Is AI really brain dead?

[Abraxis]

Their names and faces are well known among the community, Ed Beach included and above all I would say. He is devs leader so now he has to face his responsibilities.

oh really? because according to this...

They make the AI feel schizo. Diplomacy right now seems to consist of everyone being permanently furious with each other and no one explaining why. Not that you can do much even if you know why they are upset.

It sounds to me like they've perfectly modelled the human condition. Maybe they'll get a nobel prize.

 

[Raider]

I do find it pretty amuzing that the feature that the developers talked about the most as making AI interesting is the one that contributes to it being completely worthless. Just goes to show that there is virtually no proper effort and testing that goes into the AI being any good at all.

 

[Stilgar08]

Their names and faces are well known among the community, Ed Beach included and above all I would say. He is devs leader so now he has to face his responsibilities.

I think he did a pretty good job. He's responsible for the game as a whole including core mechanics. Everyone who expected a smart AI never played another civ before.
Which doesn't mean there are tons of stuff to be improved!

 

[Roald Amundsen]

Long time lurker here: this is actually the worst civ i've ever played. It's not just the AI, this whole game is just seriously bad. Think i finally kicked the habit.

 

[LDiCesare]

The AI does the worst things I've ever seen and is bugged like crazy:
It has about 12 legions surrounding my capital. Over 12 turns of siege or so, it only attacks once, pillages a bit, but eventually signs a peace treaty without ever taking any of my cities despite overwhelming forces.
So it gets big production bonuses, combat bonuses, but doesn't know how to take a city!
It is able to declare war at you before you've even met.
It likes to denounce dead civilizations.

 

[JtW]

It's a joke when people claim ANYTHING is worse than CiV in CiVI. You guys forget too soon how awful CiV was on release. CiVI is lightyears ahead.

False. In Civ 5, the AI managed to take a city from me inmy very first game. In Civ 6, I don't think they ever could.

 

[Miir]

I agree. The AI is broken. It aint able to fight, just shuffles units. Doesn't upgrade units, doesn't pillage when able, doesn't protect settlers/builders, build wrong type of units. In my last emperor game the other civ still have tons of warriors in mid game and Greece kept making catapults to defend Athen under siege. In another game, my two neighboring civs both DOW me, but didnt attack. I soon realised they actually didnt have any military left, at that time, after both had been getting killed by a single barb camp spawning cav units. This need some serious patching, it baffles me that this wasn't noticed in testing.

 

[Brianstorm]

Don't worry guys, they'll patch it up thanks to us beta testers giving them the privilege at 60 bucks a pop. Just in time to sell some DLC!

 

[Raider]

Don't worry guys, they'll patch it up thanks to us beta testers giving them the privilege at 60 bucks a pop. Just in time to sell some DLC!

Actually this is exactly why i didn't play past 2 hours and spent some time watching streams and reading forums. Already requested a refund.

I was fooled once by Civ 5 vanilla. Learned my lesson and never bought BE at all since that game was trash and never got better. And now will either buy later when the game is complete or can just pass and never waste either time or money.

 

[MkLh]

The AI is much worse than in V thanks to it's cowardice. Kill one unit and the others will run away no matter how big their material advantage still is. Honestly I don't think it's possible to lose a non-isolated Deity start unless you really try.

 

[Sascha77]

False. In Civ 5, the AI managed to take a city from me inmy very first game. In Civ 6, I don't think they ever could.

Well.. I did see Sumeria conquer one of Arabia's cities in my first game (Prince-difficulty) - and then Arabia re-conquering it a few turns later.. So they do seem familiar with the concept of conquering stuff..

I do agree however that in its present state, I seriously doubt the AI could take any of my cities.Not that they were a huge threat in Civ V (think I only ever lost two cities in 1451 hours of playing Civ V), but they seem even dumber than in that game now. I never thought I'd say this, but I kinda miss Civ IV's stacks of doom now where the AI could get truly scary and could pose a very real threat to your cities.

S.

 

[JtW]

If they don't fix the AI, it's the last Firaxis product I've bought. I'm not even gonna bother with DLC/expansions.

 

[Pepo]

I haven't tested the game yet, but from what I've seen it is slightly better than Civ V at release. That isn't a justification however: if they can't make the game challenging , maybe they should start wondering why they are still using 1upt and the broken diplo system

 

[GAGA Extrem]

The AI is pretty bad when it comes to warfare and other on-map unit movement things, but it actually kept up pretty well on Emperor (much better than the CIV5 AI did).
...then again, that might just be due to the fact that it cheats like mad with extra starting units.

