Is AI really brain dead?

[bladex]

here's what happened to me last game proves how dumb it is

i'm playing on KING i have rome to my left and brazil to my right and i'm right in the middle of them. both HATE ME and have way more tech than me but don't even bother using it. they have a horsehockyload of units all horseman, spearman and catapults yet they are in the modern era! now if they wanted to they could both gang up on me and i would really be in trouble. i have only a few musketman and field cannons as well as a bombard in each city defending my capital and surrounding cities. but what do they end up doing? rome instead wants to trade with me and wants open borders so he can send his units through my territory to try and fail miserably and capturing brazil!! in the meantime norway has done a few surprise attacks on me and failed miserably against my battleships and field cannons the dumbass sends his units through the water right up to my battlehsips which i can easily pick off i easily I took 3 of his cities but now he call me a WM even though he started the war LOL! now why rome and brazil have been fighting i've easily caught up in tech and now in the information era and ready to build my spaceport and the ship...which i don't even think the AI even knows how to do that either?!

 

[Evs]

I agree, 1UPT is not the problem, Firaxis is. The mods for Civ V have made the AI, including fighting, awesome. No reason why Firaxis couldn't.

This is so true for anyone who has played the community patch.

I just can't wrap my head around how firaxis sat down on day 1 of AI programming and didn't think
"Ok so the AI will start on Emperor and above with extra warriors and an extra settler. First thing we need to do with the AI- is make sure a warrior escorts that extra settler. Especially since we are planning on making barbarians more of an immediate threat."
This is like the first thing that should have gone in to AI programming, never mind how the next 400 turns will play out. It's utterly mind boggling to me how basic this is.

 

[Evs]

Here's IGN's opinion of the AI in a pre release;

http://m.uk.ign.com/articles/2016/08/03/hidden-agendas-and-improved-ai-in-civilization-6

The attached photo is IGNs opinion of the AI post release yet they give it 9.4/10.

Did it get worse since pre release ? Or is this just marketing tricks from Firaxis and the so called professional reviewers ?

 

[Deggit]

More than one year ago, Soren Johnson (the lead designer of Civ IV) was asked his thoughts about 1UPT in a Reddit AMA. His reply was diplomatic:

I am very glad they tried it as it was certainly on my short-list of ideas for Civ that hadn't been done yet. Obviously, 1UPT creates some serious AI challenges, so I think your opinion about the mechanic is largely colored by how important a competitive AI is to you. (A lot of Civ players just want to walk their way through history and don't even like fighting wars.) I will say that I am very curious about what happens to the mechanic in future iterations of the series.

I left him the following reply -

I think Civ5 shows why you cannot have military strategy and military tactics in the same game. To see why they are incompatible consider a case where your civ is invaded by a much larger AI. If a small group of units can hold off an arbitrarily large enemy using the right maneuevers and tactics (Civ5) then there's little point to all the infrastructural effort the AI put in to build his large army. Conversely, if 30 units always beat 10 units (Civ3&4), then there's not much point to modeling all the maneuvering on the battlefield because even the most gifted tactician can't change the outcome.

In a game where strategy reliably beats tactics, that necessarily means tactics reliably loses to strategy.

It comes down to asking, which is more relevant to civ as a game genre, strategy or tactics? And I think the answer is clearly strategy. The military subsystem interacts with the rest of the game in strategic terms. It's all about opportunity costs, building a unit means not building a temple or lab, researching a military tech means not researching an infrastructure technology and so on. The stack of doom is a natural phenomenon and the only "problem" is it took too many clicks to manage compared to the gameplay relevance of what was in each stack. The answer was to simply make stacks an explicit gameplay element - "armies" would absorb "units" as you built them and you would only have to think about 5-10 "armies" on your map at a time. I think Civ5 went in the wrong direction. Tactics dominate and the strategic tradeoffs become less relevant.

Civilization series is ultimately a game about producing things... units, buildings, cities, technologies. The game is about snowballing your capacity to produce and prosper. A too-tactical focus takes away the whole point of the game. Playing battlefield general is fun, but when I play a civ game I want my civ to rise or fall because of the broad opportunity tradeoffs I made that define my civ's "character." I don't want to be able to battlefield-micromanage my way out of a war that I should lose because I didn't do like Stalin and order tanks built 10 years ago.

Soren replied I think that was a very good analysis.

The moment I heard Civ 6 was going to be 1UPT I knew the launch would be a trainwreck. But they were simply never gonna do it any other way. Civ 5 sold over 6 million copies and Civ6 has already sold 1 million at launch. Firaxis is chasing the money, people want a tactical game.

