Really bad AI. Anyone else experiencing this?

[rtt4a]

Any place i can read about different difficulty bonuses/handicaps? I remember in vanilla civ higher difficulties gave ai advantages in battles and if its like that in rand then I'd rather avoid it.

Check \Mods\Rise of Mankind - A New Dawn\Assets\XML\GameInfo\CIV4HandicapInfo

 

[Charriu]

It raises and lowers the difficulty for both you and AI depending on how you and AI are performing. The problem is that in such a big mod as RAND, it's almost impossible to have AI perform well in every situation because in different stage of civilizations development the logic behind a move might be totally different.

Yes you are right, that raising the difficulty can help with some of the problems. But there are some AI behaviour that are plain stupid no matter the circumstances. For example in my last game I had a huge stack of 20 units with a good chunk of berserkers in there. I moved next to an AI city and as soon as I moved my stack there, he suicided 8 of his 10 longbowmen into my stack. This happened at every city and no matter the terrain that I was standing on. I don't see how this can be a apropitiate reaction. And I just want to iterate this again. The AI did not do such a thing 2 years ago and the basic concepts of the mods have not changed since then.

 

[rtt4a]

Theres propably no way to teach AI same level as for example in k-mod, theres jus too much content in this mod.. but once again I have to agree with Charriu that theres serious problems in AI and its getting lot worse in last couple of years. It should be possible to stop AI killing it self.. I have no idea how it works in code wise but why AI is for example attacking against 100% changes? Charrius example is good, theres no way that its smart to use defending units like that and I have seen the same thing.

Basic rules should be that AI defend cities always and dont attack against 100%, now it can leave cities empty or remove most of defenders or kill them for pointless attacks. Almost as bad is if AI wont use latest and best civics like it can do now or dont expand when theres free space etc..

@Affores, you always watch over and sometimes come back and do miracles.. maybe you could do some magic again I know you could teach AI practicly anything and atleast fix it as good as it was.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Any place i can read about different difficulty bonuses/handicaps? I remember in vanilla civ higher difficulties gave ai advantages in battles and if its like that in rand then I'd rather avoid it.

You can check Handicap xml file in the mod, but IIRC there's no such thing and I'm not sure there was in vanilla civ either (you can only set a number of "free wins" in the first clashes with barbarians, I think). Bonuses/handicaps only affect how fast/slow you build/train/create buildings/units/wonders and how much science/gold you produce. More or less that should be all.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Yes you are right, that raising the difficulty can help with some of the problems. But there are some AI behaviour that are plain stupid no matter the circumstances. For example in my last game I had a huge stack of 20 units with a good chunk of berserkers in there. I moved next to an AI city and as soon as I moved my stack there, he suicided 8 of his 10 longbowmen into my stack. This happened at every city and no matter the terrain that I was standing on. I don't see how this can be a apropitiate reaction. And I just want to iterate this again. The AI did not do such a thing 2 years ago and the basic concepts of the mods have not changed since then.

I never experienced something like that; in my games AI hardly attacks my units. The only thing I can think of is that maybe AI thought your stack would conquer your city anyway so it tried to do as much damage as it could, judging the damage would be higher to you than if it simply waited for your attack. But I frankly don't think AI is so smart.

 

[Charriu]

I highly doubt that this would even be a smart move. You have to remember that the AI suicided Longbowmen stationed in a city against my stack. I also have an earlier savegame in which the AI suicides some archers into my stack, if you want to have a look at it.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

I highly doubt that this would even be a smart move. You have to remember that the AI suicided Longbowmen stationed in a city against my stack. I also have an earlier savegame in which the AI suicides some archers into my stack, if you want to have a look at it.

I have very little time for testing but please upload it so I can check. Anyway, it would be a good move IF you know you are already doomed and you expect to cause more damage by attacking than by defending. An example would be attacking units having multiple City Attack promotions. If AI judges that with your attacking units you can wipe all its units and conquer its city without you losing any unit because you are stronger because of the city attack promotion, it wouldn't be that crazy trying to kill some of your units even by sacrificing all of its units. The city would be lost anyway but attacking you would cause more damage than simply waiting for your attack. As I said anyway, I don't think AI can think like this.

 

[Charriu]

Yes I had a lot of city attack promotions, so you could be right. Is this a behaviour added or is this standard BTS. Because I never noticed this behaviour in BTS. There the AI kept defending it's cities.

 

[<Nexus>]

Is this a behaviour added or is this standard BTS.

As I said anyway, I don't think AI can think like this.

