Status of Civ 6 AI

[gettingfat]

How many games have you played to reach that conclusion?
I have seen them build many of both districts. Some civs might give
preference to other things early in the game, but they definitely
can pump out comm and ind districts later.

I don't know how many, but at least 30.

Most AI leaders give these two district types low priority. Because district building is limited by population, putting holy sites, campus and theater zone at higher priority (and harbor if coastal city and encampment if these leaders have involved in wars) mean a large number of cities have to wait for a long time before they have enough pop to build these two. Yes, they will eventually start building them, but usually too late to be truly relevant.

 

[Ferocitus]

I don't know how many, but at least 30.

Most AI leaders give these two district types low priority. Because district building is limited by population, putting holy sites, campus and theater zone at higher priority (and harbor if coastal city and encampment if these leaders have involved in wars) mean a large number of cities have to wait for a long time before they have enough pop to build these two. Yes, they will eventually start building them, but usually too late to be truly relevant.

Thanks. 30 or so is a reasonable sample, even if it's based mostly on memory.
I agree that some civs have other more immediate priorities, both in-built and
because of events, but I'm not sure if they are always too late to be relevant.
OTOH, I only ever play with 24 civs on ludicrous size maps at marathon pace, so
that gives them much longer to establish themselves.
I'll try to compile something more substantial the next time I do a large
number of autoruns.

 

[agonistes]

@Ferocitus

Keep in mind marathon skews things quite a bit. I only play giant earth marathon x2 (jealous of your ludicrous dang you). I certainly agree the ai builds, actually spams, commercial and industrial. Once it can.

But most folks play much faster and more condensed maps. I bet the game is pretty much over for warmongers before they get to the phase where the ai is building 4th and 5th districts.

And that's okay. Its not district choice that is hurting the ai so much as it is tactics.

But the better the ai becomes at tactics, the less choices the player will have, because the optimal choice will then be at a premium, and poorer choices will have a larger negative impact.

I think really what the mongers want is to see far fewer *stupid* actions by the ai. They want competent decision making. They want a field that will make them pay for their own stupid mistakes. Not necessarily a balls-to-the-wall killer ai.

Besides, no matter how good the ai gets, the player should always have a huge advantage, because the player can meld tactics and strategy and change both in a single turn, feinting and reacting. Only a true ai will ever be able to do *that* well. Fake it, sure, easy, no problem. But not actually do it.

 

[Mechazawa]

I have only skimmed through the thread so maybe this has been discussed before.

But could people's complaints about the AI be due to the fact that people have been playing Civ games for 6 games and they no longer suck? I started just a month or so ago with Civ 5. I have enjoyed it fairly well and found the AI a challenge on Prince, though I do admit I have not beaten a game yet (marathon length + mods + grad student = me restarting a lot). I can safely say that my skill at the game is likely not that great. Probably the hardest situation I have encountered lately is when playing Morocco; Askia and Rome declaring war on me at the same time from both sides and being able to fend them off. (Playing with the Vox Populi). T'was funny, Rome lost like 3 units and then ran away and asked for peace. Most of the pounding came from Askia who promptly asked if I was begging for mercy from him after I destroyed 3 of his cities. My point is that I am having fun with the AI and I am also not very good. I imagine if I was a starcraft-pro level of good at Civ games then the AI would be rather boring and I would notice every little stupid thing they do.

I had the thought when I was reading a Darksouls difficulty discussion about how Darksouls 3 isn't necessarily easier than the rest, its just that a lot of people who make the claim have played all of the soulsborne games in order and so the gameplay is something they have mastered; and other than outright cheating or outrageous stats you can't really make bosses all that hard anymore without some very different gameplay mechanics.

This isn't to say that Civ 6 vs 5 AI might be terrible or better; just that Civ AI in general may seem terrible to some because they are too good at the game.

 

[ashendashin]

I have only skimmed through the thread so maybe this has been discussed before.

