Just another example of AI idiocy

Lord Parkin

aka emperor
Joined
Apr 27, 2004
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New Zealand
Just another example of AI idiocy in my current Immortal game:

Elizabeth asked me to join her war against Ramesses. I agreed, and helped her eliminate Ramesses.

Immediately after Ramesses has been eliminated, Liz says that my troops are worryingly close to her borders. No duh, dumbass, I just helped you eliminate the enemy on your borders. Aren't you supposed to be a little more grateful towards me?

The very next turn, Liz comes to speak again with the quip, "I just noticed how pathetic you are", and turns hostile. You stupid jackass, what kind of friend are you?

I subsequently declared war on Liz and got rid of her pathetic empire in a few measly turns. But still, this highlights the incredibly broken AI diplomacy. Going in 2 turns from "thank you for helping in our war" to "get away from my borders" to "I hate you" is just dumb.

Fix it, Firaxis.

(Tied in with another overriding problem that the AI is far too aggressive.)
 
lol, that's gratitude for ya. But yeah the AI isn't really that intelligent at all.
 
actually there might not be anything broken here...

You helped her, aka playing her game.
You were a convenience.

Did she take any cities from ramesses?

Did she have more cities then you?

If you digg some through these forums you would find out thet Lizzy doesn't like people with a smaller empire (ammount of cities is below some treshhold for her).

So what might have happened is...
She wanted Ramesses dead, asked you for help, actually got it, capped cities got "too big" her AI calculated that your small and pathetic compared to her and she started to hate you.

I agree alot of AI things need fixing but this one might actually be part of a working AI! zomg :)
 
"it's because the AI plays to win"

But really, that's an excuse for every single silly thing the AI does. If that's so, why the hell make it even possible to ask for favours? Why bother with helping them? If they will just attack even when you did probably the most friendly thing you can do, declaring war to help her, then just remove all that options.
We are just beeing fooled doing lots of things for the AI thinking it will help our relations. Only to be told 2 turns later "well he did [insert erratic action] because it's just playing to win". Then don't lie to us with requests. Make it 2 states, neutral and war, and no more options. because the few that are ingame are just confusing us into thinking they are worth it to make them our friends.

Declaring war on a civ, as a request for help from another civ, is the most dangerous thing to do. More than gifting money or luxury. It makes you stop producing wonders, expanding or whatever, start producing units, it lowers your relations with that leader (or should if there were any) and it puts you in danger. Doing so should have a good relation reward. And I everytime I do so (trying to not lose faith on diplo) I am still attacked or insulted for my military (the one I made to help them).

It's not playing to win, it's hostility+randomness
 
She didn't take anything from Ramesses, I took both his cities.

She has a pathetic 2 or 3 city empire while I have a 5-city empire.

I still think it's broken. Shouldn't the AI be the tiniest bit grateful that you're doing them the favour of helping them out? They get pissed off if you don't help them, and they get pissed off if you do? How in the hell does that work?

Especially when turning on you the instant the war ends is suicide for them? Crazy.
 
"it's because the AI plays to win"

But really, that's an excuse for every single silly thing the AI does.

It is, but it probably also really is why it does these things. They just never programmed anything else than strategies the AI would choose to win.

For the purpose of diplomacy, the AI behaves like an autistic sociopath. It has no social skills: None have been programmed. It has a disregard for the rights of others: Its strategies don't take other people into account much.

Since this combination is very very rare in humans, the AI appears to act in completely incomprehensible ways. Even a human that is playing to win is not going to act like the AI in Civ V because (non-autistic) humans understand how their actions affect the emotional state of other humans, and can use this to their advantage. And non-sociopathic humans understand that acting like a total jerk 100% of the time will make the opponent not want to play against them.
 
She didn't take anything from Ramesses, I took both his cities.

She has a pathetic 2 or 3 city empire while I have a 5-city empire.

I still think it's broken. Shouldn't the AI be the tiniest bit grateful that you're doing them the favour of helping them out? They get pissed off if you don't help them, and they get pissed off if you do? How in the hell does that work?

Especially when turning on you the instant the war ends is suicide for them? Crazy.

Liz asked you to join the war SHE has, not to steal her war away and not let her have them cities ;)
 
It is, but it probably also really is why it does these things. They just never programmed anything else than strategies the AI would choose to win.

For the purpose of diplomacy, the AI behaves like an autistic sociopath. It has no social skills: None have been programmed. It has a disregard for the rights of others: Its strategies don't take other people into account much.

Since this combination is very very rare in humans, the AI appears to act in completely incomprehensible ways. Even a human that is playing to win is not going to act like the AI in Civ V because (non-autistic) humans understand how their actions affect the emotional state of other humans, and can use this to their advantage. And non-sociopathic humans understand that acting like a total jerk 100% of the time will make the opponent not want to play against them.
Exactly. You got it in a nutshell. :)

The AI acts completely selfishly almost all of the time. While this is arguably an okay strategy to win in some cases (ignoring for a moment the abysmal AI military tactics), it's not fun. Playing a game of Civ is supposed to be fun, and you should be able to make friends and alliances if you play your cards right. Having the game such that every AI is out for themselves doesn't make for an enjoyable game experience.

Soren Johnson outlined this extremely well in a recent video I watched (rather long, but very interesting). The AI should react intuitively and understandably, allowing the human to befriend and ally with it even if it is not in its best interests in terms of "winning". Apparently Civ5 was designed (at least in its half-finished state) without those lessons from Soren in mind.
 
Maybe she got pissed you took those cities then!

But as Danny said, the AI are best treated like complete sociopaths untill someone can either patch it, or modd it.

