friend Darius could indeed squash me like a bug, I am after all a simple pacifist. Which is why this sort of passive resistance seems a perfect tactic for me as Ghandi.

I especially love that one of the units stymying Darius entire Napoleonic era army is one of my... stone age Warriors. A hundred guys with loincloths and armed with jawbone of a Game Designer, stopping the mightiest army in the world in its tracks.

 

[fils]

I think fixing the power of the early rush will go a long way to solve this.

Main problems with it as far as I can tell:

1. Defenders don't get enough of a bonus. In fact, very early I feel like attackers have the advantage sometimes, which has never been the case before.

and

2. Lack of war weariness, being at war doesn't hurt your economy enough

In other versions of Civ, at least at my level, you needed to have a major advantage to wipe out an opponent without losing a bunch of units or crippling your economy. It wasn't until mid-late game where you finally get access to stronger units that are able to survive multiple waves of attacking, and even then, it's a slow process and it's difficult to balance the economy with war.

Now, even the slightest slight military advantage seems to be an autowin. This happens as early as the classical era when you get access to iron working and even with archers. This leads to a couple of gameplay outcomes. One, a domination victory is too easy to achieve for a player, as they can simply focus all of their efforts on military early on. Two, if a player goes the peaceful route, the stronger AI conquers its opponents much too quickly, leaving you in a rough spot later on in the game because of the sheer size of the AI's empire. It looks like this is what happened in your game.

 

[milk steak]

Love it!

Does he have flight available to him yet? I wonder if he would try using that.

 

[RickAucoin]

Well, it's currently 1550AD and he's now got Infantry, he's slowly upgrading all those Rifles to Infantry... I hope its bankrupting him.

He's not got flight yet. But I will say that I HAD left that one water hex open for about a dozen turns after he enveloped the City State and he never sent a troop into the water to take advantage of the fact that the City State had been reduced to Zero Defense with his cannon. He could have walked right in, but didn't.

I eventually moved that Embarked Chariot Archer into the water hex just to block in in case. I don't know if he would have ever used that water hex to get to the target though.

@fils: Not sure what you are refering to, this isn't an Early Rush situation.

 

[milk steak]

Very interesting. What victory condition are you gunning for now? If you can sneak some troops to his cap, you'd win a domination victory right?

 

[fils]

@fils: Not sure what you are refering to, this isn't an Early Rush situation.

Yes, it is, isn't that how Persia managed to secure its empire?

My bad for misunderstanding your post. Too many of my peaceful games have ended this way, except I didn't have a wall of troops around the city state, lol.

 

[Tylerryan79]

Wow! I guess when the AI sets it's mind on something it doesn't F around! Seems like the only way it knew how to cope with the situation was to send more and more troops! God bless civ v!

 

[RickAucoin]

Culture, hence Ghandi and only three cities for myself. I just discovered gunpowder... Darius and all of the City States are popping out Infantry, in the 1500 AD period. Argh for war at this point.

There are now two City States adjacent to my small slice of the world, both of which I have surrounded by stone age warriors and elephant archers, holding off Darius' vast hordes of infantry and cannon.

I'm not a very good Civ player. I've been playing since Civ I and spent untold thousands of hours on I, II, III, Civ: Call to Power, Civ IV, not to mention other Microprose classics of the same time period as Master of Orion I and II, Master of Magic (anyone remember that one from Microprose?). But I'm not very GOOD at them, not like I see on these forums where the day of release one AI weakness after another is discovered by one clever player or another.

Point being, if a "Noble/Prince level" player such as myself is seeing the profound AI issues and raping the AI players with exploits a week after launch... who the hell beta tested this thing, Forrest Gump?

 

[ShaqFu]

My best guess would be to treat you having units in a city-state as if you were supporting them. Not quite as bad as going to war over it, but close enough that you're feeling heat, and should start thinking about getting out or going all-out.

 

[Earthling]

Point being, if a "Noble/Prince level" player such as myself is seeing the profound AI issues and raping the AI players with exploits a week after launch... who the hell beta tested this thing, Forrest Gump?

No, not really, actually some beta testers were very intelligent and reasonable people (in the civ community). This does raise a whole lot of questions though - that the testers can't answer by non-disclosure, but perhaps a lot of advice was just ignored as the devs were trying for "mass appeal" of the game or something. Disappointing in other words, but again I do hope some of the larger exploits are fixed by patches.

At any rate I know some posters who I'd otherwise be jokingly criticizing for specifically failing to get the right feedback...like they've made it their "personal cause" and a lot of what they post on these forums )) mission to fix certain problems with AI and diplomacy and map balance and civ5 repeated some of those problems even worse

 

[For Nall]

Culture, hence Ghandi and only three cities for myself. I just discovered gunpowder... Darius and all of the City States are popping out Infantry, in the 1500 AD period. Argh for war at this point.

There are now two City States adjacent to my small slice of the world, both of which I have surrounded by stone age warriors and elephant archers, holding off Darius' vast hordes of infantry and cannon.

I'm not a very good Civ player. I've been playing since Civ I and spent untold thousands of hours on I, II, III, Civ: Call to Power, Civ IV, not to mention other Microprose classics of the same time period as Master of Orion I and II, Master of Magic (anyone remember that one from Microprose?). But I'm not very GOOD at them, not like I see on these forums where the day of release one AI weakness after another is discovered by one clever player or another.

Point being, if a "Noble/Prince level" player such as myself is seeing the profound AI issues and raping the AI players with exploits a week after launch... who the hell beta tested this thing, Forrest Gump?

There are some Beta testers that insist that the AI used on release wasnt the same (was a lot dumber) than the AI in the beta.

 

[Rellin]

The English were doing this to a city state on a Prince level game I finished yesterday, but with less numbers. They sent wave after wave of archers mixed with a few melee troops and got the city very low, but never were able to take it when they should have easily.

 

[RickAucoin]

Rellin, look at the map I posted. Darius has infantry and cannon. And he can't take the city state town, period. He can not do it.

 

[dubrown]

The AI seems indeed flawed in many areas, in this case, the AI should DoW you right away, with such a superior army and techlead he'd wipe you out very quickly indeed.

I've seen in my game an AI spamming workers instead of producing the much needed military to defend from my invading forces, it wasn't even that the workers where needed for anything much. I'm quite sure he couldn't build almost any military due to some unit limitation with all those workers around (I think I counted to more than 10 workers visible to me and he only had ~4-5 cities with most of the land developed.)

 

[RickAucoin]

Oh, he did, about 200 years later. Just wasn't any way to keep him from looking at my three towns with all of those Wonders and mere muskets against his mechanized infantry around 1750AD. Alas.

What was funny was continuing to pay 250 gold ever so often to the two City States I'd encircled when Darius declared war on them. Here I am saving their asses in a big way, and they are a) asking for troops and b) demanding gold or they won't be my friend any more.

Um... hello?

 

[Guardian_PL]

Very sad, I agree. Firaxis, please fix this

 

[Zhahz]

The answer would be to remove 1upt

That is NOT the answer. Go back to Civ IV.

This is basically a player exploit/abuse of the system. The AIs would never do anything like this. And the player knows what will happen.

There are some AI solutions for this. For one, it would be easy enough to have the AI detect this kind of protection scenario...then deal with it by attacking the protector. Plus, the AI really needs to play more to win and more to not lose (which was supposed to be the case). If the one civ already rolled everyone else in the game, WHY would it leave weak player alone instead of finishing off the win? Obviously the AI is not checking for alternate victory conditions (if one assumes the AI is going for space or something and leaves the player around since he's zero threat).