But could people's complaints about the AI be due to the fact that people have been playing Civ games for 6 games and they no longer suck? I started just a month or so ago with Civ 5. I have enjoyed it fairly well and found the AI a challenge on Prince, though I do admit I have not beaten a game yet (marathon length + mods + grad student = me restarting a lot). I can safely say that my skill at the game is likely not that great. Probably the hardest situation I have encountered lately is when playing Morocco; Askia and Rome declaring war on me at the same time from both sides and being able to fend them off. (Playing with the Vox Polli). T'was funny, Rome lost like 3 units and then ran away and asked for peace. Most of the pounding came from Askia who promptly asked if I was begging for mercy from him after I destroyed 3 of his cities. My point is that I am having fun with the AI and I am also not very good. I imagine if I was a starcraft-pro level of good at Civ games then the AI would be rather boring and I would notice every little stupid thing they do.

I had the thought when I was reading a Darksouls difficulty discussion about how Darksouls 3 isn't necessarily easier than the rest, its just that a lot of people who make the claim have played all of the soulsborne games in order and so the gameplay is something they have mastered; and other than outright cheating or outrageous stats you can't really make bosses all that hard anymore without some very different gameplay mechanics.

This isn't to say that Civ 6 vs 5 AI might be terrible or better; just that Civ AI in general may seem terrible to some because they are too good at the game.

Play vanilla some more and you don't have to be good at the game to see how little Firaxis bothered with it. True enough that many players may not care about what they're playing against, but it doesn't excuse the vanilla AI when there can be a decent one that doesn't leave new players in the dust. It needs control through difficulty (which Vox Populi does), not an AI that's terrible at the game and is instead buffed massively straight off the bat to appease "hardcore" players. But that requires some extra investment in the AI department, which probably doesn't exist in the first place.

 

[gettingfat]

Thanks. 30 or so is a reasonable sample, even if it's based mostly on memory.
I agree that some civs have other more immediate priorities, both in-built and
because of events, but I'm not sure if they are always too late to be relevant.
OTOH, I only ever play with 24 civs on ludicrous size maps at marathon pace, so
that gives them much longer to establish themselves.
I'll try to compile something more substantial the next time I do a large
number of autoruns.

As the other posters suggested, play some standard size map games at standard or epic (these are more the "default" setting), and at the time you have a spy and go to that mission screen, you will be amazed by how few commercial/industrial zones the AI leaders have. At the end of game when you review the gpt graph, you will also find that their curves go up very slowly. The gpt of a semi competent player will start to pull away at around 100th turn even at immortal or diety.

The implication is that even given all sorts of bonus, the AI still won't be able to afford the maintenance of a medium size upgraded army. That also explains why the AI leaders with early UU are mostly much more dangerous, as they can do a bit of UU spamming without breaking their piggybanks.

I'll suggest if the devs can't substantially upgrade the war AI, at least put commercial hub higher on building priority, and half the unit maintenance and upgrade cost (or decrease based on level of difficulty). I will even suggest lowering the war weariness on them. This will allow the AI to use the dumb rich man approach.... beat you by throwing lot of units at you even in an unskilled manner

 

[PhilBowles]

I have only skimmed through the thread so maybe this has been discussed before.

But could people's complaints about the AI be due to the fact that people have been playing Civ games for 6 games and they no longer suck? I started just a month or so ago with Civ 5. I have enjoyed it fairly well and found the AI a challenge on Prince, though I do admit I have not beaten a game yet (marathon length + mods + grad student = me restarting a lot). I can safely say that my skill at the game is likely not that great. Probably the hardest situation I have encountered lately is when playing Morocco; Askia and Rome declaring war on me at the same time from both sides and being able to fend them off. (Playing with the Vox Populi). T'was funny, Rome lost like 3 units and then ran away and asked for peace. Most of the pounding came from Askia who promptly asked if I was begging for mercy from him after I destroyed 3 of his cities. My point is that I am having fun with the AI and I am also not very good. I imagine if I was a starcraft-pro level of good at Civ games then the AI would be rather boring and I would notice every little stupid thing they do.

