Most competitive AI opponent?

Ronza149

Chieftain
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Well let's say on standard deity,which of the AIs are likely to become a runaway and being competitive to victory?In many of my games those runaways often include:Alexander(spamming cities,bribing CS,taking cities,etc),Hiwatha(same as Greece but puts more attention to wonders instead of CS),Shaka(domination only),Austria(likely to runaway by buying CS but not pushing hard on victory),Casimir(somewhat aggressive and great advantage from UA),Polynesia(spamming cities and going cultural),etc.Basically every civ who likes to spam cities or build wonders are likely to runaway.
Who else can you think of?Who do you hate the most?(bet everyone will vote for Greece or Iroquois)And what are your ways to prevent them from winning?
 
Well in many of my games greece obviously, ashurbinaple can runaway if he's lucky, his UA helps him maintain some semblence of tech competency. Also russia and suprisingly gandhi, who seems to be able to eat all the warmongers that attack him and get huge
 
Korea, Poland and Greece are the trifecta of Doom. If you meet them early and want go warmonger, start with them before they get too strong.
 
I find this ridiculous that in so many people's games Alexander is runaway, while I have never ever found him achieving anything in my games :lol:

He always makes some insanely stupid early war, loses, is hated by the entire world and annexed :lol:


Most dangerous AI?
- Bismarck, damn, in my games he is always either runaway or his country falls buuuut not before making lots of problems for the entire world (yeah, that's basically Germany :lol: ) Only one time I have seen him early conquered, by...
- ...Casimir :p This is crazy, I never thought my country will appear in this game, and when it appeared it is damn overpowered runaway :p
- Catherine - my favourite AI personality by far. Lots of people complain on her backstabbing, while I was NEVER EVER backstabbed by her :lol: we are always best buddies :lol: Also, she has awesome voice, music, leaderscreen, "personality", and almost always creates big stron empires
- Hiawatha: this guy is the proof that modern technology allows on creating pure evil artificial intelligence, I hate this bastard
- Shaka, yeah he knows only how to warmonger but my God, this is enough :lol:
- Haile Seilasje, somehow always manage to crate religious/cultural superpower which is damn difficult to conquer
- Pacachuti, I don't know if this is his personality or his start bias or his unique abilities, but conquering his empire was always PAIN for me...
- Darius, wondermonger no. 1
- Sejong, sciencemonger no. 1
- Gustav Adolf, I mean, he often fails but on the other hand he is completely unpredictable - he can suck for half of the game and then surprisinly conquers half of the world :0


On the opposite side - Songhai's unability to achieve absolutely anything will never stop being hilarious for me :lol: Failed state no. 1 :lol:
To be honest, Aztec fail almost as often as Songhai but for some reason I love these guys in that game, they add so much fun if they are present on the map (and I love Monty <3)
 
Well let's say on standard deity,which of the AIs are likely to become a runaway and being competitive to victory?In many of my games those runaways often include:Alexander(spamming cities,bribing CS,taking cities,etc),Hiwatha(same as Greece but puts more attention to wonders instead of CS),Shaka(domination only),Austria(likely to runaway by buying CS but not pushing hard on victory),Casimir(somewhat aggressive and great advantage from UA),Polynesia(spamming cities and going cultural),etc.Basically every civ who likes to spam cities or build wonders are likely to runaway.
Who else can you think of?Who do you hate the most?(bet everyone will vote for Greece or Iroquois)And what are your ways to prevent them from winning?

Greece in my games is always having at least one city in the mountains in a area hard to attack. So them. Otherwise, Atilla is pretty hard to beat.
 
- ...Casimir :p This is crazy, I never thought my country will appear in this game, and when it appeared it is damn overpowered runaway :p

Your country actually beat Russia once, so...
 
AI Playing peaceful: That is Korea. Their science flavor is high enough to go after the science buildings to use it's UA. And the AI handicap gives it a shot at Great Library for another major boost.
In addition, it's UUs are late enough that it doesn't interfere with it's flavors, unlike AI Babylon whose desire to build its UU & UB is competing against building libraries.
(In addition, AI doesn't know that in early game it should form an academy. :( It was coded for Vanilla when Academies were really weak and never updated)

Attaching war mongling: Persia. It's science flavor is high enough to build the science structures while conquering.
 
Greece, naturally, it's gotten to the point where in the thread where everyone was supposed to post their "top 3 tips for Civ V", somebody actually listed "Kill Alex".

One game, I was playing as Siam on a Continents map and kept getting the popup "Another civilization has lost their capital!" Naturally, it turned out to be Alex, conquering every other civ on the other continent. Welp, so much for that diplomatic victory I'd been planning. Science victory it is.

Interestingly, while everyone says that the Aztecs usually fail because they're too aggressive and get themselves wiped out, that has not been my experience almost all the time. Almost always when they appear in my games, they create a pretty strong empire with lots of cities. Rarely the strongest, but pretty strong. And although they indeed repeatedly declare war on literally everyone else, they always seem to get away with it and not get crushed into the dirt by the rest of the planet. They're like the world's biggest Karma Houdinis or something.
 
