Peaceful game - nice try

[bryanw1995]

The problem is that the AI seems to be more random than ever.

I am currently having a game (emperor/huge/continents) in which I am friend with everybody (turn 232).
I haven't fired a single shot in this game except against barbarians.

Have I changed my playstyle? No.
The same nations which in the previous game conveted my lands while being half a continent away, denouncing me in turn 50 and declaring war in turn 100, now are actively searching my friendship.
The worst to happen to me until now was to have to pay a premium for research agreements.

As I said, I am not playing in any way different from the other games. It seems that just the AI is so random, that the one game you may play peacefully, the other game you have to defend yourself against each and everybody.
Unfortunately, you will learn about this only after having played and invested some hours into the game.

This is a bad design decision, since the warmonger always can trigger wars by himself.
The builder, though, is taken hostage by something behind the screesn which he cannot influence.

playing a peaceful game with lots of available land (like on a huge map) would definitely be conducive to a more friendly ai. they typically aren't going to covet your lands if they still have plenty of room for expansion in their own territory unless you are aggressively expanding towards them, soaking up all the resources/luxuries/natural wonders/etc. also wonderwhoring will get you in trouble, how many wonders do you have? have you avoided declarations of friendship? that can actually help you keep good relations with everyone b/c then you can't have a DOF with a civ who's been denounced by somebody else, plus you don't have to worry about the diplo hit from getting denounced by a previous "friend". if possible it's usually best to keep the dof's limited to the last civs you want to conquer, maybe civs on other continents in a non-pangea map.

 

[MAntoninus]

I have noticed the AI goes bonkers on you if your army gets too small or your score gets too large. It does not want to be peaceful with you if you are going to stop it from being the first to victory, of if you look like easy pickings. In the games I have played, it has been relatively easy to maintain several good relations so long as I was neither the best or worst civ.

Tons of good value here.
Yes, they come after you if your army is weak.
Yes, they come after you if you are winning.
Those things I'm ok with.

What frustrates me personally is trying to win peacefully and having NO shot on anything smaller than a Standard map.

King game...Standard map.
Had two friendships, one with Alexander on another continent, one with Siam.
Friends with Siam on a continent we share...great trade relationship (regularly exchange two luxuries, do tech research).
Never declared war on anyone, never denounced anyone.

Siam backstabs me and declares war and denounces me.
Alexander denounces me because my friend did.
I take half of Siam's land.
Siam sues for peace for all of my cash and luxuries.
I refuse (THE KEY)
Everyone tells me I'm a warmonger.
I'm in the minus because my friend turned on me - with everyone - they're all guarded.
Eventually Siam capitulates and offers me everything - I don't want the cities but take cash.

The problem is this IMO. The AI brings you into wars, and if you refuse their ludicrous initial settlements, you're a warmonger. I did almost NOTHING to be a warmonger, I fought a defensive war and took a few cities to force Siam to offer decent terms. I didn't enter war or denounce.

Once you start down this road you have no choice - if you want to win - but exterminating the sons of buzzards...otherwise they'll keep denouncing and undermining you.

I was on guarded or hostile terms with the entire world after that.

The system lacks the ability to improve your peace/credibility standing, and it's too biased to assume you're a son of a buzzard.

 

[Mustakrakish]

I just won a blowout game on emperor w/o signing any pacts at all. Nobody ever declared on me because I was on my own continent and didn't piss anyone off. 1901 space game with nobody else close. I even went cherry tapping with the tradition branch and very little else meaningfully contributing to science or production. Didn't matter.

Apparently, having a pact with an AI's enemy really pisses it off, and leads to chain-denouncements. It seems like right now as long as the AI has someone it hates more you can keep most at friendly by simply doing nothing. Not the best diplo design, really.

I may be looking into things too much, but I think score and "power" (in general) has a lot of to do with it. Civs always fear whose number one. I've noticed this among the AI too, they will begin denouncing the top score AI like it's nobody's business.

Yeah, those pacts are very fragile, they easily lead to fast chain reactions that screw everything up. In my first post-patch game I managed to be on good terms with everyone till modern era. I was low in score, no tech lead, no cultural lead, no threatening army or a small push over for that matter. Only a couple of people ever wanted my lands. Genghis since the moment I met him. He was on a neighboring continent, just 2 tiles away from ours. He was alone there + me being the closest neighbor + him being Genghis, it kinda makes sense he wanted my lands. Also Washington basically landlocked by me wanted my lands for a brief period, but it passed.