I had the thought when I was reading a Darksouls difficulty discussion about how Darksouls 3 isn't necessarily easier than the rest, its just that a lot of people who make the claim have played all of the soulsborne games in order and so the gameplay is something they have mastered; and other than outright cheating or outrageous stats you can't really make bosses all that hard anymore without some very different gameplay mechanics.

This isn't to say that Civ 6 vs 5 AI might be terrible or better; just that Civ AI in general may seem terrible to some because they are too good at the game.

Play some '90s games for comparison sometime. In an era where most games were single-player and mechanics tended to be simple and AI friendly, the AI was a genuine challenge. With so many games from that era now available again online, it's surprising just how hard they are by today's standards. Unfortunately neither of the Civ games from that era is easily available these days.

Though back to the topic at hand, I've had the sense that many people here started with Civ IV and Civ V, the most popular games in the series (while on a technical level it's true that Civ IV was among the series' best entries, there's a definite baby-boomer quality to the "Civ IV is the best Civ game!" phenomenon - i.e. the voices are as loud and numerous as they are simply because there are more of them than there were for Civs I-III). Comparisons with games from 20 years ago aren't really necessary.

Most of the complaints here aren't of the "AI is too easy" variety, but are much more specific: "in Civ X [mainly Civ V, because mechanically that's much more similar to Civ VI than Civ IV is], the AI performed the same behaviour better than it does in Civ VI" - and this is the case in very comparable systems, such as Civ V's combat AI vs. Civ VI's (Civ V used units to counter others - such as pikes vs. horsemen - more appropriately, it massed fire on targets until they were dead as Civ VI doesn't, it understood that embarked units can't attack at sea), and it simply built larger armies, declared war and chose more suitable war targets rather than declaring war with three warriors after marching them past border cities and up to a capital where they could easily be surrounded and wiped out. AIs build holy sites en masse without regard to whether or not they'll benefit from religion; in Civ V AIs tended to adopt this behaviour only if they favoured a religious strategy. etc. etc. One big bugbear is the AI's inability to escort settlers, which is hugely punished in Civ VI by settler-stealing (in Civ V captured settlers turned into workers). This was a source of many complaints in Civ V, which had the same issue for much of its life - but Civ V almost fully solved it by the end of its run, even without a Civ VI-style 'attach' option. It's not at all clear why Civ VI has reverted to older behaviour in this regard.

To put it into something of a balanced perspective, the AI is not completely hopeless. Allowing for the fact that it's designed - presumably deliberately - to be easier at a given difficulty than Civ V (as Civ V was relative to Civ IV), if you let it broadly alone and don't follow a particularly optimised strategy, it can win peaceful victories, much as Civ V could, and if anything it may achieve them slightly earlier. I've so far only played two full Civ VI sessions, on Emperor, and was just beaten in both, as I didn't have a good handle on the tech tree or the district system, and managed growth poorly. Sure in an older Civ game this is the sort of difficulty you'd want for Prince or King rather than Emperor, and when I say you need to leave the AI alone I mean it pretty strictly - take more than a couple of cities from a leading AI and it will fall apart - but it sets at least a baseline.

Nevertheless, the AI is both weaker and easier to derail than those in the previous games. It certainly doesn't help that the game made AI-unfriendly changes like the district system (which forces the AI to understand adjacency bonuses and punishes it for building the wrong districts, thanks to the limitation on the number it can build) and city defence (cities were so intrinsically strong defensively in Civ V that they compensated quite a lot for AI weakness - even with high-level defensive structures Civ VI cities are much more fragile, and the siege system is brutal) don't help, and like Civ V it doesn't understand that natural wonders are worth settling (a further drawback in Civ VI as the value of NWs is on average higher than in Civ V).

 

[earlc]

Not really. If your leader look and gestures are of a comedy caricature you're going to hear the dialogue and tone through that lens. Alexander in Civ V came across as a commanding warlord - Alexander in Civ VI is Prince Charming from the Shrek films, right down to the comic preening.

