Let's talk ciV AI (Suggestions/Fixes) for the Developers

[dexters]

I am resurrecting this thread to address some spit and polish issues as well as general suggestions that should help improve AI performance.

The old list can be seen below hidden in the spoiler section.
Below are current issues as of [1.0.1.383] As I'm not an AI programmer, these are written in lay person's POV

Changelog:
8/26/2011 - Old issues/solution in spoiler tab below / New & current issues/solutions shown below.

Spoiler :

Please
Observations:
Military

• Injured units reliably pull back. So the bombard from a distance to stop an invading unit 'trick' works
• AI is often more concerned with 'zerg rushing' the front that keeping a cohesive line. If the frontline units are defeated, the AI will rush in auxillary units to continue the offensive (ie: sending in Anti-tank guns and even artillery right up to the enemy line)
• Ranged units are often left unprotected
• There is a lack of a cohesive 'front' when the battle is joined. The AI does a fine job of moving its troops up to borders where another Civ masses their troops often arrayed in an impressive line of infantry/pikes in front supported by cannons/ranged/catapults, but once the battle commences, discipline breaks down. Destroyed units are not replaced, units who survive rush forward. Range units are left exposed or as noted, are moved to where the dead front-line unit was, leaving them open for destruction
• AI doesn't understand naval power and air power and rarely move units overseas.
• (NEW)AI is often well aware when it's offensive units are running low. They can be counted to call up the Civ to ask for peace. An AI might acquiesce, but a human player sensing a chance to take AI cities will refuse.

Suggestions:

• Add certain randomness to AI behavior. Certain leaders may retreat unit with slight damage and play conservatively, while others may go all in.
• Allow for variations in AI behavior in unit management. Again through the use of conservative <-> agressive spectrum.
• Allow for variations even within certain playstyles. A conservative AI who pulls troops back and prefers to soften targets with Ranged may once in a while rush a target
• (not an AI programmer) - To Solve the oft reported 'Artillery left exposed and undefended' critcism, make ranged units have a certain stickyness to them so they move in close sync with other units deemed 'defenders of ranged units'. If none are nearby, these ranged units will then retreat
• Avoid falling into the 'zerg' trap of defense. Allow AI to plot and hold reserves of troops on DOW. It's amazing how little has changed since CivIII, where the AI could be reliably expected to throw all of its forces on the opening turns of a war and are subsequently left defenseless
• (NEW)When the AI realizes its troop count has fallen below a certain threshold, employ the ' Mother Russia' strategy, pull back all remaining forces, and force the other side to attack. The shortened supply lines will help in the defense of the empire, while the enemy's extended lines could cause strategic error and units to become isolated. This symmetrical shift in bonuses/penalties is strategically a good choice and preferable to losing every last unit and becoming completely defenseless.

City States

• City State AI is completely incapable of doing anything meaningful. They
  do not or rarely support allies/master Civ in times of war.
• Troops patrol aimlessly within their borders.
• Coastal City States reliably fail to build a navy of any kind. Only when they are gifted warships do they upgrade them. Even then, the ships, like the land units remain within their cultural borders.
• City States cannot mount of a serious attack on another city state, in the rare occasions where two go to war.

Suggestions:

• Allied City states should have automatic open borders with their masters, allowing them to move their troops to hotspots to help
• City states shouldn't be stuck as 'quest givers' and 'damsels in distress' and use its units to their advantage.
• Neutral CS can explore and have maps for purchase
• Military/Agressive CS may ask one Civ to attack another in return for allegiance
• Give CS production bonuses (if required) so they can field more potent military forces

Diplomacy

• Liberated Civs are often petulant and ungrateful. We have their UN vote but it doesnt feel like they want to do it.
• While role-playing leaders ala the ones found in Civ4 are gone, the scheming aggressive leaders found in Civ3 which the AI most closely resemble lack the ruthlessness of the old Civ3 AI.
• There is a lack of nuance in AI behavior. It generally seems to be between 'tolerable' and 'hostile' as the two working modes of the AI. This leads to shallow diplomacy.
• (NEW)AI X is at war with AI Y. I talk to the leader of Y. And leader refuses to
  1) Sign secret pact against X,
  2) Refuses to discussing me declaring war on them
  3) When I exit the 'discuss' option and go back to trade, and offered to declare war on X and ask whim what he would offer, AI replies "That is not even close to a fair deal"

