Increasing a civs flavor towards victory

[sdsgoa]

Hi! I'm kinda new at this, but I'll try to make myself understood...

I don't know if anyone have already asked this, but I was wondering if it was possible to change a civ's flavor controlling their push for victory? I might be wrong, but doesn't every civ have different flavors, where their aggressiveness towards claiming victory are on a scale from 1-10?

I often notice several civs don't try to claim victory even though they are very capable of it. For example Ghandi always end up going towards a cultural victory adopting the needed social policies, but never build the Utopia Project? And the same for other civs not building spaceship parts and the UN.

I would like for the other civs to at least try to stop me from winning. I always play on immortal difficulty, expected them to be a bit competitive.

 

[Derpy Hooves]

If you want a AI that challenges you by making good decisions your playing the wrong game, you can change their values in the XML files, say make Gandhi into a 9 warmonger and 3 cultural, but it won't change the route by which they will achieve it. I believe they build spaceship parts piece by piece from a single city, they can only buy out a single city state at a time for diplomatic and I've never even seen a AI finish more then 4 policy trees (altough I should note that by finishing their 4th they become my number one priority for extermination).
The only victory condition they seem to really understand is domination, and even that is hindered by the AI's poor understanding of basic strategy and formations.

I should note that when the DLL's get released and the modders can actually edit the core game this might be fixed, Firaxis have already stated they would release it several times altough they won't go into any more detail then "In the next couple of months", and considering the whole X-Com stuff they're focusing on now this might very well go on the back burner.

 

[PhilBowles]

Hi! I'm kinda new at this, but I'll try to make myself understood...

I don't know if anyone have already asked this, but I was wondering if it was possible to change a civ's flavor controlling their push for victory? I might be wrong, but doesn't every civ have different flavors, where their aggressiveness towards claiming victory are on a scale from 1-10?

I often notice several civs don't try to claim victory even though they are very capable of it. For example Ghandi always end up going towards a cultural victory adopting the needed social policies, but never build the Utopia Project? And the same for other civs not building spaceship parts and the UN.

I would like for the other civs to at least try to stop me from winning. I always play on immortal difficulty, expected them to be a bit competitive.

This is an unfortunate feature of the AI. I won a game on King because Egypt stopped building its spaceship after completing two spaceship parts.

Although in that same game Denmark actively tried to claim diplomatic victory (and did build the UN), and I had to bribe CSes to delay their victory long enough to complete the Utopia Project. Also, with diplo victory particularly, civs will try to prevent you claiming victory by allying lots of city-states and then declaring war so that you can't get them back.

This is an option that doesn't exist for the other victory conditions, since you can't actively interfere with another civ's tech advancement or cultural development - however I have for the first time recently encountered an AI refusal to accept a research agreement in an Emperor game where I have a tech lead.

With domination, of course, it's inherently very difficult for an AI civ to claim a domination victory with the human player still in the game, and it's never happened to me, so I don't know if AI civs will pursue domination to the point of victory.

 

[TPQ]

This is an option that doesn't exist for the other victory conditions, since you can't actively interfere with another civ's tech advancement or cultural development - however I have for the first time recently encountered an AI refusal to accept a research agreement in an Emperor game where I have a tech lead.

You can actively interfere with another civ's tech and culture advancement.

You can bribe them, or other civs into war. This means they'll focus on building military for a while, instead of building science, and war will stop them signing RAs with the civs they're warring with and will cancel RAs they already have with them. If the target Civ looses cities in a war you instigated, they loose population, which means they loose science output.

Unlike for the human, warring often slows down scientific progress for the AIs. This is especially true in the modern era where the AIs will nuke the crap out of each other, reducing science output to a trickle.

It is more difficult to influence another civ's cultural development, but buying cultural city states is one way to ensure the AIs don't get them and as a result you can at least slow the AIs culture down. War again helps to focus the AIs away from building cultural buildings and sometimes landmarks can be pillaged, slowing culture down more.