Pacachuti, I don't know if this is his personality or his start bias or his unique abilities, but conquering his empire was always PAIN for me...
it's the combination of hill start, which archery units can't fire over and use both of a melee unit's moves to enter, combined with a UU that not only retreats, but in his territory is likely retreating from a hill tile (again not allowing the attacker to use their second move to attack after it has retreated) and his UI is unlocked with construction, putting him on the path and predisposing him to adding the biggest nuisance a warmongerer can face- G-Wall against a hill civilization. If he gets G-Wall and/or Goddess of Protection pantheon, he's off limits until artillery, GWbombers, or nukes.

As far as AI civs that are more competitive, Kamehameha and Hiawatha usually do pretty well in establishing a strong empire but rarely do anything with it; they don't press hard enough towards a victory condition, and while they may be more powerful than the human player they rarely DoW unless you're REALLY asking for it (leaving a border unguarded while they spend a half dozen turns repositioning their carpet.) Augustus, Bismarck, and Napoleon are the more competitive civs that don't behave in this neutered fashion.

Also have to give props to the AI Suleiman- true, usually not the most competitive AI civ, but the ratio of "how well the AI performs: how good the civilization is" is pretty high with the Ottomans.
 
I have the feeling that Seiluman always fails in my games. If he spams next to me, he'll try to invade me with an army of 10 warriors and 5 archers, but I have Comp and swordsmen by this time.
 
AI Playing peaceful: That is Koreir science flavor is high enough to go after the science buildings to use it's UA. And the AI handicap gives it a shot at Great Library for another major boost.
In addition, it's UUs are late enough that it doesn't interfere with it's flavors, unlike AI Babylon whose desire to build its UU & UB is competing against building libraries.
(In addition, AI doesn't know that in early game it should form an academy. :( It was coded for Vanilla when Academies were really weak and never updated)

Attaching war mongling: Persia. It's science flavor is high enough to build the science structures while conquering.

Korea made a Dow on me once when I was dido of Carthage. With this, you could say that Korea isn't always peaceful.
 
Korea is the only civ that can beat me or scare me while playing peacefully now.

Catherine and Hiawatha are hard opponents because they spam cities everywhere, and the AI is good at playing wide.

Poland is all around a solid opponent, very good sometimes. Alexander can make city states a pain, and basically be the most annoying AI sometimes. Siam is similar, very annoying but also very hard to kill.

Otherwise, any AI can win a few early wars and expand though, becoming a runaway. Those civs above just tend to be more annoying than others.
 
While I haven't seen it as much lately, Persia has a tendency to do very well. I think their combination of flavors helps them build pretty solid empires, while still being able to attack and defend when they need to.

As it's been stated, Greece, Russia, and the Iroquois are usually pretty scary to spawn near. I've also found that the Shoshone, Ethiopia, and Rome do well in a decent amount of games, so those would be candidates in my opinion. Byzantium and the Dutch are usually contenders my games, developing pretty decent empires and smart alliances, but don't seem to gun for a victory condition.
 
Alex is by far the most dangerous opponent in my games. Other that usually become runaways and threaten my vicotry is Pocatello, Casimir and Bizmark.

Ceasar and Napoleon often gives me headace early game but I can't recall them ever beeing runaways later on.
 
I find the Iroquois, the Inca, Shoshone, Poland and Germany seem to do the best. I tend to play raging barbs enabled, so that explains Germany's strength. The Swedes are often pretty tough too.
 
Perhaps the toughest tall AI is Persia. They defend very well and wonder spams. Usually the culture runaway.

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Alexander almost always gives me problems. I'm not of a warmonger-type player, but he makes me want to just kill him, eat the warmonger penalty, and then just conquer the entire world and go for a domination victory (I did that to Gandhi once, haha; I posted the events of that game somewhere in the stories sub-forum).

Bismarck and Monty don't do it every game, but I know better now than to not be very on-guard around them, especially when they spawn close by, because a war could come at any time.
 
From what I've seen, the AI that most often become runaways:

  • Ethiopia (surprised they haven't been mentioned much -- they're often the largest, most cultural civ in a game)
  • Korea
  • Poland
  • Ottomans
  • Shoshone

Conversely, the ones that seem to struggle in every game:

  • Egypt (hoards a few wonders and builds burial tombs until he's nice and ripe for the plundering)
  • France (generally declares war, bites off more than he can chew, and subsequently collapses -- I think Napoleon's AI is at odds with cultural uniques)
  • Mongolia (targets a few CSs, gets denounced by the planet, and then swamped by angry AI)
  • Portugal (this civ is a bit too complicated for the AI to know what to do with it)
  • Celts (similar to France, Boudicca seems to have a strong early game before collapsing in the mid game)
 
Korea is now seeming a bit weaker in BNW to me than it was in G&K, particularly since the recent patch. The cultural game may have confused it and driven it away from its classic focus on science.
 
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