Suggestions:

• (gameplay) Return the flexible trade tables allowed in CivIII. ALLOW lumpsum for GPT deals
• Allow more flexible deal terms for non-standard trades. of 10,20,30 turn durations (ie: 100 gold to AI in exchange for 6 gpt for 20 turns)
• Allow interest/arbitrage values to be calculated (if it isn't already by calculated) by the diplomatic AI to support meaningful trade and further enhance the central important of 'gold' in the game.
• Liberated Civs, should be friendly.
• Give AI civs the appropriate range of behavior to support the banter in-game (friendly/pleased/cautious/hostile). As I described in this post.
  
  
  

  That's probably what people complain about, they play to win so they treat everyone as a potential enemy.
  
  But here's the salient difference. The CivIII AI was ruthless and was often described like 'a pack of dogs'. It was completely ruthless and wonderful. But in that game you can really buddy up withb an AI if there's common interest and be on fantastic terms with them. There's that feeling of alliance and friendship or working towards a goal (maybe both of you want to beat down a more powerful 3rd Civ).
  
  Though the Civ5 AI does offer quite a few suggestions on who to form pacts of 'secrecy' against they are often running their own agenda, and when you work with them, you're treated like a disposable ally. It feels like you're completely alone in Civ5, and I think that's what people are reporting back when they mean the AI is ganging up on the humans.

  
  

• (NEW)When AI is at war, adjust script so that they are willing to sign secret pacts against agressor and will accept offers to go war with a gold payment.

Problem:(NEW)

As I noted in this post, the AI has all the mechanisms to catch /spot what the player is doing but there are areas where it lacks coherence in specific situaitons which I suspect will come up quite often with 'human' player.

The situation:
- Player have Pact of co-operation, and open borders with Civ X, and have signed a secret treaty with Civ X against a much larger Civ Y which is threatening Civ X
- Player moves their troops inside Civ X's territory in hopes there will be an opportunity to jointly declare war against Civ Y or simply to protect Civ X from Y.

The Issue:
-Civ X will fail to look at the power balance, proximity of Civ Y and the deals at hand when evaluation relationships
- Civ X will see close military proximity as a threat (its a potential threat) but fails to consider mitigating treaties
- Civ X will see player aggression against weaker Civs a world away as a threat to itself (also logical generally, but not logical in this case)



Suggestions:
-Pact of military co-operation against <insert Civ here> as a pact in addition of pact of secrecy.
-This pact:

• Is public. AI will see a global announcement. Human players can also see it if AIs sign one against them.
• Can be signed without pact of secrecy, but combined with secrecy grants a double modifier which allows AI to be more willing to go to war with the target Civ.
• Enhances relationship bonus for gifting units
• Penalty of having your troops near their cities reduced but not removed completely
• Penalty of aggression of on the Civs removed for the duration of the pact
• Strong global penalty for breaking this deal and attacking the partner Civ. (global war? no trades allowed etc.)

Errata - Issues from other Posters

More problems with teams:

- Confirmed that wonders don't give shared benefits. The Great Library was built by an AI teammate, and it didn't appear to give me their free tech. The Pyramids was built by an AI teammate, and it does not seem to have sped up my Worker speed. I suspect this is going to be the case for all wonders. In Civ4 they had shared benefits in teams, which made sense. What's up with Civ5?

- AI teammates offer excess resources to other civs with preference over your own. This is backwards; in Civ4 they always offered excess resources to you first.

- No control over which City States your AI teammates go to war with. This not only means they can attack a city state you were hoping to ally with soon, but they can ruin your chances to gain future city state allies because of their warmongering ("City States band together" event). The power to control wars with City States in a team with one human player and the rest AI players should ALWAYS reside with the human player.

- The above also makes me suspicious that AI teammates may be able to declare war on other civs without your consent. As before, in a team with one human player and the rest AI players, this power should always rest with the human player.