When I decided to get on the "world stage" so to speak, "bring England on the world map" so to speak, that's when things have gone to hell. After building a more capable army and involving myself in a couple "on paper" wars I started making enemies. After joining in on the Rome cake with Napoleon and acquiring some lands for myself I got myself some more "defined" enemies. Once I made it clear I'm going for science victory by building Apollo project, chain denouncements followed.

Actually, now that I wrote it, it all kinda makes sense, doesn't it? Kinda lost my point there...

Anyway, the point is: The next game where I tried to be more diplomatically active, I experienced mass denouncements and DOW's.

So it does seems that making friends is futile if you're not gonna sit around doing nothing and challenging no one.

The problem is this IMO. The AI brings you into wars, and if you refuse their ludicrous initial settlements, you're a warmonger. I did almost NOTHING to be a warmonger, I fought a defensive war and took a few cities to force Siam to offer decent terms. I didn't enter war or denounce.

Once you start down this road you have no choice - if you want to win - but exterminating the sons of buzzards...otherwise they'll keep denouncing and undermining you.

Yeah, that's annoying.

 

[danieladler]

Yes I have made the same observations as you have

 

[LDiCesare]

The problem to me is the AI decisions don't make any sense strategically or diplomatically.
Pre-patch: I had a game where I waged war against Arabia. Since my military seemed low, America DOW'ed me, which slowed me down a bit, but once I had destroyed his army in addition to that of the Arabians, I took arabian cities one after the other. America DOW'ed Arabia while still being at war against me, because, you know, he was weak. Effectively backstabbing his ally while still having to face me afterwards. Effectively committing suicide.

Post-patch: Suleiman declares war on me. I pay Russia to declare war on him. They are not exactly neigbours but at least they won't have pacts of research and the like. Russia becomes friendly. Two turns later, I haven't lost any unit yet, and Russia declares war on me, who am on the other side of the continent, so they'd have to go through Turkey forst to reach me. Once again, backstabbing their 'weak' ally while remaining at war. and being unable to ferry troops to fight me to boot.

This is just stupid behavior. There's a very simple rule for warfare: Avoid fighting on two fronts. It's not that hard to implement either.

 

[MarkC1]

I strongly recommend you to stop giving good advices when you don't know about which levels others are reporting.

Strongly recommend? What the hell does that even mean?

I see you replying to all my posts with this trolling so I assure you I'm going to ignore all your replies regardless of classifcation from now on.. unless it's super mega ultra recommendations, of course

And by the way.. he clearly states "King" in the post just above mine

 

[MarkC1]

I strongly recommend you to stop giving good advices when you don't know about which levels others are reporting.

Strongly recommend? What the hell does that even mean?

I see you replying to all my posts with this trolling so I assure you I'm going to ignore all your replies regardless of classifcation from now on.. unless it's super mega ultra recommendations, of course

And by the way.. he clearly states "King" in the post just above mine

 

[slowcar]

my biggest problem is that i feel forced to win by conquest.
i try to play peaceful, and would be ok if a warmonger hated my guts for that (and my land and big cities), but all AIs seem to go after me just for being there.
playing to win, sure, but why stay buddy-buddy with eachother and only go for the human player?

deity is the only level where the AI poses a challenge military-wise, just by sheer force. but currently i find it difficult to keep the tech pace, without all the scientist bulbing fun, at least for this game i went down to emperor.
telling me to play prince doesn't really help, on emperor i feel like clicking away without any challenge, just destroyed my 50% point lead, 100% army lead neighbour who went like this:
- best friend
- round 1: denounce me, go to hostile
- round 5: ask for open borders, suddenly friendly
- round 8: declare war on me
(now its around turn 25 since war was declared, waiting a few turns until i raze his empire, already drained his army)

Even with popup texts the whole diplomacy system makes absolutely no sense, and i guess there just is no other optimal playstyle but REX and conquer. ICS is still strong, despite their best efforts, and my huge cities still cannot build a thing...
disappointed in the patch so far, they made early rushes a lot more difficult, made bulbing take more time but the underlying problems, like an AI too stupid to move its troops, are still there.

 

[Guardian_PL]

So many complaints about difficulty now.. stop using the ultra hard levels.

