Jadwiga's Legacy scenario - how is the AI...?

[V. Soma]

So Firaxis gives us a scenario where we are supposed to defend against attacking AI civs...

again: AI civs that declare war and... do combat...?
AI... combat...? Really?

I don't have the scenario - but I would be interested in player experiences, how the AI does combat in it...

 

[klail]

You start out on a map in central Europe. There are three city/states you need to protect that are on the left-ish part of the map. The three allied human players start in the center/left-ish part of the map. The invading forces are basically "barbarian camps" that spawn in parts of the map. I put that in quotes because they're not called barbarians. If a camp starts in the german portion of the map, then they are "Teutonic Knights", if in the southeast, they are turks, etc. They are also unlike barbarian camps in that they spawn a LOT of units. On each spawn cycle the camps spawn like 10-15 units (I only tried it on deity) rather than the normal 4ish that camps spawn on deity.

They put up a good fight because of their numbers, and well, because they are barbarians. We all know the barbarians fight better than the AI civs for whatever reason.

However, I never saw any cities actually get taken by the invading forces which was unfortunate. They did reduce some of the cities to 0 health and 0 walls, but didn't actually take them for some reason (probably the same reason they have trouble taking cities in general).

I found the other scenario, the viking one, to be more fun because you have to take a ton of cities in 100 turns (I was only able to take less than half of the cities on deity on my first attempt) and the AI seems to be much better at defending cities than taking them (at least with the unit spam they get in these scenarios).

 

[V. Soma]

Ah, so AI is like barbs in the scenario - well, that may work for them... to some extent...

 

[HF22]

Yeah zero cities taken by the barbs of any Civs or city states in my deity play through (despite zero health cities - A bug maybe?).

Plus about a 200 unit kills to 5 losses ratio for me. On deity & not playing particularly well (didn't take the +5 strength re barbs card to start because I didn't know the game was vs barbs).

Just no challenge. Whats the point?

 

[vmxa]

I think you actually only have to prevent Vienna from being captured.

 

[Siptah]

This may sound stupid, but if it is against Barbs, it's probably harder on lower difficulties. The AI has not so many bonuses and builds less units.

 

[Halcyan2]

I think you actually only have to prevent Vienna from being captured.

In my first game, I just let the Yellow (Commercial) city state get killed.

I feel like the Polish (Blue, SW) civilization is the best, because of the extra Knights/Winged Hussars. The SE civilization has Pikemen which are okay, but are generally weaker units (but okay against Golden Horde mounted units). The NE civ has extra Builder/Military Engineer and seems weakest because there isn't much time (or need) to build up improvement infrastructure and you are better off with more military units. The Polish SW civ is also next to 2 city states so you can protect them, get help from them, and easily send trade routes to them. The Ottomans spawn in an area to the south but there are some good choke points.

In the game, there is only 1 copy of each of the Great People, except the Great Generals where there are 2.

It does come with quotes for the Great Writer and artwork for the Great Artist.

I hope they incorporate the Great Artist into the base case. More art is nice (the guy makes 3 Portraits).

 

[grizlob]

In my first game, I just let the Yellow (Commercial) city state get killed.

I feel like the Polish (Blue, SW) civilization is the best, because of the extra Knights/Winged Hussars. The SE civilization has Pikemen which are okay, but are generally weaker units (but okay against Golden Horde mounted units). The NE civ has extra Builder/Military Engineer and seems weakest because there isn't much time (or need) to build up improvement infrastructure and you are better off with more military units. The Polish SW civ is also next to 2 city states so you can protect them, get help from them, and easily send trade routes to them. The Ottomans spawn in an area to the south but there are some good choke points.

In the game, there is only 1 copy of each of the Great People, except the Great Generals where there are 2.

It does come with quotes for the Great Writer and artwork for the Great Artist.

I hope they incorporate the Great Artist into the base case. More art is nice (the guy makes 3 Portraits).

Remember that you can culture bomb with forts as Poland. In combination with the garrison promotion for xbows, the double military engineer does have some pros after siege tactics.

 

[Halcyan2]

Remember that you can culture bomb with forts as Poland. In combination with the garrison promotion for xbows, the double military engineer does have some pros after siege tactics.

Yeah, but grabbing more territory doesn't really help in this scenario.

I first thought that clearing the barbarian camps would stop the spawning but that didn't help. Then I thought that claiming the land (so it is not in the fog of war) would stop the spawning but that also doesn't help. Even when I grabbed all the southern land, a dozen Ottoman barbarians would randomly spawn in my land.

In fact, they'd even spawn inside my empty Encampments and even in my empty city! Yeah, I someone ended up with a barbarian unit *in* my city. It seems like it destroyed my Ancient Walls so I couldn't build Medieval Walls in that city.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

I replayed this scenario several times, and Gdansk was destroyed pretty fast each time. I also played as the blue, and it looked like the Ottoman barbarians moved to Vienna swiftly, while the CS had no military units whatsoever. They also spawn in large numbers, but if you just spam units, it is pretty easy. What you need to do is just found 5-6 more cities, and you will easily win the score.