Economy
Issue:
AI governors believe tiles within a city radius needs improving and continue to suggest workers as an economic build choice even when the empire have enough workers and the tiles around a city are improved. This is likely the source of numerous reports from human players observing the AI having too many workers

• Wasted hammers
• Wasted gold upkeep

This issue can be easily observed with how city governors work for human players.

Spoiler :

Solutions

• This issue appears to have been introduced during one of the recent patches/updates (There was a previous issue where City States would not build workers after their initial builds were captures and pillaged tiles are never repaired). This Could be the unintended result of this fix or another fix
• One possible solution is to fix how AI decides if tiles around a city needs improving and crosscheck it with number of workers on hand

From my AI Puppet Empires - the Paper Tiger thread
Issues:

• AI will not annex conquered cities ;
• 'Gold' Focus is often sub-optimal for larger cities which could build gold producing buildings/science and culture buildings at a faster rate on 'default' focus. Getting multiplier buildings up sooner is more effective! High production/pop cities could be put into better use producing MORE culture annexed; and units
• Large AI puppet empires are often susceptible to 'total collapse' if their main armies are defeated or occupied elsewhere (say 2 front war with the 2nd front on the other size of their large empire) and their productive core is attacked on the other side. Leaving the rest of the empire prostrate and undefended. This quicky destroys their main armies and they are left feeding in a few units at a time per turn.
• Capitol AI will routinely place a Civ's 2nd and 3rd capitals into a puppeted city, often of decent size. But the AI seems unable to deal with this - ie: notice their capital is a puppet.
• The AI appears oblivious that they have puppeted cities

Solutions:

• Allow AI to annex and rush buy courthouses in high pop/production cities, especially those in resource rich/food rich/production rich areas. This won't be universal, but they will do it for SOME of them. preference could be form size/growth potential/existing infrastructure/distance from capital (for symmetry)
  
• Target cities that symeterically balance the current core, to spread out production over more nodes in a large empire
• Do the annexing in the 'peace' phase after a conquest, not in the heat of the battle - The idea is for 'consolidation' rather than the current issue of a relatively small core dragging along a large empire that is completely dependent on the core to produce units and non commercial buildings

Tactical AI
Issue:
AI will rush in a defender and worker on a red-lined city which would have fallen regardless.

Solutions:

• Check City HP before sending in Sierge units to defend
• Check local enemy superiority to decide if the risk it work taking. And if enemy is locally superior, check to see if units (air/land/sea) can be combined to weaken attackers
• The idea is not to have the AI NEVER play this gambit, but to do so prudently.

Issue:
When attacked and having their field armies destroyed, AI will feed in units piecemeal, instead of retreating remaining damaged units and mustering a force to counterattack. This hastens, collapse of AI empires.

Solutions:

• Related to my earlier point about annexation of puppet cities, AI needs to annex cities and develop those cities to increase 'real' production proportionately with growth of empire; as a corollary, Annex cities as needed when production is lost elsewhere.
• Evaluate threat level of invasion and formulate a force required to respond. This will be a variable bounded/balanced by the by gold rush buying units/production and the time required.
• Engage in disruptive attack behaviour by attacking flanks, and supply lines and not directly at the next besieged city. A Human player can usually redirect besieging forces to destory enemy units. The working assumption must be that a counter-attack is to disrupt and not to directly attack invasion forces.

Victory
Issue:
AI have a sticky cash problem - (they like to hold on to their cash far too much) This has led to the following scenarios.

• Despite having a 2.5 to 1 gold advantage an AI willingly let me buy up all the city states 1 turn away from UN victory and win a game I would have easily lost
• As their forces are whittled down during a war, AI gpt will often improve and gold reserves will go up. It is not uncommon to see an AI with 10,000 or 20,000 gold reserves sitting like a lame duck as their cities fall around them. Though this may be due to the fact the AI lack enough unpuppeted cities to rushbuy those units.