But ever since IV the Civ series has been all about adding complex new subsystems to the game without any regard for whether the AI can handle them.

When you boil it way, way down the AI interacts with the player in 2 ways:

1. Fighting the player in wars
2. Outracing the player to a nonmilitary victory condition, which is just a way of saying out-producing the player

The traditional Civ solution for making the AI competitive on the 2nd front has simply been to let it cheat its way to massive productivity. That massive productivity was then also the main thing keeping the AI competitive in wars, as its usual strategy was an overwhelming stack or armada of units. This was true in all the Civ games including the "good ones" like II and IV.

The problem is that in V and VI, productivity doesn't win wars by itself. Because the focus is tactical not strategic. But look at this thread, players don't want to win tactically, they consider it a BUG when the AI "throws its units away" in matchups that favor the player (due to positioning, terrain, unit matchup etc).

 

[Herakleides]

It's about tactics not strategy in this game.

 

[mogilan]

I hope someday Paradox will produce excellent Civilization game and will punish this greedy Firaxis. Their EU4 have already got many Civ elements, their games cover timespan from ancient era to WW2, they have even sim city game in their portfolio so they are not too far from surpassing Sid's studio.

 

[skyclad]

Thanks for posting that info from Sören. I also read interviews with jon shafer (original lead designer of vanilla civ5) admit 1upt was a mistake because maps are too small for tactical combat to make sense.
Yes I would like to see paradoxs take on civ. If they could shave all the fat off (usually i find their games quite bloated though still excellent) they could probably produce something great.

 

[Zuizgond]

It's about tactics not strategy in this game.

Currently it's none of them.

 

[Sascha77]

Currently it's none of them.

LOL... yup.



S.

 

[shiren]

I'm kinda losing the interest after over 100 hours because this game is too easy compared to older civs. I haven't lost a single game on deity so far whereas loosing used to be a real possibility.

This game is just too complex for the AI too handle. One of civ 6 core features, the districs, give the player an unfair advantage. There are just so many variables to min/max districs which are beyond any simple AI but rather easy for a humans. No amount of production bonuses the AI gets can compete with ideal placement and beelining. Can't help but fell that districts where introduced to make game "less boring" for the casual crowd without any regard for balancing in higher difficulties.

Another big flaw I see is the warmongering penalties, the AI unwillingness to go to war after the ancient era and their utter failure in waging wars. In older civs, the dominant AI would devour everything in its path and it was often a race whereas in civ 6, the game is practically over after you knock down and assimilate a couple of civs. The old "runaway" effect is completing absent from civ 6 and that turns the mid/end game into a borefest where you have no way to lose. Even if you don't conquer your neighbors, the AI won't either and they just can't compete after you get your districs going.

 

[Archaelicos]

First game, I'm paying Gorgo/Greece. Teddy keeps asking and asking and asking me to go to war with Germany with him, and I keep refusing. He's situated directly between me and Germany. Germany starts threatening me over my cozy relationship with city-states so I finally accept Teddy's invitation to a joint war. I then start moving troops through his territory (we have open borders because we're pals) and then he gets pissed about that and tells me to move them away. I assure him we're just passing through but then my relationship takes a huge nose dive and he starts threateing me. Why? Because I declared war with somebody on his continent. BUT SO DID HE. AND I ONLY DID IT BECAUSE HE ASKED ME TO. WTF? He then made peace with Germany and him and Germany ganged up on me. I just quit the game and restarted at that point.

Then the exact same thing happened with Ghandi, who asked me over and over and over to join him in a joint war with Cleopatra. After she broke four promises to stop converting my cities, I finally agreed and then Ghandi got mad at me for not complying with his peace agenda. WTF!?!?

Playing last night and I have no idea what I did differently but EVERYBODY loved me. I had friendship with 4 Civs. Over the course of the next 6 turns, ALL four turned sour and three declared war on me. I did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. They were dead turns waiting for stuff to build. The miscreants were Rome, France, and China. I wasn't even exploring all that much. I have no idea what pissed them off, but I quickly demolished all three's armies and they made peace one by one, waited about 50 turns, then did it again.

Why can't Firaxis get this right? Relationships degrade SO FAST with NO WARNING whatsoever, and so no discernable reason.

 

[Roxlimn]

FWIW, I can tell exactly what happened during your first game, and I can surmise what happened in your second. It's not really that hard.