Well sure, but that doesn't have anything to do with what you said about V's voice actors being superior. Maybe you meant VI's seem inferior to you, based upon your reaction to the graphics.

All I know about Clash of Clans is the graphical style, hence the comparison. Human brains are very well-designed to recognise human-looking figures and to isolate them from background details in much busier settings than the Civ V backdrops - I don't see what you're getting at with that assertion. We're also hard-wired to read body language and to distinguish appropriate from exaggerated gestures, as well as to read the latter in a negative light.

That makes it sound like directors never care about the positioning of actors on the screen and everybody hates cartoons. No, these things definitely matter.

And it's not like we want to find a small character on the screen, try to make out their face and carefully observe their muted body language when we're focusing on something else entirely, a trade deal, what strategy we were just thinking about, reading what our trader updates are, what we were just doing before the turn ended. Flipping screen to screen is enough of a break in flow. It's much better that the characters are easily and immediately recognizable, and you don't have to guess how the game says they feel about anything.

Civ 1-4 all got it right, but they tried something new with V. It was part success, part failure. I feel VI is building on those past incarnations and also trying something a little new, and I'm glad for it. Unless it's a good idea to keep, there's no reason economically or creatively to just do the same thing over every iteration.

There always has been a degree of randomness - the way character coding has worked in all previous iterations is that leaders were given randomised scores for each aspect of their behaviour, with each having weighting towards preferred options for that leader. So they'd behave in a certain way more often than not, but not exclusively so.

Civ VI gets the worst of both worlds. AIs appear to differ little or not at all in favoured behaviours, all civs behaving similarly in most cases and with nearly all of the remaining variation fully random. But imposed upon that they have the agenda system, which means that, without fail, any given civ will act in exactly the same way in one specific context in every single playthrough. This produces a result where the civs manage to both lack meaningful personalities yet are very strongly predictable, moreso than Suleiman's backstabbing or Gandhi's love of nukes in past games.

On reflection, this may be a hallmark of Ed Beach design, in which subtlety is not a virtue. In BNW AI behaviour was the area that actively regressed following the expansion - the shiny new toys were culture and ideology, so every civ cared massively (and equally) about ideology, and save for a couple of hard-coded exceptions every civ always favoured culture over science, in both cases to the near-exclusion of other personality traits once these features became strongly relevant.

In Civ VI the shiny new thing is agendas, so those have to be the primary determinant of AI behaviour and any other sources of variation in personality are minimised in order to showcase them.

The semi-randomized personalities you describe do sound better, though I'm not sure they should be mutually exclusive with the agendas. Agendas only account for a couple of friendliness points in either direction, and I don't think spelling them out is necessarily an issue, if the other aspects of personality were suitably attributed through weighted randomization.

The dread shouldn't be based on their mechanics alone - and fear inspired by mechanics shouldn't be mitigated because you know that all you need to do is not backstab people and Tomyris will be friendly unless she randomly decides you're her enemy. The Ottomans and Mongols could be frightening in Civ V simply because of their personalities, even though in the early game they got no military bonuses (as they're uniques were medieval).

Yes, that sounds good. A personality could be volatile or aggressive without necessarily being predictable.

That seems a weird interpretation. I'm going by long experience with Civ V and earlier games and experience with Civ VI. Civ VI simply is a step down in most respects, more than one in some, and the complete lack of AI personality is so grating that that alone has stopped me completing sessions of a game whose numerous other major flaws I'm able to overlook to some extent. I don't need to make any assumptions when experience with every iteration of Civ since the series started tells me that, were it not for having a main-series number attached, Civ VI would be better-compared in terms of its overall quality with spinoffs like Beyond Earth than with the main Civ games. It's better than Beyond Earth, to be sure, but if it were called Civilization: Earth or somesuch instead of Civilization VI it wouldn't warrant comparison with Civ IV or Civ V.