YES, going down a difficulty level makes a difference. Clearly if you're in the lead and on pace to win, the rest of the world will NOT like that. The difference is that in the lower levels you can manage the invasions that come piecemeal and playing off the AI nations/City States against each other.

It's called "Emperor" for a reason..

You sir have no clue about the thread you're posting in. Let me help you:

The problem is that regardless of how well you play you can't play peacefully. In this Civ War Game you either wage war till you'll maim/kill everyone or you lose.

Like Islet said few posts under your enlightened recomendation - going on Settler because the game is broken design-wise is not a solution. On levels up to Prince you can do anything and have no difficulty at all, but there's no fun if there's no challenge, I mean I can kick the puppy (the AI) but it won't make me feel good about myself

 

[Ymir9]

Captain Haddock had a pre-patch mod out that simply increased the distance threshold needed for civs to declare expansionist wars on one another and the player and removed the possibility of warmongering civs declaring permanent wars. It ought to make the AI much less maniacal. Does anybody know if it still works post-patch?

 

[Yrkoslaw]

Confirmed. A bit.
Tried a Warlod Level Game to check how crazy AI is.
Result: Crazy as a coconut!

I played Darius with Immortal early little warmongering, but nothing against other CIVS or CS's that was "pledged to be protected" by AI CIVS. I conquered and annexed two nearby CS's - simply put, instead of building settlers and stuff, I prefered to take my cities Funny thing, even with fighting super early and short wars (without even making contact with most of other CIVs so far) after I grabbed those two CS's everyone currently known to me denounce me and declare a war against me (and I must point it out, that I was not first on the score ladder yet!). The funny thing about it is, that those WARS war never-ending. No talking for peace, ever - die or be vanished! Another funny thing is, that after like 50 turns of not attacking them, just protecting my cities from their random, puny attacks I give up the "friendly way", simply because they do not want to talk about peace until I spank them and take a city or two from their hands.

BUT guess what!? If I do so, and send my armies to force a peace on them, all other guys that discovered me lately denounces me and start another "war to to end", because I am a "warmongering threat to all humankind!". So my options here was:

- DON'T kill the guys that declared wars against me, and let them harass me till the end of the game.
- Force them to make peace by spanking them, and receive futher denounces and war declarations for being "the bad guy".

PS: Add to this mix the frustrating "They caveat your land, but they are like, I mean really, zillions miles away"...

 

[s1ngl3play3r]

What bugs me most is that I don't really care about winning. I care more about immersion. In civ IV I have the feeling I'm building an empire and like in the real life I have friends I can rely on and enemies that hate me. Winning in civ1-civ4 has never been an ultimate goal for me.
In CiV you can't have real friends if you're winning and this pisses me off incredibly.
As far as I'm concerned they can stick their incredible "backstabbing AI" feature where the sun don't shine.

 

[Mustakrakish]

Yep, like I said the only option to being friendly is sitting doing absolutely nothing, no score lead, no culture lead, no involving yourself in anything etc...

One thing though, I seem to be lucky enough to never experience the ridiculous intercontinental land coveting thing. Every time someone wanted my lands, it was pretty much logical and from my immediate neighbors... I guess I was lucky.

 

[lschnarch]

playing a peaceful game with lots of available land (like on a huge map) would definitely be conducive to a more friendly ai. they typically aren't going to covet your lands if they still have plenty of room for expansion in their own territory unless you are aggressively expanding towards them, soaking up all the resources/luxuries/natural wonders/etc.

Unfortunately, this doesn't meet my experiences.
As having said earlier already, I assume almost any behaviour of the AI being RNG triggered.
I have had occasions where other civs "conveted" my lands while being half a continent away. In the current game, I was separated from Washington by a bottle neck. Since I had a scout there (turn 25 or something like this) I could see his scout approaching, meaning that at that moment he couldn't have any knowledge about my lands.
Nevertheless, he was hostile and "coveted".
Meanwhile we're at war and I am taking his cities. Because of this, I *know* that our capitals are at a distance of ~20 hexes.

also wonderwhoring will get you in trouble, how many wonders do you have?

Man, I am playing as Ramesses. What do you think how many wonders I have?

Spoiler :

have you avoided declarations of friendship? that can actually help you keep good relations with everyone b/c then you can't have a DOF with a civ who's been denounced by somebody else, plus you don't have to worry about the diplo hit from getting denounced by a previous "friend". if possible it's usually best to keep the dof's limited to the last civs you want to conquer, maybe civs on other continents in a non-pangea map.