I played on Emperor.

 

[Halcyan2]

I replayed this scenario several times, and Gdansk was destroyed pretty fast each time. I also played as the blue, and it looked like the Ottoman barbarians moved to Vienna swiftly, while the CS had no military units whatsoever. They also spawn in large numbers, but if you just spam units, it is pretty easy. What you need to do is just found 5-6 more cities, and you will easily win the score.

I played on Emperor.

I just played a game as White (SE, extra Pikemen, access to Cossacks).

In this game, Gdansk did not get destroyed. My best guess is that the blue AI, while crappy, at least drew some of the barbarians away from Gdansk, which saved it.

In terms of actual abilities, the extra Winged Hussar is definitely the best. However, the positioning of the SE player is a bit easier. If you are playing Blue, you have to contend with Ottoman Janissaries, which are very tough. As White SE, I only built 2 Pikemen (and got 2 free ones, in addition to the 2 you get for founding your first 2 cities). And Cossacks come way too late to be useful unless you beeline it. However, Mongolian (Golden Horde) barbarians are just Horsemen and Horse Archers, which are easily countered by your Pikemen. You do need some Crossbowmen to take care of the Swordsmen from the south.

The only possible issue I can see is that if you are NOT Blue, then you aren't near Vienna and so you are reliant on the crappy AI to protect Vienna. I don't know if the Barbarian AI will actually take Vienna and if that means game over.

 

[Halcyan2]

Remember that you can culture bomb with forts as Poland. In combination with the garrison promotion for xbows, the double military engineer does have some pros after siege tactics.

I actually just played a game where I went Encampment heavy. In this case, the culture bombing turned out to be a serious negative. It really messed up the borders of my settlements (I was settling cities 4 tiles apart to try and get overlapping city and encampment bombardments). There were several cases where I couldn't build encampments in the places where I wanted to because of the city borders, which got messed up due to culture bombing. (City 1 builds an Encampment and culture bombs the territory that City 2 would normally take, so when City 2 gets founded, its borders are shifted quite a bit. Etc.)

 

[HF22]

They also spawn in large numbers, but if you just spam units, it is pretty easy. What you need to do is just found 5-6 more cities, and you will easily win the score.

The big thing we really find out from this scenario is none of the really basic problems with the combat AI, even if fixed, will make it much better. This scenario has barbs as the opponents, so they:

1) Don't have the timidity issue of the AI civs;
2) Don't get distracted and change target every other turn;
3) Don't have settlers to steal;
4) Have upgraded units;
5) Get a proper unit mix from the spawning script; and
6) Get large numbers of units from spawning.

And the combat AI, on deity, is still completely useless. They take maybe one city state in 60 turns, never a AI Civ city (despite that one to the north east often getting to zero health). That means the combat AI is unfixable by modders with the current tools available. It likely means it can't be fixed economically by redoing the AI coding.

Maybe it could be fixed by more direct bonuses (to combat strength and promotions) and making the game easier for the AI to play#. Which everyone will hate. So I am calling it - Civ 6 will end its development cycle with combat AI / overall challenge at brokenly low levels (i.e. less than Civ4 and even Civ5).

# This is what stacks did in Civ4, and the 4 city limit in Civ5 really (because conquest wasn't so important, it mattered less the AI was no good at it).

* The encampment heavy AI Civs in the Viking scenario provide a bit more challenge (effectively game over by turn 30 of 100 on deity, but still it feels more interesting). Being on the defensive against coastal attacks seems to provide it some help. But maybe that is the Panzer General thing - A combat puzzle to attack is somewhat better for 1upt.

 

[HF22]

The only possible issue I can see is that if you are NOT Blue, then you aren't near Vienna and so you are reliant on the crappy AI to protect Vienna. I don't know if the Barbarian AI will actually take Vienna and if that means game over.

Vienna didn't fall in any of the three games (one with each Civ) I played, despite it getting no help from me.

 

[Halcyan2]

Okay, I finished the scenario.

Won with all 3 leaders on Prince, and then won with Volhynian (White) on Deity, to unlock all 4 of the achievements.

On Deity, the main difference is that the other 2 players start with a bunch of extra units (additional pikemen, 2 extra settlers so a total of 4). However, the barbarians seem to remain at the same strength and spawning rate.

The AI doesn't seem to know how to take advantage of its extra settlers. Blue Poland took a long time to settle its 2nd, 3rd, and 4th settlers. Yellow Lithuania quickly settled their 2nd settler but the other 2 just hung around the capital until they got captured by barbarians in the mid-game (I then snagged one of them).

