Please fix the game balance and AI

floppa

Chieftain
Joined
Apr 17, 2021
Messages
7
First, let me say that I used to really like this mod, the amount of work you put into it is impressive.

But since recently I am starting to think that it is becoming too overwhelmed with new features, which make the AI buggy and break the game balance.

Let me start with the AI. In my most recent game (Venice, King), my AI friend civ (the Dutch) gave me 2 of his cities, so that I declare war on his enemy (the Huns), even though the Dutch was already winning his war and was close to capturing a Hun city.
Another example is AI mass-vassalizing other AI civs without a war. In my game as soon as the Dutch and Indonesia both adopted Order, they immediately peacefully became vassals to another order civ, the Iroquois. That I completely don’t understand, since the AI never accepts even a defensive pact with me, here they became vassals to another AI with no war.
It seems like the AI’s main purpose is not to win but to annoy the player. I’m used to AI adopting a conflicting ideology all the time no matter what, or attacking exclusively my units when another AI is going to capture his city. But this was just too much.

Another thing to fix is the tourism and dissidents system. AI’s cities should start to rebel as soon as their happiness is lower than 50% of mine. Well, I had a net happiness of +250 (highest that I had ever) and no AI civs’ happiness ever decreased below 50% for more than 1 turn in a row, even with –30 negative dissident modifiers. That completely ruined the game for me because I’ve loved this system since vanilla and now the AI got an extra like +100 happiness out of nowhere.

Some other minor things:
  • I would make open borders necessary for musician concerts and prophets/missionaries. Think about the Beatles who could never have a concert in the USSR.
  • I still don’t understand, how the CS influence sometimes decreases, sometimes – does not. Seems that it depends on distance between player’s capital and the CS. Why not make it fair to all civs? Starting close to a CS already gives you an advantage of less distance for your diplomats.
TLDR: Please try to fix existing features before adding new ones.

Edit: A couple more things I forgot to mention:

- Great work of art slots in castles cannot be seen on the Tourism-My Culture window and thus cannot be reassigned. I had to click optimize and reassign manually every time I digged up a new artifact because of that, which was very annoying.

- Not a bug, just a suggestion: Can you maybe make the Worlds Fair and similar projects available to build in puppets? Otherwise, playing as Venice there is not even a chance to win those.

Playing latest non-beta version (Dec 1st).
 
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Which version are you playing on. Although balance will always be a concern, I think the current beta already addresses much of what you are talking about.
 
There haven't been many new features added for a while except for the spy system maybe, the features you're citing have been a part of VP for a long time.

Open borders is not necessary per se for musicians, that's a feature for balance reasons (to not make it too easy to just deny a CV by not giving open borders). Missionaries already suffer attrition without open borders, if you straight up couldn't spread without open borders, that would require rebalancing a lot of the existing spreading mechanics and reformation beliefs (as they highly depend on being able to freely spread).

I'm pretty sure the CS influence for certain quests is simply random within a given range (don't quote me on this though not 100% on how it works) and doesn't depend on distance.
 
That's just King for you, I also play on that difficulty and oh my god the A.I are so goddamn annoying
Warmonger - bribed war
Have a neighbour - Neighbour wars you and never makes peace, making both of you irrelevant
Although I think you're playing on an older version, because the A.I don't pay that much to declare war on someone anymore. I remember Persia literally gave me all of his cities just to declare war on Shaka...
Weird - I don't see much peace vassaling, although I don't play into the late game
Edit: I checked his previous post - he plays on the "official" December version, so that will definitely have some bugs....
 
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Edit: I checked his previous post - he plays on the "official" December version, so that will definitely have some bugs....

If this is the case, there have been huge improvements to the AI in the interim.
 
You can disable bribed wars and voluntary vassalage in diploaioptions
I could, but that'd make the game too easy
Also - if I have to disable things in a mod that claims it makes the A.I better, then that just completely negates the point of that
Good work, sure, but there's plenty of balancing to do
 
Those options exist because not every person agrees with what you're saying. I'm not personally bothered by the things you're listing; bribed wars are usually over as soon as the AI is allowed to make peace, and outrageously long wars are not something I see too often. Settling defensively and using your units efficiently usually means that you can pay minimal attention to aggressive wars and focus on your infrastructure so that he becomes irrelevant and you don't.
Don't you get that the A.I can literally spam out their uniques or generally just normal units in like 3 turns? I literally buy more units than they can produce and they don't give up
Bribed wars are REALLY bad on small/standard maps, because anyone can actually reach you
Again - I have to take their city/push forward in order to make them consider peace
 
I do think that it should be disabled by default, at least the voluntary vassalage. Why does it exist? I respect the AI development for this mod a huge amount but I dont trust a scripted AI to make good decisions about voluntary vassalage. It also just ruins games imo.
A lot of people have complained about bribed wars too, so I think that should be turned off as default aswell. Maybe a poll can settle it!
 