Solutions:

• Set gold reserve ratio based on perceived threat level over both long and short term. While holding a large stockpile is a good long-term strategy, not using this cash becomes a short term liability when those long-term problems become short-term problems in the situation of say Total War or a clock running down to UN victory
• Corollary to my previous point about city annexation*, city annexation is key to create more possible nodes of production. This will enable AI to use this cash to rushbuy infrastructure and units. And AI that can rushbuy units in its core + annexed cities will always have more units, and ultimately more usable production (that the AI civ can direct as needed) than the same AI relying on its core to support the rest of his empire.
  
  *As noted earlier, annexation needs to meet a criteria (growth potential, size etc) and this isn't a suggestion for a carte blanche request to have the AI annex most of their cities (that is bad too)

 

[carlisimo]

In my games city-states have fought better than in yours, though they never had the right units to actually take anything. They defended their land then entered a hex or two into enemy territory. That led the enemy to sue for peace.

But as we know, the combat AI is generally weak. To me it looks like it just doesn&#8217;t have any definite goals. The AI should only declare war when it wants something, like a city with a strategic resource, or to destroy a city with a strong research score, etc. Sometimes it should demand it first. In my current game the Chinese have declared war on me twice but they spread out their attacking forces. If they had concentrated them, they could&#8217;ve taken one of two cities. Also, I had a lot of elephants (as Siam) yet they didn&#8217;t train any mounted units.

Empire: Total War was said to have a &#8220;goal oriented&#8221; AI but it didn&#8217;t work very well. Maybe it&#8217;s easier said than done.

 

[Malkaviel]

how the hell did you totally miss this?

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=119

Please

post threads in appropriate forums.

Moderator Action: Please use the report post function if you believe a post is in the wrong forum, thanks.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Drawmeus]

I've had the opposite experience regarding the AI dealing with injured units. It doesn't retreat its own injured units, and it doesn't prioritize killing mine more than usual. Both of those behaviors are totally wrong.

The AI seems ignorant of Zones of Control - even when it isn't too busy rushing the front line with artillery, it doesn't effectively use its melee units to cover all approaches to its artillery. There are times when you gamble, but it isn't doing that, it's just not thinking about it at all.

The main problem I've noticed is that it appears to be judging what to do with each unit independently. It should be maintaining goals at four levels levels - civilization ("conquer that enemy civ as part of my plan to win a Domination victory"), theatre ("move troops towards a staging area in order to conquer their city of Brussels"), battlefield ("coordinate the infantry and artillery that I've staged for attacking Brussels to take the city with minimum losses"), and tactical ("Move the Infantry to prevent an attack on the Artillery by that enemy Infantry unit"). Essentially, the AI appears to be missing the battlefield layer; instead of setting the priorities for an Artillery unit to "Bombard their city so that your Infantry can favorably assault it in a few turns" and an Infantry unit as "Prevent the enemy from being able to attack your Artillery unit that's going to bombard their city", the priorities for both the Infantry and the Artillery seem to be set to "Attack that city", leading to a total lack of coordination between them in a combat system in which coordinating mixed military forces is incredibly important.

 

[dexters]

City States military and I assume battle AI in general also get stuck in a loop.

I've seen a city state feed in 1 unit at a time to a Civ they are at war with.

The Pike would walk up to the city, get bombarded by the city, fortify, and just sit there getting killed. -2 per bombard +1 from hp healed.

CS seems to have issues running its military, granted military AI in general seems to need some work.

 

[Scipio Aetius]

Detailed diplomacy screens that provide graphic info. You really get the feeling that you are "flying blind" with the current set up.

 

[galahadba]

One big problem of the AI is that they do not avaliate the chances winning apropriatelly.

many people compains that the ai get all their forces to war... having a backup force is good of course, but it is not the great problem, to get everything to war is in great part of the times THE thing to do, unless you have problems in other fronts or have suspicious of being atacked by another ai, the human player do the same thing theres no reasom the let units iddle when they can be put in good use for war.