From all of my playthroughs, AI seems to do best with White Volhynia, followed by Blue Poland. They are pretty atrocious with Yellow Lithuania. In 2 of my Prince games, they lost a city and were stuck with just their capital, constantly sieged by barbarians. In the Deity game, they had 2 cities but couldn't expand further and kept getting pounded by barbarians. My Prince Lithuania game was more competitive with the 2 AI's than my Deity Volhynia game, which just goes to show how different the starting positions are.

Other than Great General's, the AI's don't really go for any of the Great People until the very end, so it is very easy to get them all. I did notice that on Deity there is only 1 Great General available (instead of 2 on Prince). There are also 2 variants between Great Engineers (one allows you to build additional districts, the other provides amenities/housing), Great Merchants (both give you gold but one gives you envoys while the other increases your trade route capacity), Great Writers (none have quotes though) and Great Artists (both make only portraits with nice images, even though one of them should probably be Religious Art since they are all of religious figures). It seems like the AI's choose Strategos for a policy at the start but don't bother with any of the other great people generating Wildcards.

I found the scenario reasonably fun. The main thing I learned is about building closely clustered cities with lots of encampments to maximize bombardment overlap. Normally, I play single player and prefer to build cities 9-12 tiles away from each other, so it was interesting building them so close in this scenario.

I do think it would be cool if the two Great Artists got included into the normal game....

 

[therefromhere]

I've won this on Deity and I found blue (Polish noble families) the easiest - partly due to the bonus Husars, but mainly due to the starting position (no barbarians initially, sheltering mountains to the south providing good choke-points, lots of resources, and close to the city states. Yellow is tough since you're swarmed with Knights from the north almost immediately. White is better, but the potential city sites are weaker, and there's a continuous stream of barbarians from the east (though they're generally weaker than those from the north and south).

I found it was possible to keep Gdańsk alive by building my second city fairly close by (at the fork in the river south of Gdańsk), which distracts some of the northern barbarians, and keeping the southern barbarians at bay is easy if you control the choke-points.

 

[Klinn]

I first thought that clearing the barbarian camps would stop the spawning but that didn't help. Then I thought that claiming the land (so it is not in the fog of war) would stop the spawning but that also doesn't help. Even when I grabbed all the southern land, a dozen Ottoman barbarians would randomly spawn in my land. In fact, they'd even spawn inside my empty Encampments and even in my empty city! Yeah, I somehow ended up with a barbarian unit *in* my city.

Same thing happened to me with that southernmost Ottoman camp. Fought my way down there, destroyed it, but still had more barbs spawn at regular intervals. Nasty cheat by the AI.

On the other hand, when I played as the white noble towards the southeast, there seemed to be two camps around. One further east that spawned most of the barbs and another to the southwest that spawned fewer units. I took out that one and didn't seem to get any more barbs from that direction. So maybe some camps count as being destroyed and some don't.

Fun scenario though, next I have to try the yellow noble and see how that goes.

 

[Klinn]

They take maybe one city state in 60 turns, never a AI Civ city (despite that one to the north east often getting to zero health).

I just won as Lithuania (yellow) by the skin of my teeth and it was thanks to the barbs actually razing an AI city.

Volhynian (white) expanded up and to the right, managing to plant 4 cities. The eastern-most one was sitting there at zero defense for the longest time but eventually the barbs walked a melee unit into it, mostly by chance I suspect.

In this scenario, has anyone actually made it to field artillery so they could upgrade their crossbows? I've been tempted to try building up my science output and beelining for it, but not sure if it will work out.

 

[bbbearbbb]

In this scenario, has anyone actually made it to field artillery so they could upgrade their crossbows? I've been tempted to try building up my science output and beelining for it, but not sure if it will work out.

Managed to get all the way to Infantry as the white civ on Emperor. Expanded south, then west (where the Ottoman spawn and also near blue civ), and north east and north west, for 9 cities total.
Built Campus next to all the mountains and in the larger cities, had about 80-90 science per turn by the end.
Settle on spawn points means your cities/encampments plus some units will mow barbs down in a few turns. Just make sure to put xbow/field cannon in Encampments and cities or barbs will spawn inside (as you already noted). =)

 

[VicRatlhead5199]

Gdansk got wiped out 2/3 plays and Vienna was in serious trouble quite a bit since Turks seem to get muskets pretty early. The barbs definitely fight better than AI civs. I'm guessing there's some kind of healing/risk avoidance rules written into the major civs that's not present with the barbs.

The AI allies you're actually competing with for victory are not really worth talking about. They don't seem to expand enough to keep up in score. It's still a challenge though since pushing barbs back to expand is tough and some late comer barbs can shock you a bit. Sweden pops out of right when you have some breathing room after eliminating the Teutonic Knights.

Really enjoy both scenarios quite a bit. Francia and the Eastern European barbs keep the Viking scenario pretty interesting.