Quite some.
But in other games I did so too.

Nevertheless, in one game it turns out this way, in another game it is completely different.
Which is ok, as no game plays like the other, don't get me wrong.

But the backside of the medal is that you really don't have any clue what to do in "diplomacy". One time your playstyle get's rewarded, the other time it get's punished.
It is just random...

 

[CrispyCritter]

Tons of good value here.
Yes, they come after you if your army is weak.
Yes, they come after you if you are winning.
Those things I'm ok with.

What frustrates me personally is trying to win peacefully and having NO shot on anything smaller than a Standard map.

Not true. It all depends on circumstances - I agree you can't force a peaceful game from all setups, but you can often go peaceful.

I play Immortal, everything else random (I enjoy trying to figure out what strategy to take given the situation.) Last game turned out to be a duel map with me as Catherine against Montezuma, and we never had a war! It ended up being my first (immortal) Cultural victory, which I certainly didn't go into the game planning for.

Given geography and City States, I was able to seal him off in the early game. I had to go into all out war preparation mode several times, rushing walls and castles as well as units, but it scared him off enough so he never actually declared war on me (the main buffering City State was a mid-game casualty, though). Most of the latter part of the game I had 2 of my 4 cities spending half their time building units.

I really think the patch buffed up City defenses enough to scare off war declarations. I almost never built city defenses pre-patch, but in this game my cities were at the 120-140 city strength level by the end, despite being not all that large (16). That was evidently enough so that even though Montezuma had a bit of a tech lead (he had 15 cities or so), he never wanted to attack them.

You can't have a peaceful game without preparing for the possibility of war, but I really think the patch has made defensive games possible. It was very difficult pre-patch.

 

[Sneaks]

I did some XML scrounging and found several things that may contribute to the no-peace games. There were several AI random roll values in diplomacy, which I am going to test zeroing out. I don't really want a 15% chance of it deciding to act irrational.

 

[Dralix]

I did some XML scrounging and found several things that may contribute to the no-peace games. There were several AI random roll values in diplomacy, which I am going to test zeroing out. I don't really want a 15% chance of it deciding to act irrational.

The problem is, the AI cannot reason like a human can. In order to prevent the AI from being completely predictable, they have to introduce die rolls.

This is exactly the reason people are reporting the AI being irrational. Why does the AI do stupid things sometime? Failed the die roll. Why do some people report AI doing one thing, and others the opposite (or the same person, different game)? Different die roll.

This is simply a fact of life right now. We can't create an AI that can reason, so we have to resort to an AI that has a percentage chance of doing a certain thing in a certain situation.

tl;dr version - you might want to try tweaking the numbers, but not zeroing them all out.

 

[Sneaks]

Well some I want to zero. I think one of the random adjusters was it would occasionally claim you were too close regardless of where you were. In general, while I am doing this AI tweak, I plan on seriously downplaying how cranky the AI gets about land buying and settling. I am ok with tension from close borders, but want to adjust settling because it works counter to the AI's own tendency to settle close to the player. I more or less want to decrease the chances of the AI attacking a peaceful player, unless that peaceful player is about to win or has next to no army.

 

[Pazyryk]

I have noticed the AI goes bonkers on you if your army gets too small or your score gets too large. It does not want to be peaceful with you if you are going to stop it from being the first to victory, of if you look like easy pickings. In the games I have played, it has been relatively easy to maintain several good relations so long as I was neither the best or worst civ.

This is the key, except this part

It does not want to be peaceful with you if you are going to stop it from being the first to victory,

isn't quite correct. I have won two games with either no wars or limited war with a neighbor, both on Emperor. In both cases (space victory and diplo victory) no one DOWed on me as I approached victory (contrary to so many posts here). If peaceful, high-diplomacy games are your thing, then 1) don't be weak militarily; 2) don't befriend everyone and don't befriend neighbors (because neighbors will almost always go hostile at some point); and 3) don't get too large.

 

[MAntoninus]

Diplomatic AI needs to scale with map size too (as does their happiness bonus).

By that I mean they need to be less prone to going ape over proximity on a smaller map.

It's clear to me that Civ V was tuned on standard or large...and the same biases don't fly on more compressed land masses.