The problem with the ai is that it needs an better algoritm to decide when to atack, when to defend, when to pull back it forces... many examples can be show:

1 - When the human player gets a force to atack a city, lets say, 5 units... then if you lose 2 of then, you avaliate if the 3 avaliable are enoth to do the job, if not, you stop the atack and:
- Wait until you can get more units to the front
- Go to a supresion war, pillaging thing to do damage to the enemy economy and get some gold.
- Call back the atack if you don't have mor units to defend apropriatelly you empire.
- If have a small chance of winnig decide wenever is worth taking the risk of losing everything

2 - If some more powerfull enemy atacks you, you get your units in defensive position to defend your empire until you have a good enoth force to make a counter atack, the ai simply goes atack you with everything it has

3 - If you get into a well defended pass, or any well strutured enemy position:
- You try to win by quantity , joining a good force and trying to atack at once, not a little at time
- You put a defensive possition in the same pass and try to find another way to atack (by sea for example)

And many other examples.... the devs have to spend some time to make and algoritm to analyse situations like these. the ai now just go an "all or nothing" atack, lose all its units and normaly gets nothing...

 

[Moss]

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas and Suggestions forum.

 

[carlisimo]

Detailed diplomacy screens that provide graphic info. You really get the feeling that you are "flying blind" with the current set up.

Isn't that more realistic? I thought it was silly to get so much detail in Civ IV.

 

[galahadba]

Isn't that more realistic? I thought it was silly to get so much detail in Civ IV.

Agreed. the fact you don't see the modifiers is alot better for me.

The only diplomacy problem for me is the inconsistency.
as it is now the ai rejects every offer you do (go to war, pact of coperacy, etc) even when it wants to do it, and have ofered one turn before or will offer you a turn after...

The Ai should have a list of things it would accept, and it should last for a few turns at least... i am not saying that refusing to go to war with him in a turn cannot change its disposal to join you a few turns latter... but as it is now it never considers what is good for him strategicly, only the offer in the table. it means the AI will only consider is the gold you are giving is enoth to go to war with a civ of that strenght and not that the same civ is hostile, stronger , share borders with him and that they are trying to convince you to join then in a war for some time to get rid of that danger...

 

[carlisimo]

Oh yeah, no argument there. I like the new diplomatic presentation, but the system is about as bad as every diplomatic system in every game I&#8217;ve played (all the Civs, all the Total War games, Master of Orion&#8230; I suppose it&#8217;s just beyond our abilities).

This may be controversial, but I would have civilizations make public announcements saying &#8220;Japan wants Oil&#8221; or &#8220;Germany needs living space&#8221; or something like that, and then you know they might behave a little aggressively in the next few turns if you have an oil well near their territory. It&#8217;d also give you a chance to trade with them. They shouldn&#8217;t always telegraph their desires, but it&#8217;d create an atmosphere of international relations that&#8217;s missing. (And I&#8217;m never going to accept an Open Borders offer if they don&#8217;t tell me what they&#8217;re going to do with it!)

Liberated nations need to be more friendly, but that&#8217;s related to all those other problems of borders or military action causing distrust. Just being near another civilization, or expanding in a war you didn&#8217;t start (to a point), should not cause so much diplomatic unhappiness. Maybe puppet states shouldn&#8217;t either. It feels like there are some diplomatic downward spirals that are impossible to get out of and that&#8217;s disappointing.

 

[dexters]

I think the diplo AI is more astute than we give it credit for.

AI will consider all actions. Including trades, what we given them for a discount, how we handle their requests etc. The only trick from way back in the Civ3 days of giving them a paltry gift to keep the 'we've been trading' flag checked off no longer applies.

Obviously there are other overriding issues, if the AI wants your land, it will declare war.

 

[dexters]

Here's another issue. In my recent game on King difficulty, I encountered a true AI giant. France wiped out 4 Civs on his continent. By the modern era he was twice my size. 2x the pop, land, gold, hammers.

90% of his cities, the conquered portion, are all PUPPETS.

There's something wrong here as the AI appears to never annex any cities and or do not favour it. So runaway AIs become paper tigers. Lots of territory, and lots of culture/gold, but a mediocre player like myself could muster an invasion that has completely wrecked Napoleon's army.

This shouldn't be possible in CiV. As much as I like being able to do it and or brag about it. It's just ridiculous.