 

[valeriosavio]

I am experiencing "bad AI" too! I mean no more doomstack from enemies... I've put DEITY difficulty, and put my foes on flexible difficulty too but I just need a quite strong stack to conquer the entire map and defeat everyone...
plus my foes they only keep very few troops to defend the cities!
Is it happening to you too?

 

[Thandor]

I think the main issue is the AI being too pasive.. it doesn't seem to organice its units to attack..

I remember being attacked by barbs before and having to hunt them down to their cities, now they are just camping around and only attacking cities from time to time.. I fear the civ's AI are having the same problem because they don't use to send big armies to war..

 

[valeriosavio]

I think the main issue is the AI being too pasive.. it doesn't seem to organice its units to attack..

I remember being attacked by barbs before and having to hunt them down to their cities, now they are just camping around and only attacking cities from time to time.. I fear the civ's AI are having the same problem because they don't use to send big armies to war..

Yes!

Actually there is no more STACK OF DOOM from the enemy in my games !

Does that happen to some of you too ?

 

[Rezca]

Yes!

Actually there is no more STACK OF DOOM from the enemy in my games !

Does that happen to some of you too ?

From time to time. I think it's because either (A) the enemy attacking me is rather small to begin with, or (B) because they're in a massive cash deficit and don't have the army to begin with. Usually because they're running Republic with 10+ cities.

Current game I'm doing an Always War on a Highlands map with an AI team mate. She successfully grabbed some Russian and Roman cities all on her own (Go War Chariots!) while I conquered Siam early and pushed Khemer into the arctic where I'm leaving him for last just for the lols. However, as a result of the almost constant warfare, the other half of the AI not saddled with harassment by me and Egypt are developing quickly and are mostly 0.9 to 0.6 in terms of strength compared to me. At best, the Hatti have tossed a few units at the Longbows perched on hillside Forts along chokepoints, but never sent an army. The Khemer did once, a stack of NINE units (at the time, that was actually kind of scary) at a city with just an archer and a javeliner. He even had two ballista in the stack.

What did he do with it? The same thing Boudica did two games prior. He marched it back and forth between two tiles, constantly taking damage from the tundra tiles (Desert in Boudica's case) until they were at critical health and in no position to defend from my units and the rest died from exposure. The most he did after that was toss archers and javelins at a few units I later parked in forested hills along his borders (He eventually took one down out of sheer lucky RNG, but after many losses).

From what I understand, the AI sometimes does that "Durr, not gonna attack just yet" thing when they're waiting for a straggler to catch up and join the stack. On a slightly unrelated note, I think that the AI doesn't really understand the Damaging Tiles option, since they often park their units on or march their units back and forth between two damaging tiles until they're too weak to carry out the assault they were going to engage in, as demonstrated with the Khemer above and the Celtic two games prior. Sometimes I see them load up on Arctic or Desert promotions even when there's none of that around (or very little of it), other times not so much. Here he'd have benefited greatly from it - though not every unit type can make use of those promotions. I think Siege Units are some of them?


Earlier in the thread someone (I think the OP?) mentioned AI's not spreading their religion. Hoh boy, do I definitely not experience that. Every time I see an AI nation on another continent they've got every city with their religion and have a city or two packed full with their given missionary type. Most AI's will end up like that very quickly, and Hatshepsut in my last game founded Buddhism while she was converted to my Zoroastrianism. She didn't do much at the time no, but after a while she decided o build a monastary. Very, very shortly I found every one of her cities and mine had that religion in it and she was flooding missionaries out to any other nation that had Rite of Passage with her.

Yes, she took a while before she began to do it. She had JUST one city with Buddism to nine with Zoroastrianism. But once she began spreading it, she was determined to spend every ounce of production she could to get every city that was within her grasp into that religion.

So I don't know. Maybe AI personality has something to do with it? (THe less-religious ones being less likely to care about spreading it) Regardless, there was a delay but once she started she was passionate about it. I also had a lot of missionaries from a border nation trying to get theirs in once bordered opened. There was half a dozen in one pop, meaning they had them sitting there waiting for new cities to spread into.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

Yes!

Actually there is no more STACK OF DOOM from the enemy in my games !

Does that happen to some of you too ?

We have greatly reduced that years ago because of balance reasons. Making the game balanced for many different options required some compromise. You won't meet 200 units stacks anymore, that's for sure; but I guess it all depends on what's your idea of "stack of doom". Since units production has been reduced for everyone, if you can defend a city with max 3 units, even a 20 units stack looks like a SOD.