 

[PhilBowles]

You can actively interfere with another civ's tech and culture advancement.

You can bribe them, or other civs into war. This means they'll focus on building military for a while, instead of building science, and war will stop them signing RAs with the civs they're warring with and will cancel RAs they already have with them. If the target Civ looses cities in a war you instigated, they loose population, which means they loose science output.

You can, the AI can't, and these are limited sanctions at best - something the AI is not able to recognise. My point was that the AI will try to deny you a diplo victory, but not culture or science. It can see that if it has a CS and declares war, you can't get that CS. That's nicely black and white. It can't see the bigger picture and won't grab a cultural CS or a specific Wonder to deny you science or culture (you still get some science/culture, so the AI appears unable to recognise that preventing you maximising it is a good strategy). In fact in my experience the AI rarely if ever makes targeted decisions about which CSes to ally, even if it is after a cultural victory itself; it will tend to get them only to deny other players a diplomatic victory.

I've found by far my most rewarding games of Civ V are those where there's conflict over a diplomatic victory (usually when I'm one of the players shooting for it), because it is a different AI experience - you can actively tell that the AI is trying to derail your strategy or execute its own. Early in the game I'm starting to grab city-states and Arabia wants a diplo victory? Arabia grabs as many CSes as it can and declares war. I need 10 votes and have 9 (but not the UN yet)? Japan invades Kuala Lumpur and attacks Vienna. Conversely, I'm going for culture victory and Denmark has the UN? Egypt and I both bribe CSes away from Denmark to deny them victory.

The end result is that, when well-played, diplo victories *feel* like the product of diplomacy - as in actual in-game relationships between civs and decisions that affect one another, not just "a victory that involves opening the Diplomacy screen", as the non-domination forms of diplo victory were in previous Civ games.

 

[apocalypse105]

Civ 5 vanilla enchanched mod increase the AI flavor towerd space race culture and diplomacy I actually lost a game because washington won a space race

 

[Vorlath]

In my last game on Emperor, two AI's were fighting for city states to get diplomatic victory. But one guy had tons of gold. And he didn't have enough votes anyhow. But on the same turn that the second vote was supposed to happen, I finished the spaceship. The top AI was building spaceship parts too and was way ahead of me in tech. But it was very sporadic. Not sure why he didn't build more parts and win. If the AI at least understood victory conditions, it could have easily won.

 

[PhilBowles]

In my last game on Emperor, two AI's were fighting for city states to get diplomatic victory. But one guy had tons of gold. And he didn't have enough votes anyhow. But on the same turn that the second vote was supposed to happen, I finished the spaceship. The top AI was building spaceship parts too and was way ahead of me in tech. But it was very sporadic. Not sure why he didn't build more parts and win. If the AI at least understood victory conditions, it could have easily won.

I've had this with one game - a cultural victory I wouldn't have got if Egypt hadn't stopped building its spaceship. And I think Civs can finish all 5 policy branches needed for culture and not build the Utopia Project.

However, I find that the AI will genuinely try for a diplomatic victory - that same game where Egypt didn't build the spaceship, Denmark had the votes for a diplo victory and was only denied it by Egypt and I taking CSes from it. This is one of the things that makes diplo victories most interesting to play. The downside is that the AI will always try to get *exactly enough* votes to win, not more, so it's too easy to beat by denying it just one CS. It will also of course try for domination, but I've only once had an enemy civ capture all other capitals except mine, and then it engaged in the usual AI warfare of attacking border cities, even with time pressing to claim victory (and it failed as the spaceship took off from my capital soon after).

I think that the AI is actually going for victory, it's just going for the fifth victory condition - having the highest score if no one else has completed any of the other victory conditions. The usual AI strategy of spamming cities and units is probably intended to inflate its score in pursuit of this goal. It is perhaps unable to calculate the risk that the human will obtain victory with a lower score if they meet one of the main victory conditions.