 

[mamuz]

My 2 cents :

About tactical AI (manage a battlefield).
I've got the impression that each AI's units works individually. Maybe, the AI should have an "human help" as a base for managing his units. For exemple, don't consider 1 catapult, 1 pikeman and 1 spadassin like 3 strictly distinct units, but as a group of 3 units linked by a priority (stay together as long as possible). It's not because stacks has dissapeared that groups of units should dissapear, too. AI should "just" think horizontal instead of vertical.

AI is a complex thing to develop, but, here, it's not impossible. Even "Advanced War" on the Nintendo DS has a correct AI to manage the battlefield. It was not a strategic genius, but it makes no big big mistakes (but i think it's easier to develop a correct AI if units can move a bit more than in Civ V, 'cause of an easier pathfinding).

About diplomatic AI (manage relationship).
Hard to say. We are a bit blind about what a leader thinl about the others. Maybe, it's logic. Maybe the strange behaviours are linked to the General AI.

About general AI (how to reach the victory).
Hard. Really hard. Good luck to developpers... I've no good ideas, here.
A leader in Civ V seems (if it's true) to redefine his own goals and priorities during the game to reach a victory. For a computer, i guess it's really a hard thing to do. Especially when it needs to stay competitive. It's harder than just have one predefined goal (for example : "go for space victory") and manage it and only it.
It seems simple for us to change our priorities temporarly in function of the others while keeping in background another goal, or reactivate it, or change it. I think it's a big challenge to program. I'm totally sure that stupid diplomatic AI behaviours can be a consequence of these changes. And, finally, i'm not sure that it's a good idea to design leaders going for the Victory, instead of having, for instance, a faithful cultural behaviour.
But, maybe, with the help of Pentagone's AI specialists and by giving us the next generation of Intel processor with the next patch, 2K will show me that i was wrong.

 

[Col Mustard]

Great stuff said here, hopefully a dev or a serious modder will work on this stuff. I honestly think that if the diplomacy AI is improved the other AI problems will be less significant.

Therefore, my suggestions primarily concern the diplomacy AI, screen, and actions/reactions. To put it simply I feel limited by the actions I can take, the information given, and the actions/reactions of the AI. The actions I can take now are basically binary and boring. I would like a list of actions for each AI action. Now, if Augustus places a new city near to mine, my options are say don't settle near me in the future, or do nothing. I can go to war but how does the AI know if I'm going to war over his new city, the resources near it, if I'm being a bully to him, or if I'm just trying to take any land I can? I should be able to take an action and be able to give a reason for the action or not give a reason. Obviously, if you don't give a reason others will see you as unreasonable. On the other side, the AI should do the same for its actions and give a reason if it thinks you should have one. You should be able to ask a leader for a reason for what they are doing as well. The AI should react to your actions and reasons according to traits/flavors of the leader, how it see your civs, and how it thinks other civs see your civ.

There should some popup or screen that shares the diplomatic relations between other civs so we can see how they act to other. For example one game, the Iroquois wanted me to make a pact of secrecy with them against Siam and Siam asked the same against the Iroquois. How am I supposed to make a decision if I have no clue how the other civs are acting. I choose to not help either and in the end Siam was conquered by the Iroquois and I later got zerg rushed by 30-40 Iroquois units. If I have known that the Iroquois were being a bully in the early game I would have helped the Siamese civ but I had no way of knowing that until Siam was conquered and the Iroquois turned on their sights on my land. A simple log on diplomatic relations between civ could have helped a lot in that situation.

On CSs, you should be able to see the influence of other civs on CSs. Also we should be able to jointly protect a CS with another civ and not have to other civ automatically hate that you also want to protect the CS. Maybe you could even become friends because you want to protect the same CS. You should gain influence with a CS if you declare that you will protect it and the diplomacy screen should show what CS city states are protected and by whom. Another thing I hate is that CS only give one quest at a time and if that quest is to destroy another CS, you better have a lot of gold if want to have normal relations with other CS. If you destroy a couple CS while completing the quest, all CSs will hate you which is ******** since you had a reason to conquer that CS. Because of this, rarely does a destroy another CS quest get completed but the quest stays there for the rest of the game! This seriously limits CS diplomacy because you know that eventually an allied CS will ask to destroy another CS that you want to ally with and then them only thing you can do it shovel gold at them. Maybe a turn limit for any given quest should be used; so that, you have 20 turns to build a road to connect your capital to the CS.

