Grandadmiral, considering they did quite well in CIV I suspect the diplomatic AI might just be another victim of the rather shoddy work done on this game, especially if you take into account that they made a lot of weird choices post release, almost like the did'nt really conduct a beta.
Tyboy, actually you where intruding into the conversation by claiming I shouldn't compare SC2 to CiV because it's a bad comparison, I completely agree here, I even stated exactly that in a discussion in the "No iron" thread that is severely suffering from wall of text syndrome at this point. But again, I was never the one to start about the RTS comparison, I was just commenting on an unrelated tangent about Blizzard AI that you latched onto rather vehemently.
For the record though, I do believe that the Blizzard AI is better then the CiV one, this is not entirely relevant to the OP but in lieu of more interesting posts I suppose I will indulge.
For one, the Blizzard AI is a lot better at what it was intended to do, and the same goes for overall complexity, what you seem to forget is that you take on a single Blizzard AI, while to win a CiV game you have to best about 6-12 of them. You can't just roflstomp through 6 brutal enemies once you a good army rolling, and even then, unlike in CiV due to 1UPT, the amounts actually matter.
And on the lower levels of SC2 the AI most certainly does not have impeccable micro of units, try it out for yourself.
Honestly, I could make a list here of the absurd amounts of mistakes the AI makes that could actually have been programmed out, I'll give a few that spring to mind as relevant but you know as well as I do that most of the general forum is filled with posts about peoples incomprehension at the terrible mistakes the Diplo and War AI makes.
No unit formation whatsoever, yes it lacking dynamic movement is a problem but if it would at least send it's line or wall of units in consecutive waves this would be mostly fixed, IE when the war would be initiated, make unit cluster -> send meelee wave, when first or last unit at x distance or x turns have passed -> send out the ranged wave.
Not updating the AI with the nerfs, some civs are just completely powerless at this point because they make a lot of unit's that have been heavily nerfed, the Ottomans and England come to mind, they still bother making huge navies, sacking their economies for it and then having their cities taken while their ships just sit there attacking some city it won't be able to take anyway.
I don't often encounter a civ going for large amount of horse units, perhaps due to how bad the AI is at connecting resources and a tendency for early warmonger civs to spawn next to me but I imagine it would fare the same as the naval focused AI scenario.
Terrain, again, this should not be that hard to implement without learning the AI hex combat, it's just a matter of giving unit's orders before they engage, IE If first attack unit is in 3 range of enemy force, prioritize hill&forest&etc in 2 range unless in 2 range of attacking units, as it's army will still be clumped up there will still be undesirable spots because they need to stay in formation but where possible the AI will pick out a better spot to engage, simple commands like this could easily make the terrain workable for the AI.
Escorts and GP, the AI often thinks a GG is an army unit that should lead the attack because it doesn't have to wait for the rest of the army to make their journey, telling the AI to always keep a strong army unit on the GG if it's in a war could easily fix this, sure, and then you could even attach a script for it to go to the nearest unit with a good amount of health. If an AI tries for a overseas invasion and you have 2 trirememes or so, the AI is dead, sending a few escorts should be about as easy as the GG script as I believe they can stack (been ages since I bothered with an overseas invasion that did'nt involve just rushbuying an entirely new army there).
I'll stop here due to the aforementioned wall of text syndrome.
The only major mistakes I can think of that the SC2 AI makes is it's inability to stop a Cannon rush and it's tendency to not expand enough, and as I havn't played the SC2 AI in a very long time so patches might very well have improved the game at this point, not to mention that it's a game that mostly revolves around multiplayer, if their AI actually was poor it still would not matter because it matters very little for what people will actually do with it.
There is also the point of studio's, ofcourse Blizzard tends to work on 2 or 3 games at the same time but with a 5000 studio employee count compared to the 120 of Firaxis (both taken from Wikipedia) it is still more then likely that more then 10 times the people worked on SC2, giving them a lot more resources to spend on the AI, even if it's a smaller feature of the game (due to the lore obsession of the fans(that Blizzard managed to screw pretty hard I should note) the game still needs a somewhat capable AI though because the SC1 and BW campaigns where lauded as fantastic, and in my opinion the best storyline Blizzard has ever written).
Considering CiV was very unpolished when it was released and I have not seen the AI make any advancements, the opposite in fact, I think we can safely assume that with all the bad choices it makes on a consistent basis it was hardly play tested and altered afterwards, either the people in the studio are all terrible at the game or when faced with continuing problems they at a certain point, perhaps close to release, just threw in the towel and released in anyway, perhaps postponing it while not considering the costs associated with such an undertaking.
Or as mentioned before they just half-assed it.
And the SC2 AI does change it's formation based on what unit's it's attacking what with, which, in contrast to CiV, it knows how to prioritize.
Actually, considering he was making grand statements about how I was contradicting myself when this was clearly not the case I find the term boorish bluff still very apt.
You being an unecessary grammar nazi was fairly pointless though, I used the term boorish because it actually originates from my native language, and this is actually the most logical way to spell it if you know the original word 'Boer'.
And then you go on about a tirade about how I want to seem more knowledgeable by using fancy language, perhaps that's why you use them but in my case it's just my normal behavior, I enjoy using words like that because they're pretty, boorish bluff for instance has great poetic potential.
You essentially say I'm pretentious, which, in my country at least, is still an insult, it feels more like door into your own psyche then mine though.
Perhaps you don't realize it but correcting someones spelling, especially on the internet, the one place where people are even less likely to take your opinion seriously, makes you come over as a pretty annoying person, I would enjoy continuing the discussion as you seem relatively knowledgeable about the subject matter but for gods sake don't stoop to such low tactics.
Shurdus, feel free to latch onto any comment I made about the complexity of the AI's in question, I'd like to hear any rebuttals.
Wannabe, I'm not going to respond to your last comments, just stay out of the discussion, you have not contributed anything of value.
Moderator Action: Given the above moderator warnings, aspects of this post, particularly towards the end, aren't going to produce anything but a negative reaction.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