 

[valeriosavio]

We have greatly reduced that years ago because of balance reasons. Making the game balanced for many different options required some compromise. You won't meet 200 units stacks anymore, that's for sure; but I guess it all depends on what's your idea of "stack of doom". Since units production has been reduced for everyone, if you can defend a city with max 3 units, even a 20 units stack looks like a SOD.

But at least in my game, I see that there aren't even a 10/15 stack anymore.
Is it just me?
I mean, I just need to make myself a stack of doom and go conquer every enemy, since most of them keep only 4 or 5 units in the cities !

 

[Rezca]

But at least in my game, I see that there aren't even a 10/15 stack anymore.
Is it just me?
I mean, I just need to make myself a stack of doom and go conquer every enemy, since most of them keep only 4 or 5 units in the cities !

I've only played two full games since I returned to the mod and am in the middle of an Always War game right now, but I've not seen a pack larger than ten yet in the field that I can remember, but I have seen up to twelve or fifteen units in garrisons at times later in the game. Twenty or thirty at times if you include their tendency to sometimes huddle ships in there and a city housing the entire National Limit for a given missionary type....

In this AW game right now, Hatshepsut has at least thirty units running around in Russian-Roman territory, but in clusters rather than a single stack. Some seem like they're on pillage missions, others are in small groups of 3 ~ 7 sniping lightly defended border cities, and I guess others still are simply passing through on their way to fortify other locations - but she's got units out there performing a seriously well done military effort


Often though I notice something that may be contributing to that. Most of them are running a deficit at 30% or less Science because they insist on using "Best Civic" Republic. I get the concept behind it, a civic for small civs to run to help them keep their head above water when they only have like three or four cities, but in practice everyone wants to run it from the moment its unlocked 'till the end of time. Events want you to switch into it, Revolutions want you to switch into it, and the AI want to switch into it then disband their entire military force because suddenly their sixteen cities can't support the ludicrously large maintenance penalty they just got hit with. Blinded by the huge bonuses on it though, they can't seem to let go of the damned thing.

I always reduce the AI weighting on Republic because it's like they're determined to swap to it as soon as they can and then never leave. Don't know how much it helps really, but it's nice to know the whole world other than myself isn't running Republic regardless if they can afford to or not.

 

[triplebassist]

I wonder if we should put a cities limit on Republic for the AI, or at least teach it to understand how much money it's losing due to the maintenance increases. Can it calculate how much additional GPT it would get from the Commerce bonuses and compare that to the maintenance costs we see in the advisor?

 

[Antonius Bonus]

I'm glad a few people have pointed this out, because I too have noticed the AI get weaker in the last couple of years. I don't enjoy this mod so much now. You can't expand so easily because of crushing unhappiness, yet the AI is piss easy to take out. I'd rather the unhappiness was tweaked and AI got smarter and made some SODs! This mod was better two years ago, you've kind of ruined a bit, which is a shame because it is a great mod. The balance doesn't seem right. I play on Noble/Prince and it seems very hard in the early game. I'll have 3-5 cities struggling to grow beyond size 3, because of unhappiness, while the AI is sending settlers miles away on to my doorstep and having 8 cities and pumping out units and wonders quickly. Then all you have to do is get to Scriptures, go Divine Cult and build a stack big enough to take out 10 enemy cities and suddenly the game is too easy. I know there's a increasing difficulty option, which I haven't tried. (I didn't really get on with the flexible difficulty). And did I mention when the AI dows you? Where are they? Where's there stack? Oh look there's one Ballista. Terrifying...

 

[JosEPh_II]

Yes you are right, that raising the difficulty can help with some of the problems. But there are some AI behaviour that are plain stupid no matter the circumstances. For example in my last game I had a huge stack of 20 units with a good chunk of berserkers in there. I moved next to an AI city and as soon as I moved my stack there, he suicided 8 of his 10 longbowmen into my stack. This happened at every city and no matter the terrain that I was standing on. I don't see how this can be a apropitiate reaction. And I just want to iterate this again. The AI did not do such a thing 2 years ago and the basic concepts of the mods have not changed since then.

Does Rand still use the BBAI_AI_Variables_GlobalDefines? If it does, then look into the set of defines there that deal with the AI about defending and attacking. 8 Total defines and 3 - 4 of them will deal with your problem.

 

[black213]

AI needs to learn not to always choose Republic. It's a big detriment to their capabilities, and long known, but it still hasn't been patched?