 

[dexters]

Updated:

AI X is at war with AI Y. I talk to the leader of Y. And leader refuses to
1) Sign secret pact against X,
2) Refuses to discussing me declaring war on them
3) When I exit the 'discuss' option and go back to trade, and offered to declare war on X and ask him what he would offer, AI replies "That is not even close to a fair deal"

Solution:
When AI is at war, adjust script so that they are willing to sign secret pacts against aggressor and will accept offers to go war with a gold payment.

 

[Becephalus]

AI makes poor unit choices. I often see it building a half dozen or even a dozen settlers in the 1700s when there is no land left.

It love anti tank and anti aircraft guns when there are no tanks or aircraft about.

 

[Creepy Old Man]

The ai really needs to place a greater emphasis on defending capital cities. Especially end game. Especially when the capital is coastal.

I just finished a game (emperor difficulty) on a "continents" world. Saladin had conquered all of his continent, and I had most of mine. He and I were the only players who still had capitals. So I assembled a few destroyers and a single infantry. I went, and in one turn, declared war, bombarded his capital to defenseless, and amphibious assaulted with the infantry. Game over.

According to statistics, he had more land than me, double the food, gold, and resource production I had, and a much stronger army. He was also more technologically advanced than me.

Note that his capital, when I did this, did not have city walls, and did not have a military unit garrisoned in it.

At an absolute minimum, capitals need defensive buildings, garrisons, and, when they're coastal, they need naval units patrolling. At least near end game, when there are few capitals left.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Numerous issues with the AI in team play. It seems literally untested, rife with bugs and glitches.

All of the following glitches I found in less than one hour of playtesting. LESS than one hour. If anyone had even started up a test game in teams before release, these things would have been noticed immediately. Apparently that never happened.

A few key bulletpoints:

- Teamed AI treats you with just as much rudeness, derision and hostility as regular AI. They also complain about your bloodlust and hope for your failure when you're in a war together. Huh? Where's the perma-friendly relations for allies that was in Civ4?

- Teamed AI's refuse requests for gold, resources, etc. What kind of alliance is that? A very stark contrast to Civ4 where they were always only too happy to help.

- No ability to see into your teammate's cities. Consequently, no way to check how much gold, research or culture any teammate is producing (AI or not). Your could do this in Civ4 easily. HUGE oversight.

- No option to suggest to the AI what to do with its military. (Like in Civ4.)

- No method to switch tiles between allies. (Civ4 had at least a makeshift solution.)

- Friendly units from the same team are unable to mix (e.g. Workers cannot improve tiles where friendly military units are sitting).

- City State bonuses only apply to ONE team member. How was this overlooked? Consequently, your teammates buy out City States from underneath you. How cooperative.

- No method to suggest to the AI where to focus its gold (upgrades, particular city states, etc).

- AI opponents on teams come to you separately looking for pacts of cooperation and secrecy. This should instead be a team-wide effect.

- Social Policies are separate for every team member, not combined for the team as a whole. Not sure if this is intentional or not, but it seems wrong. It contributes more to the feeling of teammates playing separate games with their empires than managing a cooperative strategy together.

- Haven't checked them all yet, but I believe at least some wonders may not be providing effects to all teammates, as they should do (they did in Civ4). Will get back on this later.

That's just the start of the list. I'm adding more issues as I go to the original thread.

 

[dexters]

Military
-AI is often well aware when it's offensive units are running low. They can be counted to call up the Civ to ask for peace. An AI might acquiesce, but a human player sensing a chance to take AI cities will refuse.

Suggestion
-When the AI realizes its troop count has fallen below a certain threshold, employ the ' Mother Russia' strategy, pull back all remaining forces, and force the other side to attack. The shortened supply lines will help in the defense of the empire, while the enemy's extended lines could cause strategic error and units to become isolated. This symmetrical shift in bonuses/penalties is strategically a good choice and preferable to losing every last unit and becoming completely defenseless.