Make The AI Great at Conquering Again

[Trav'ling Canuck]

If the chance is impactful enough, I agree - I don't mind that my archer might do 15 to 23 damage on an attack, I don't feel like it's the end of the world if I get 15 on that roll. But if the downside is as impactful as losing something that I built instead of setting up my infrastructure, it's just too annoyingly random to me.

This won't happen in Civ 7 as we would have seen evidence of it, but I'd prefer Civ got away from building units directly and instead had you build military infrastructure. That infrastructure would then allow you to field a certain number of trained troops (determined by your tech) to go along with, when defending at home, a certain number of lower quality levy troops. When units are eliminated in the field, after a few turns delay, they get replaced for free.

Not only would this better represent what typically happened in history and eliminate the need for a maintenance system, its also more AI- and newbie-friendly: poor tactical decisions that result in losing some units wouldn't lead so directly into having your entire army destroyed and all your cities captured.

 

[dagriggstar]

I don't remember exactly where, I think I read somewhere that if you conquer a city the city keeps its unique infrastructure. If that's the case then I could see conquest being the "meta" - best way to guarantee multiple bonuses in the next age will be to conquer other capitals sort of mid age after their unique quarters/improvements are up then build your own there. Bonus if you can capture wonders.

The AI is going to have to be good at warfare.

 

[ThunderLizard2]

The AI is going to have to be good at warfare.

And so far I see no evidence of that being the case

 

[aieeegrunt]

Yes! If I get beat in a strategy game I'm much more inclined to give it another go and try better next time. And I actually find the Game Over state in Civ much more satisfying than the next-turn-click-mouse-button-slog that is called Victory.

I'm hoping they dial way down how powerful cities are. The AI had an easier time in the first four Civ's where cities were defenceless. It seems that cities doesn't shoot anymore, which I always didn't like, and it will hopefully help the AI. I mean, I see from a development perspective why they made cities hard to loose for the player so new players wouldn't be scared away from the game, but for me it just doesn't work and it doesn't seem to work that well for the AI too. Scaling down city HP poses it's own problems with 1upt. Before you could stack huge ammounts of units within the city and protect it. Not so much with 1upt.

Hopefully the new generals could fix this, so there is some way to stack units in the cities. I'd say, make defenseless cities bite the dust!

Cities without walls were usually easy to take provided they didn’t have field armies protecting them up till modern steel rebar concrete construction happened.

It’s good history AND good gameplay to dramatically reduce their defensive values till Steel. You could easily reflect this in Civ6 since I think there is a mechanic for it already where city defense jumps up a lot when you discover Steel.

Ed Beach said they were quite content with the tactical AI in Civ6 so it seems not much has been changed there. What they did fix is the difficult movement of armies.

However, IMHO, the movement wasn't the only problem: army composition, the lack of late game units and inefficient sieges hampered the AI conducting a war massively. Often the Barbarians were more of a threat than other civs.

Wait what? The AI in 6 is the worst in the series by a mile.

Speaking of Civ 6 war AI, on a hunch I reduced combat strength of crossbowman and archers in the game files, and the AI was able to conquer cities after this. I only played one game, however, so this isn't an accurate test. Because I've noticed how hard it is to conquer a city in Civ 6 that has walls and a crossbowman in it. And the AI certainly can't conquer your city with those things, but even against other AI's it struggles. I just feel like the combat values of ranged units is unrealistically high.

I would say just getting rid of city bombards alone would help tremendously in this regard. But as I mentioned above, reduce the effectiveness of ranged units.

Ranged units in 6 are stupidly OP. They do far too much damage, and the combo of slow units, multi hex range, and 1 UPT means they can often get multiple shots in and focus fire to outright delete units

They shouldn’t be able to damage cities as well.

This is awful history and awful gameplay.

Technically I think they said they had double the number of people working on AI. Which some folks are interpreting as they now have 2 people working on AI, since they had 1 in Civ 6, while others view it as 1 person now working on AI ( or 2 people working part-time on AI), since the 1 person who did AI for Civ 6 was generally understood on this forum as being part-time on AI as they also had other dev team responsibilities.

What?!? Well no wonder it was awful. Really says a lot about priorities where AI in a predomiantly single player game is part time

This is pretty sad if it’s true

 

[Arcaian]

Wait what? The AI in 6 is the worst in the series by a mile.

I feel like people forget the way the Civ 5 AI couldn't move a ranged unit and attack on the same turn