Something's wrong with the AI

Yes, I've seen this as well. It is quite common. Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of facing longbows when I'm attacking with tanks or even modern armor.

One thing that is disturbing in the op screenshot is the tile development. Why haven't those forests been chopped at some point? Why aren't there more cottages? It's a CAPITAL for Pete's sake!

I felt that poor tile development was part of the poor tech problem (combined with overinvestment in espionage and overexpansion/troop maintenance), but was assured by some top players that it wasn't. But seeing this screenshot I'm concerned again...
 
I havent seen anything like this. Ive played about 5-7 games. Weird...

I play on Epic if that has anything to do with it...
 
How many other cities does he have? He has 83 units in the capital? He must have been stuck on no research for a very long time if hes still researching civil service...

Not 83 units, because difficulty gives some happiness and Palace gives +1, so he has about 75-80 units depending on difficulty, I'd say.
 
Not 83 units, because difficulty gives some happiness and Palace gives +1, so he has about 75-80 units depending on difficulty, I'd say.

You can't know about his happiness resourcers there's at least one, wine.

I've seen 30+ stacks without Aggressive AI. So maybe 2 of his stack of 30+ just happened to be in Capital at the same time. That's 60 units and happiness about 20-25 and he was low on health because no grannies or anything. I'm not so surprised by that.

EDIT: No, he had grannies but nothing else.
 
Yes, I've seen this as well. It is quite common. Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of facing longbows when I'm attacking with tanks or even modern armor.

One thing that is disturbing in the op screenshot is the tile development. Why haven't those forests been chopped at some point? Why aren't there more cottages? It's a CAPITAL for Pete's sake!

I felt that poor tile development was part of the poor tech problem (combined with overinvestment in espionage and overexpansion/troop maintenance), but was assured by some top players that it wasn't. But seeing this screenshot I'm concerned again...

bad tile placement is nothing new lol.
 
Huh, I thought the AI was supposed to be "vastly improved" for BtS!
 
AI-built coastal cities seem to have a Trireme fixation. Huayna has two such cities on a coastline some eight tiles long plus a deep, narrow bay: his triremes can't go further along the coast because he doesn't have Open Borders with his neighbours, Tokugawa and Gilgamesh: and he has six triremes at sea and (my spies report) eleven more in the ports and two more under construction. But he has Astronomy, so why not build more-advanced ships ?
This trireme frenzy could, I suppose, have been triggered by the Privateer I have anchored on his Fish. But I would think that he could sink it by attacking with trireme after trireme, although the first few would probably lose.
 
It differs from game to game. In my first few games in BTS, I simply blew past the AI in terms of tech. No one had chemistry by the time I was building tanks and the Apollo. Now, in my current game, I did do quite a bit of warring like in the previous games (I'm Louis XIV :lol:) and Justinian and Qin Shi Huang are quite a bit ahead of me in tech in the industrial era (3-4 techs) and Justinian even has a bigger power graph. I find that the AI does better when on huge maps or at least a large pangaea. AI simply cannot handle isolated or jungle starts nearly as good as human can and tends to fall behind in tech quickly. All I can say it varies greatly from game to game based on my observations.
 
I was a at war with ragnar at about 700 AD on Noble, and I thought I was starting to fall behind (I had to turn research down), then a thing poped up telling me I was the most advanced person in the world. Afterwards, I really boomed economically, so I was fine. I have No tech Brokering on, but it just really hurt the AI, since normally I'm pretty good when it comes to teching.
 
I have No tech Brokering on, but it just really hurt the AI, since normally I'm pretty good when it comes to teching.

It really slows down the AI a bit...I think I will be back to normal with it and see what happen!
 
Please post a save of this, if you still have it. Was it a "always peace" game, by any chance?
 
It seems to me that if you play with a lot of AI civs (15+) then the AIs that get good starts end up engulfing the AIs that get jungle or isolated starts right away. This is great because it leads to less of the parity that you'd used to see in Warlords, where all the civs were about the same tech and poewr level.
 
There's a problem like this in Medieval 2: Total War as well. The AI is programmed to be aggressive in its unit recruitment, and it can pose a real threat (especially with some of the fan-augmented AIs) in the early to mid game, but by the end game, it's suffocating under the weight of the unit upkeep its outdated armies cost and is quite easy to dispatch. In M2TW, there is no way at all to mod AI recruitment behavior (it's currently hard-coded). I'd imagine in Civ, there is a way to alter this. All the same, I think the basic fundamental changes in the BTS AI are a huge step in the right direction - I just wish that this particular problem wasn't so crippling for the AI in the late game.
 
This AI behavior is specific to the always peace option and will be adressed in the patch.
 
He's the lead designer on BtS ;)

In the meantime, using my unofficial patch should also address the problem.
 
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