For me personally : They always get a "no" to any question, im not going to mingle in their little wars, if however they dare to attack my military might i will smite them down, burn or take every city they have and leave them to rott in their capital.
(actually it's funny to make your citystate friend take their cities aswell :p)
 
Liz asked you to join the war SHE has, not to steal her war away and not let her have them cities ;)
In that case, what the hell was I expected to do? Is the only way to make her happy really to take on the full costs of a war and let her take all the spoils? And for the record, I don't believe for a second that she would have acted any differently had she got those cities anyway. Too many other experiences with the broken AI have shown this.

You have to admit, in its present state the AI is clearly broken in its diplomatic relations, acting like a selfish :):):):):):) most of the time and unable to concieve of a friendly long-term partnership.

EDIT: Really, the r-tard word is blanked here? Apparently the rest of the world has gone much more PC than us lately...
 
You have to admit, in its present state the AI is clearly broken in its diplomatic relations, acting like a selfish :):):):):):) most of the time and unable to concieve of a friendly long-term partnership.

Treat her like an crazy ass ex-girlfriend!
 
Maybe she got pissed you took those cities then!
I think, as you admit, she would have got pissed regardless of what I did. It's what the AI in Civ5 specialises in at the moment. They get pissed at you if you don't help them. They get pissed at you if you don't help them enough. They get pissed at you if you help them too much. You can't win with them either way. ;)
 
Treat her like an crazy ass ex-girlfriend!
Actually I think most people would rather not sit down and try to play a game with their crazy-ass ex-girlfriend. Especially when ALL of the players in the game are clones of that same crazy-ass ex-girlfriend. :lol:
 
This AI move sounds very close to real life to me,

2 countries agree a pact to attack a 3rd country and a year later after winning are at war with each other. (Germany, Russia & Poland if you had not guessed). If it happened in real life why should you complain that the AI does it??
 
Liz asked you to join the war SHE has, not to steal her war away and not let her have them cities ;)

I can come up with an excuse like that for every single random action the AI does.

An example:
The other day I was in war with montezuma, we were the 2 big civs of the game. Between us was the last small city of siam, the rest had been conquered by montezuma. They were at war and monty was trying to destroy siams last city. Siam only had 1 elefant, and monty and me tanks. I was saving siams ass stopping montezuma from attacking his city and suddnely, siam declares war on me... Since his city is acting as a shield, instead of attacking it I just take my units away from there. 3 turns later monty captures it.

Makes no sense right? Well, you are wrong, the AI was playing for winning:
In this case, Siam thought he was not going to win by just waiting. So even knowing it was dangerous, since he had nothing to lose, he declared on me to try to reach my capital with his elefant, since if he had declared later his unit would have been teleported outside my borders.

It was a risky movement and failed, but it was worth it since he saw he anyway had no other chance of winning. So he just tried all in.

See, it wasn't a stupid move to declare war on his savior, I proved it makes sense since the AI tries to win.
 
I think, as you admit, she would have got pissed regardless of what I did. It's what the AI in Civ5 specialises in at the moment. They get pissed at you if you don't help them. They get pissed at you if you don't help them enough. They get pissed at you if you help them too much. You can't win with them either way. ;)

Yeah i agree about that one, hell i remember Bismark asking me to help him kill lizzy, who was on the otherside of him, so i needed open borders (waters were crawling with barbs at that time and no coastal cities).

Got it, went to rage on Lizzy, during the war all of a sudden he PEACETREATIES her! wars me! closes borders down on me so my troops get stuck on lizzy's lands with no way of getting reinforcements.

Crazy-ass AI indeed, but in the end i shrugged it off to a brilliant strategic move by both or one of em, i learned my lesson there how the AI acts :p
 
This AI move sounds very close to real life to me,

2 countries agree a pact to attack a 3rd country and a year later after winning are at war with each other. (Germany, Russia & Poland if you had not guessed). If it happened in real life why should you complain that the AI does it??
Because it happens pretty much every single time. Is that "realistic"? Even if it is, it isn't fun. Not to mention it goes hostile and declares war apparently completely randomly a lot of the time.

You can argue all you want, but the fact is that the present AI in Civ5 seems completely incapable of understanding the concepts of "friendship" or "allies", which the AI in previous versions of the game could do very well (particularly in Civ4).
 
ive had the exact same thing happen to me as the OP describes, were asked to go to war with a 3rd party by china, and after the war was won (all to easily you might add), china became hostile and later declared war on me... (which ofc went downhill for china, lol pathetic AI)

so yea, autistic sociopath sounds correct to me.
 
Because it happens pretty much every single time.

This is the problem. Nobody wants an AI that never backstabs. Backstabs are fun. In fact, monty was one of my favourite rivals in civ4. But that is because he was unique in doing so. The fun about a backstab is that you don't expect it. But in civ5 you don't expect anything else. It's not a unique erratic personality, it's how they all always act.
 
It is, but it probably also really is why it does these things. They just never programmed anything else than strategies the AI would choose to win.

For the purpose of diplomacy, the AI behaves like an autistic sociopath. It has no social skills: None have been programmed. It has a disregard for the rights of others: Its strategies don't take other people into account much.

Since this combination is very very rare in humans, the AI appears to act in completely incomprehensible ways. Even a human that is playing to win is not going to act like the AI in Civ V because (non-autistic) humans understand how their actions affect the emotional state of other humans, and can use this to their advantage. And non-sociopathic humans understand that acting like a total jerk 100% of the time will make the opponent not want to play against them.
Someone please mail this analysis to firaxis...it is both true and hilarious. :lol:
 
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