Just added a couple things to my first post that I forgot to mention.
Look, I did not want to offend anyone. It's just frustrating to spend a whole week on one game and then around turn 400 to find out that so many things are bugged and don't work as they should. Perhaps most players here only go for domination and many issues with cultural victory go unnoticed.
Also, it seems that instead of fixing old bugs, the modding team is fixing something that already works fine, like the old spy system which I think works great.
And sorry, I don't have time to check every single beta version - I thought non-beta is usually the one with fewer bugs and I don't play this game often.
 
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Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
 
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First, let me say that I used to really like this mod, the amount of work you put into it is impressive.

But since recently I am starting to think that it is becoming too overwhelmed with new features, which make the AI buggy and break the game balance.

Let me start with the AI. In my most recent game (Venice, King), my AI friend civ (the Dutch) gave me 2 of his cities, so that I declare war on his enemy (the Huns), even though the Dutch was already winning his war and was close to capturing a Hun city.
Another example is AI mass-vassalizing other AI civs without a war. In my game as soon as the Dutch and Indonesia both adopted Order, they immediately peacefully became vassals to another order civ, the Iroquois. That I completely don’t understand, since the AI never accepts even a defensive pact with me, here they became vassals to another AI with no war.
It seems like the AI’s main purpose is not to win but to annoy the player. I’m used to AI adopting a conflicting ideology all the time no matter what, or attacking exclusively my units when another AI is going to capture his city. But this was just too much.

Another thing to fix is the tourism and dissidents system. AI’s cities should start to rebel as soon as their happiness is lower than 50% of mine. Well, I had a net happiness of +250 (highest that I had ever) and no AI civs’ happiness ever decreased below 50% for more than 1 turn in a row, even with –30 negative dissident modifiers. That completely ruined the game for me because I’ve loved this system since vanilla and now the AI got an extra like +100 happiness out of nowhere.

Some other minor things:
  • I would make open borders necessary for musician concerts and prophets/missionaries. Think about the Beatles who could never have a concert in the USSR.
  • I still don’t understand, how the CS influence sometimes decreases, sometimes – does not. Seems that it depends on distance between player’s capital and the CS. Why not make it fair to all civs? Starting close to a CS already gives you an advantage of less distance for your diplomats.
TLDR: Please try to fix existing features before adding new ones.

Edit: A couple more things I forgot to mention:

- Great work of art slots in castles cannot be seen on the Tourism-My Culture window and thus cannot be reassigned. I had to click optimize and reassign manually every time I digged up a new artifact because of that, which was very annoying.

- Not a bug, just a suggestion: Can you maybe make the Worlds Fair and similar projects available to build in puppets? Otherwise, playing as Venice there is not even a chance to win those.

Playing latest non-beta version (Dec 1st).
Just added a couple things to my first post that I forgot to mention.
Look, I did not want to offend anyone. It's just frustrating to spend a whole week on one game and then around turn 400 to find out that so many things are bugged and don't work as they should. Perhaps most players here only go for domination and many issues with cultural victory go unnoticed.
Also, it seems that instead of fixing old bugs, the modding team is fixing something that already works fine, like the old spy system which I think works great.
And sorry, I don't have time to check every single beta version - I thought non-beta is usually the one with fewer bugs and I don't play this game often.

Welcome to the forum.

The issues with the AI paying extreme amounts for bribed wars, spamming bribed wars constantly, not accepting Defensive Pacts with humans, voluntary vassalage, Castle great work slots, and ideological pressure not being applied properly have all been fixed in the latest beta version, along with major improvements to AI intelligence. I recommend playing it as it is far more stable/less buggy than the release version.

This hasn't been well communicated (I think we need to revise the version system, and I'm working on addressing this).

If you encounter bugs on the latest beta version, please report them on the Github tracker (linked in my signature).

We're working on addressing bugs and improving the game balance as best as we can, but please understand that we are an all-volunteer development team and our time/resources are limited.
 
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I think the points you made are reasonable, even if I might not agree with all of them.

We do ask that if you have something you believe to be a true "bug", that you make a post on Github. The modders work quite aggressively on bug reports, and so that is the best way to go certain issues corrected.