 

[DonPato]

First game, I'm paying Gorgo/Greece. Teddy keeps asking and asking and asking me to go to war with Germany with him, and I keep refusing. He's situated directly between me and Germany. Germany starts threatening me over my cozy relationship with city-states so I finally accept Teddy's invitation to a joint war. I then start moving troops through his territory (we have open borders because we're pals) and then he gets pissed about that and tells me to move them away. I assure him we're just passing through but then my relationship takes a huge nose dive and he starts threateing me. Why? Because I declared war with somebody on his continent. BUT SO DID HE. AND I ONLY DID IT BECAUSE HE ASKED ME TO. WTF? He then made peace with Germany and him and Germany ganged up on me. I just quit the game and restarted at that point.

Then the exact same thing happened with Ghandi, who asked me over and over and over to join him in a joint war with Cleopatra. After she broke four promises to stop converting my cities, I finally agreed and then Ghandi got mad at me for not complying with his peace agenda. WTF!?!?

Playing last night and I have no idea what I did differently but EVERYBODY loved me. I had friendship with 4 Civs. Over the course of the next 6 turns, ALL four turned sour and three declared war on me. I did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. They were dead turns waiting for stuff to build. The miscreants were Rome, France, and China. I wasn't even exploring all that much. I have no idea what pissed them off, but I quickly demolished all three's armies and they made peace one by one, waited about 50 turns, then did it again.

Why can't Firaxis get this right? Relationships degrade SO FAST with NO WARNING whatsoever, and so no discernable reason.

I lol'ed so many times reading this because these very same situations have happened to me so many times. This is the part of Civ games that is always most dissapointing and immersion-breaking. I want to cultivate relationships with the AI that at least feel somewhat realistic, but alas it ends up being totally random every time. It makes me really sad because I always have these grand ideas about playing a game where I'm not really focused on a victory condition and just playing through history, having fun feeling immersed in the fictional world that is set before me... then the bipolar AI goes insane and ruins the immersion and I just go for the quickest and easiest victory that I can muster instead. It's still fun to try and win games, but it's funner to end up winning a game after having an imaginative historical experience.

 

[georgjorge]

I'm not entirely sure what the AI is doing when it comes to combat. This is my first 1UPT Civ and it doesn't seem to work properly. I play on Immortal, and manage to conquer the AI easily. In IV, I had to really focus on military at a certain point to do that, make a lot of units and keep the supply going. But here I can just insert a few units between other builds, and when I attack I take cities one after another while hardly losing any units. The AI I'm attacking start out having more units around than me, so even with superior tactics I would expect to lose a fair amount of mine, but they can't make any use of them. And I'm already using a mod which at least lets the AI upgrade their units instead of having Warriors in the Industrial age...

It's a pity because I REALLY like almost all the other aspects of the game. I want to continue playing it. But knowing that I can take my neighbours' cities whenever I want doesn't make for a good challenge - I'd probably have to play with a "never conquer a city" rule or something to make the game more interesting. In any case, after developers have already spent years on this game I don't have high hopes for a better AI in a patch or expansion. I guess it's up to modders again to save the day.

 

[ronin_cse]

FWIW, I can tell exactly what happened during your first game, and I can surmise what happened in your second. It's not really that hard.

Well I'm fairly sure it's clear to most people what happened, the issue is that it happened. If the AI asks you to go to war with them you should get an exemption from their peaceful agenda.

Also Gandhi isn't supposed to declare wars that give him warmonger points so it makes even less sense!

 

[ThERat]

Check my AW game to see some aspects of the AI with regards to warfare.

Once you have killed off their ancient units, they will build the next better iteration and so on. Hence, I am fighting nations that show up with infantry, cavalry and submarines. They will also form corps and armies, which can be tough to beat.

Of course, they do not know how to really take out cities etc.

 

[dfrani]

So I was thinking maybe the AI was nerfed on purpose. I remember one time when LaForge asked the computer for an opponent who could defeat data; we got Moriarty. I remember another time when machines became self aware, skynet anyone?

Maybe the original AI was so good there were concerns of a global take over crisis, and they had to dumb it down to avoid world-wide chaos. But in all honesty, lets look at the current election, and think; is the AI really any worse than what we have?

 

[mogilan]

I think AI is so dumb and irrational because finally it has achieved perfection in emulating human behavior.

 

[TurboJ]

I don't see how the AI could be as incapable as it is unless this was intentional.

It's fine with me if they want to make the game more accessible but there is absolutely no need to make deity accessible.

 

[MyOtherName]

I don't see how the AI could be as incapable as it is unless this was intentional.

AI is (usually) not something you can do halfheartedly; it takes effort to make it work well. Every fix to one stupid behavior will create a different stupid behavior. And might not even fix the original stupid behavior.