MP AI significantly worse than SP?

[Goodgimp]

After taking a long break from Civ5, I picked up Gods and Kings and started playing with it again. After several single player games, I had the opportunity over the course of three weekends to get a lot of multiplayer games (coop) in with a friend of mine. In these cases, we arranged teams for both ourselves and the AI. Listed below are the types of setups we used (all games on Marathon / Large Continents except for the last Immortal game on Pangea)

[Emperor] 2v4v4
[Emperior] 2v5
[Immortal] 2v2v2v2
[Immortal] 2v3v3 (pangea)

Now, in my single player experience with the game, while the AI isn't by any means great, it's still able to put together an army and attack a city. It doesn't do it particularly well, but it does have decent odds of taking out a city if it's not defended by a few units.

In multiplayer, it feels as though the AI has significantly more issues. It'll frequently declare war, but then never show up with an army. If it does come with an army, it oftentimes sends 2-3 pikemen and maybe a bowman/crossbow but just wander them back and forth in front of a city while you shoot them full of holes. Over the course of several MP games, I've yet to see the AI manage to mount any sort of decent attack, even on ungarrisoned cities.

In the latest multiplayer game in Immortal, we won (conquest) in about 1500AD without really even trying to do so. Both of us had pretty poor starts in terms of location (I was sandwiched between the tundra and the desert with little in the way of food resources), but we still steamrolled them. Most of the AI cities in 1500AD had barely any improvements and they were fielding only warriors with a few pikes and crossbows. Needless to say, they didn't stand much of a chance against riflemen and cannon.

I wasn't sure if I either had a bad string of luck or if it was setting the AI into teams that was causing the issue, so I fired up two more single player games on Emperor. In both cases I had the AI aggressively attack cities by the time AD rolled around, and in one case took one of my cities (my bad, I wasn't as prepared as I should have been).

Next, I went back to a multiplayer game, FFA, but I'm playing by myself. It's around 700AD and most of the AIs have barely budged. I've been under no threat, my entire army consists of a composite bowman and a swordsman. They AI has made no aggressive moves, neither towards myself or another player, from what I've seen. I'm pulling far ahead and tech and already by 700AD I can tell this is going to be an easy win again.

So anyway, in conclusion, the MP AI seems really, really off. I thought sometime last year they released a patch that said they were making the MP AI the same as SP AI (whatever that meant), but that's not been my experience.

Does anyone else have experience with AI in multiplayer Civ5? Has what I seen over the past few weeks just been really bad luck or is it just extra bad in MP?

 

[NQ_carls13]

Very interesting post It makes sense, what you've pointed out.

My experience is this: I played an 8 player mp game on deity last week. 2 players dropped in the first 10 turns. 1 of those players was next to me. I thought great now I have a deity ai next to me. From my experience playing deity in sp I assumed I would be crushed shortly. It was the opposite. Yes they mounted an attack but if was as you say half hazard at best. I held them off with 2 composite bowman. It was more target practice then anything else.

Yesterday(in single player mode) I did a few trial runs of industrial start to practice my start for a GMR game we just started. It was on emperor level. All 3 of the starts I practiced the ai mounted an attack within the first 10-15 turns. The attacks were much more significant and required some real attention to fight them off.

 

[madm]

Same here. I play coop MP games with a friend, usually 2v2v2 or so on a small world, emperor/immortal level. We have played about 10 of such games since G&K. I fully recognize your description of the AI. In addition to terrible warfare, also AI expansion is quite often (though not always) poor.
One of the patches before G&K that stated that MP AI was now the same as SP AI did change something in our experience -the MP AI seemed to be a bit better after that patch. But with G&K we seem to be back at zero again; while SP AI is just satisfactory, MP AI is horrible.

 

[Dragonmaster83]

Well I never use the team options anymore as I've always seen problems with AI when its on a team (either another AI or human).

 

[madm]

I don't think it's a team issue for the AI (though you're right, the AI can't properly play as a team). We sometimes play 2v1v1v1v1 (with some tweaked options for the AI) and find the same poor AI behavior.

 

[NQ_carls13]

I think what it boils down too is the ai sucks!! Play humans for the real experience

 

[Goodgimp]

I think what it boils down too is the ai sucks!! Play humans for the real experience

I agree that it sucks. Generally speaking, I don't care much for the 4X experience in terms of competitive play. When I play a game like Civ, I play on huge maps with Marathon setting which is not very conducive to competitive play online. These games have always been about the coop experience for me, with me giving the AI massive bonuses (or huge teams) to compensate for their general ineptitude.

The problem is that in Civ5, the AI in multiplayer is so bad that I could probably stack 10 Deity level AIs against me and still not lose, simply because they seem incapable of attacking a city. This is a big problem for me and it's very frustrating.

It wasn't until I went back to a single player game that I noticed the huge discrepancy in AI quality between SP/MP modes, which prompted me to post here. It's interesting to see that others have experienced similar issues. Unfortunately, my faith in Firaxis actually addressing this is almost nil, so I may have to shelve this game again. It's too bad, too, because while I have a laundry list of complaints about Civ5, there's a lot of good stuff going for it too!

 

[madm]

Just to tie two threads on this forum together (see forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=11755124): by tweaking the AI settings I found out that in MP mode the settings in the xml files in the ...\Gameplay\XML\AI directory are not incorporated in the game, while these settings do influence AI in SP games. This could well be the cause of the poor AI in MP games. Hope they will fix this!