I genuinely struggle to see a single element in Civ VI that's a clear advance over equivalent mechanics in Civ V, with the sole exception of Great People. Touches touted as new, like districts, are just a classic Ed Beach approach - take something the game already encouraged and oversell it without really doing anything very new with it.

There just seem to be in this thread a lot of (most likely wrong) assumptions about Firaxis, as well as quite a lot of hyperbole. There are a wide variety of things VI does that I find to be a major improvement. It could be chalked up to a difference in opinion, but it seems more like a bandwagon of sorts.

No, this isn't right. With the tile mechanics it's very important to teach the AI to use it correctly. Otherwise it gives the player plenty of terrain and range related advantages. Advanced strategies to properly use flanking and getting past choke points is something that even Vox Populi has trouble with, and the tactical AI of any vanilla civ game is a joke compared VP.

Which is why I said "relatively", and was regarding what I had just said about the production bonuses to V's AI, and what I was talking about regarding the huge jump in difficulty between an AI civ attacking with two warriors and an archer to Gilgy's war chariot rush or Harry's knight onslaught. I don't care what advanced tactics the AI would use to maneuver those two warriors and an archer, they're never going to be a challenge. Fixing VI's production so they could have a decent sized military on a lower difficulty level like prince is essential to improving the difficulty at all.

Advanced military strategies would be cool for sure, but I'm not expecting that from the game or any mods. If the AI can figure out how to use terrain and place ranged and melee units, that's plenty.

 

[Mechazawa]

Play some '90s games for comparison sometime. In an era where most games were single-player and mechanics tended to be simple and AI friendly, the AI was a genuine challenge. With so many games from that era now available again online, it's surprising just how hard they are by today's standards. Unfortunately neither of the Civ games from that era is easily available these days.

Though back to the topic at hand, I've had the sense that many people here started with Civ IV and Civ V, the most popular games in the series (while on a technical level it's true that Civ IV was among the series' best entries, there's a definite baby-boomer quality to the "Civ IV is the best Civ game!" phenomenon - i.e. the voices are as loud and numerous as they are simply because there are more of them than there were for Civs I-III). Comparisons with games from 20 years ago aren't really necessary.

Most of the complaints here aren't of the "AI is too easy" variety, but are much more specific: "in Civ X [mainly Civ V, because mechanically that's much more similar to Civ VI than Civ IV is], the AI performed the same behaviour better than it does in Civ VI" - and this is the case in very comparable systems, such as Civ V's combat AI vs. Civ VI's (Civ V used units to counter others - such as pikes vs. horsemen - more appropriately, it massed fire on targets until they were dead as Civ VI doesn't, it understood that embarked units can't attack at sea), and it simply built larger armies, declared war and chose more suitable war targets rather than declaring war with three warriors after marching them past border cities and up to a capital where they could easily be surrounded and wiped out. AIs build holy sites en masse without regard to whether or not they'll benefit from religion; in Civ V AIs tended to adopt this behaviour only if they favoured a religious strategy. etc. etc. One big bugbear is the AI's inability to escort settlers, which is hugely punished in Civ VI by settler-stealing (in Civ V captured settlers turned into workers). This was a source of many complaints in Civ V, which had the same issue for much of its life - but Civ V almost fully solved it by the end of its run, even without a Civ VI-style 'attach' option. It's not at all clear why Civ VI has reverted to older behaviour in this regard.

To put it into something of a balanced perspective, the AI is not completely hopeless. Allowing for the fact that it's designed - presumably deliberately - to be easier at a given difficulty than Civ V (as Civ V was relative to Civ IV), if you let it broadly alone and don't follow a particularly optimised strategy, it can win peaceful victories, much as Civ V could, and if anything it may achieve them slightly earlier. I've so far only played two full Civ VI sessions, on Emperor, and was just beaten in both, as I didn't have a good handle on the tech tree or the district system, and managed growth poorly. Sure in an older Civ game this is the sort of difficulty you'd want for Prince or King rather than Emperor, and when I say you need to leave the AI alone I mean it pretty strictly - take more than a couple of cities from a leading AI and it will fall apart - but it sets at least a baseline.