I am going to summarize and reclarify some of the points you have brought up.

AI
  • Deal AI: The Dutch AI was willing to give you an incredible deal (2 cities) to do a war declaration you felt the Dutch didn't need.
  • Voluntary Vassalage: You saw an instance where 2 civs capitulated to a 3 civ, and by your estimate (for no good reason). Were these civs bottom in score and small, or were they strong competitive civs?
  • AI: Is always picking an ideology that is different to yours. How many games in a row are you seeing that?
Dissidents
  • AI cities are not rebelling as they "should"
Based on your description, I am checking to see if you are fully familiar with the current happiness system. When you say dissidents, are you referring to cultural ideologies pushing unhappiness on other civs? Or do you mean rebels appearing in your civ when your happiness drops below 35%?

Idea
  • You would like Open Borders to be a requirement for Musicians/Prophets/Missionaries to enter your territory.
  • WC Projects: You would like those to be built in puppet cities
  • You desire to see a focus on bug fixing over new features from the modding team.
Bug
  • Great Work of Art slots are not appearing for Castles in the Tourism window.
Bug reports should go on to Github.

Confusion
  • You want to understand CS influence decay mechanics better.
So there are generally a few things that effect CS influence.

  • Decay Rate: CS decay generally starts at -1 influence per turn (-2 for hostile). However, the decay rate increases for every 100 influence you have. This means that when you have hundreds or thousands of influence, you will lose more per turn. This was implemented to give people a chance to get into CSes where the AIs have put lots and lots of influence in.
  • Minimum Influence Level: There are certain things in the game that can add a minimum to how low CS influence will go. Pledge of protections give like 5, the belief Abode of Peace gives some as well. When influence has dropped to these levels, it won't go any lower unless forced down by a coup/great diplomat.
  • Stop Decay Mechanics: There are a few things in the game whose benefit is to stop CS decay. Austria's UA and the cold war WC proposal are two examples.
 
Thanks for your reply and for clarifying on the CS influence.
AI
  • Deal AI: The Dutch AI was willing to give you an incredible deal (2 cities) to do a war declaration you felt the Dutch didn't need.
  • Voluntary Vassalage: You saw an instance where 2 civs capitulated to a 3 civ, and by your estimate (for no good reason). Were these civs bottom in score and small, or were they strong competitive civs?
  • AI: Is always picking an ideology that is different to yours. How many games in a row are you seeing that?
- Correct
- Those 2 were average civs, not super strong overall, but had quite powerful armies and both were my neighbors, while the third civ was on another continent. If the 3rd civ had declared war on me and those 2 vassals would join, I'd be annihilated in no time. Also, one of those vassal civs - the Dutch was my friend throughout the whole game.
- As long as I remember playing this mod (since like 2018). Although I don't play that often. Usually what happens is, the strongest civs always pick a different ideology (which I'm ok with), average civs pick a different ideology 95% of time, even if we have great relations, never went to war, trading a lot, I have cultural influence over them, etc. But 95% they rather pick an ideology of a monster-warmonger civ on a faraway continent.
Usually civs that pick my ideology are those that are on another continent, lost all but 1-2 of their cities, and 10-15 techs behind. Or my vassals whom I conquered.

Dissidents
  • AI cities are not rebelling as they "should"
Based on your description, I am checking to see if you are fully familiar with the current happiness system. When you say dissidents, are you referring to cultural ideologies pushing unhappiness on other civs? Or do you mean rebels appearing in your civ when your happiness drops below 35%?

Cultural ideologies pushing unhappiness on other civs.
I thought that if I have more influence over them, Dissidents turn into Civil Resistance, then Revolutionary Wave and that's how their cities rebel. In this game, even when I was popular with 90% cultural influence, dissidents in other civs never progressed to more advanced stages.
But even if they did, the AI just has too much happiness. I had like +250 net happiness, bought their last luxuries, banned their luxuries in World Congress, and the AI still had +100 net happiness. Maybe I'm missing something?
 
Castle gw issue was fixed ages ago.

And yea the Tourism dissidents hasn't been a thing for ages it's just still there in the text. That would kinda have to be a 'new' feature if someone was to actually make it work well.

InkAxis redid the code for that.
 
Was that with the freedom changes?

Separately.

Is there anyone actively working on the code for aircraft? I'd tag ilteroi but last I heard he didn't have access to the forum anymore.

ilteroi does have access to the forum but he's been unavailable on Github for a while, probably busy.
 
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