It did some decent moves like sabotaging my Space Port cities during the late game and encircling/cutting off my units in the field from time to time.
But it's hard to tell atm what is just "random luck" and what is "ingenious behaviour".

 

[Falk]

Almost everything in Civ6 is much better than in Civ5 vanilla. The AI is an exception though, it's even worse than in its predecessor. Honestly, this is the worst AI I've ever seen anywhere.

In my current game my neighbours are Brazil and Sumeria. For more than 100 turns now (I'm in turn 150) they are in a mighty standoff - Brazil has spammed every single tile with warriors, Sumeria has spammed every single tile with war wagons. Occasionally they DoW each other and kill off their units. Then they make peace and spam all the tiles with warriors and war wagons again. That is all they are doing. They didn't settle anything during that time (Sumeria has half a continent of great lands right behind its capital), they are way behind in everything. This is on King (the difficulty levels are a farce though - the AI is exactly the same on every level, it just has less/more bonuses).

Civ6 offers enough stuff to explore and play with to entertain me for some dozen hours. But with the AI in its current state, I will probably uninstall the game in a couple weeks and wait for some major AI overhaul.

 

[dwarfling]

For a game that's designed around the single player experience I wonder if the devs ever approached the development process as "can we program an AI opponent that can reasonably play the base game?". Instead it seems we get an AI that can't even properly move units around, reminiscent of BE. But hey, Cleopatra's denouncing boobs are pretty

 

[Frank327]

For a game that's designed around the single player experience I wonder if the devs ever approached the development process as "can we program an AI opponent that can reasonably play the base game?". Instead it seems we get an AI that can't even properly move units around, reminiscent of BE. But hey, Cleopatra's denouncing boobs are pretty

Yeah that's my biggest problem with this bad AI. In civ V they had the excuse that 1UPT was new and AI was having problems with it. But now that's 6 years ago and the AI seems no closer to being able to handle combat. At some point they should have made the decision that if it's impossible to teach the AI how to handle 1UPT combat they need to go back to some kind of stacking armies.

It would even make more sense to have stacks because tactical combat on a strategical map is weird.

 

[Ozisl]

Once again, we are saddled with an AI that needs to cheat like all hell in order to remain operative. The diplomacy is so broken that they constantly declare war on each other (and you) every 5 turns.

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

Thanks everyone for the opinions, you've saved me from wasting money&time. Reading about the AI - I'm shocked. There are so many great mods for Civ V that have greatly improved the AI, and I cannot fathom how the whole Firaxis(/Civ devs) isn't able or willing in 6 years to create an AI that is at least on par with the user-modded-AI in Civ V.

So it looks like I'll be waiting for a couple of years for patches, expansions and mods to improve the game to the point where it's worth the time&money and actually challenging and enjoyable.

 

[Sascha77]

Brazil has spammed every single tile with warriors, Sumeria has spammed every single tile with war wagons

One thing's for sure: The AI's tendency to spam a million units is a serious issue in a OUPT-kinda game. In my games, both the AI-Civs and city-states are constantly filling up the map with an insane amount of units for no real reason. I wonder if the AI is able to use the Army-Corps-feature - though I seriously doubt that it even "knows" about that one ..

Civ V had some of this stuff as well ... like friendly or neutral civs parking/moving around large armies in your territory for no real reason. But I've never seen AI-players filling up the map this badly in V.

Perhaps having a gazillion units is the only way for the AI to be able to achieve *anything* in war - since they seem to be too dumb to wage war like a human player would... with an army composed of the right kind of units, highly upgraded units and the right tactics to quickly take cities. I mean: In one of my recent Civ V games as Genghis ("King", "Marathon") I was able to conquer my 9 rivals with 4 to 5 lvl-9-Keshiks, a Great Khan and a Longsword. I never realized how insanely powerful the Mongols are once they research chivalry because whenever I ran into an AI-controlled Genghis in previous games, he would completely suck at war and end up dead or as everyone's punching bag.

I don't expect the AI to consistently replicate human performance in war but they should at least be "aware" of basic concepts like promotions, unit upgrades and softening up cities with the appropriate siege-units. Plus they should prioritize quality over quantity when it comes to the composition of their army.

S.