How to beef up the AI's with MP

[DMW]

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

Me and a friend like to play Civ 5 together against AI's. The problem is, they are really really bad. They have crossbowmen when we have tanks and all that....

They just are no challenge. How do the difficulty settings work? Do the AI's get any bonusses like as in SP when you up your difficulty? How does it work when we have different difficulties?

And more important, can we change the XML's somewhere to give the AI's similar bonusses as they have in SP. Such as make the AI's civs on default Emperor level AI's?

If someone could help me out, explain things or point me in the right direction I would be very thankful.

Cheers!

 

[turingmachine]

As of right now, the AI in MP is extremely broken in that not only do they perform much more poorly than their SP counterparts but they will almost never contact you and very rarely declare war. In terms of correcting this inherent flaw, there isn't much you can do but wait to see if they ever patch the game. However, I've never even seen a 2K post even acknowledging this problem exists, so who knows if this will happen.

Some people on the forum have claimed setting the AI to random personalities under the advanced settings when setting up a game makes MP AI perform better. However, they still won't really contact other players.

You can also set your own difficulty level to extremely high to give the AI a bunch of cheating improvements, but that's hardly an ideal solution. I've heard alternatively that the bonuses the AI receives are either determined by the host's set difficulty level, or an average of all the players difficulty levels, though I'm not sure.

 

[The Great Apple]

I think Turing pretty much said it all. Difficulty can be adjusted to SP levels using the difficulty settings in game (probably safest to all go the same). Random personalities is said to make the AI more of an active player, but they will never contact you... though this really isn't a huge issue as you can trade by contacting them. I don't know if they interact with each other at all.

Civ 5 MP seems to be set up for PvP online, with the AI as a placeholder for when somebody drops. Turn based mode and proper AIs seem to have been dumped. It's a shame really, as I think a large proportion of the MP community aren't the sort that enjoy online clickfests, and instead prefer games with friends.

 

[turingmachine]

Random personalities is said to make the AI more of an active player, but they will never contact you... though this really isn't a huge issue as you can trade by contacting them. I don't know if they interact with each other at all.

The problem I have with just relying on us to contact the AI is that a lot of times the AI in (SP) will propose a trade, which it wouldn't accept if had you proposed it to them... One time they AI asked me for mutual open borders, yet on the same turn and every other turn of the game, if I proposed mutual open borders the AI also wanted gold from me.

Also, the diplomacy is so wonky the only time I can really judge how the AI is feeling is if they constantly ask for pacts of corporation or secrecy pacts. Then again, I guess this last part wont matter because in MP the AI will never declare war on me and even if they did they'd be behind in tech/units.

 

[DMW]

Well, I dont think it is as broken as is said. The AI's do declare war on eachother and on the players, not so often but it does happen. My friend got attacked by 4 civs simultaneously last game. But the problem is that the AI's fall behind very quickly.

How can I make them better? Does changing our difficulty levels really affect the game? Because I didnt really notice it.

Would changing the "prince" AI bonusses change the bonusses they get in MP?

If so, I can just switch emperor and prince ai bonusses and they should be better?

 

[turingmachine]

Well what difficulty were all the human players set to? "Prince" is sort of default where the AI doesn't really cheat or get many bonuses. If you set everyone to a higher difficulty than Prince they AI should get some bonuses and start with extra units. You might have to go 2 or 3 levels up to really notice a difference, though. Also, remember to set the AI to random personalities in the advanced set up options.

You can edit the XML files (I'm not sure which) to change the default AI difficulty. However, since you can't use Mods in Multiplayer (yet!) this is actually a lot more complicated to do than it should be. Basically, if you want to do this, everyone you play with would have to manually change the XML files beforehand on their computer. However, changing the core game files can cause problems so it's not really recommended.

If you do do this, you shouldn't change the AI to a higher difficulty as that would just give them negative buffs (I think, how difficulty levels work in MP has always been complicated). Instead, you should set them all to a lower difficulty than prince so they get production bonuses, etc. (for the same logic another human player would choose settler difficulty in MP so they get buffs as compared to other human players with a higher set difficulty).

Either way, the AI still won't really contact you for trade and pacts which would lessen their ability regardless.

 

[DMW]

Ok, perhaps we should go with immortal than, and use random personalities. Thanks for the advice.

I dont mind it really that they dont engage in diplomacy so much, as long as they build large empires and dont lag behind in tech so much....

Thanks!