Nevertheless, the AI is both weaker and easier to derail than those in the previous games. It certainly doesn't help that the game made AI-unfriendly changes like the district system (which forces the AI to understand adjacency bonuses and punishes it for building the wrong districts, thanks to the limitation on the number it can build) and city defence (cities were so intrinsically strong defensively in Civ V that they compensated quite a lot for AI weakness - even with high-level defensive structures Civ VI cities are much more fragile, and the siege system is brutal) don't help, and like Civ V it doesn't understand that natural wonders are worth settling (a further drawback in Civ VI as the value of NWs is on average higher than in Civ V).

Oh I grew up with 90's strategy games, though mostly RTS. The thing is, most of them just cheated. The AI in Starcraft cheats (though the AI is decent too), so does it in Red Alert and Tiberium Sun and I even think AoE, though I never played it. Empire Earth was my jam and I am not sure if the AI cheated on harder difficulties or not. They are hard though, I recently tried Open RA and I couldn't win even on the easiest modes in skirmish lol. Or maybe I am just way to rusty. Only tried like 3 games.

I have not played Civ 6 so I cannot really comment on the comparison of the AI's. What I know about earlier Civs is the concept of stacking, it actually sounds terrible, lol. Put your whole army on one tile? Why have tiles at all at that point, just have a dialog popup that shows numbers mashing into each other. The combat in Civ 5 is great for me, it plays very much like Battle for Wesnoth which is pretty much like a Civ game without the Civ parts.

So far in Civ 5 with Vox Populi, the only AI issues I can say I have noticed is AI's that are way weaker than me going to war, or AI's that cannot even reach me going to war. Also they don't seem to prioritize units when attacking all that well. It is fairly common that I have a weak red unit near some of theirs and they will move units or not attack it. Granted maybe that is smart in a way because I try to bait them with weak units. Granted, all of this is Prince difficulty.

 

[PhilBowles]

Well sure, but that doesn't have anything to do with what you said about V's voice actors being superior. Maybe you meant VI's seem inferior to you, based upon your reaction to the graphics.

The same tone can be interpreted very differently depending on context - if the Civ V voice actor were used for Civ VI Alexander, he'd just come across as parodying the personality he actually exhibited in Civ V.

That makes it sound like directors never care about the positioning of actors on the screen and everybody hates cartoons. No, these things definitely matter.

Not everybody hates cartoons, but you'll find people who do where you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who takes exception to live action. And many of those who like cartoons wouldn't consider them appropriate in a putatively serious strategy game of Civ VI's scope. You can get away with cartoonishness in things like Blizzard games more easily because something like Starcraft has a fairly absurd premise to begin with, even when it's trying to tell a serious story.

And it's not like we want to find a small character on the screen, try to make out their face and carefully observe their muted body language when we're focusing on something else entirely, a trade deal, what strategy we were just thinking about, reading what our trader updates are, what we were just doing before the turn ended.

Quite possibly that's why Civ V has gigantic screens with large characters front and centre - and while their gestures aren't extremely caricatured to the extent of Civ VI, they're anything but muted. Does Askia seem subtle to you?

Flipping screen to screen is enough of a break in flow. It's much better that the characters are easily and immediately recognizable, and you don't have to guess how the game says they feel about anything.

I'm still seeing no connection between these observations and Civ VI's character portrayals. Gandhi's no less immediately recognisably Gandhi in Civ V than he is in Civ VI, nor are any other of the returning characters. And I learn a lot more about Pedro's personality from his Civ V setting than a black backdrop.

Civ 1-4 all got it right,

People need exaggerated gestures and don't want to look for small characters, so a shrunken disembodied head in the middle of the screen, flanked by much more prominent trade details that require your attention, "gets it right"? I'm not sure how that's internally consistent.

but they tried something new with V. It was part success, part failure. I feel VI is building of those past incarnations and also trying something a little new, and I'm glad for it. Unless it's imperative to keep, there's no reason economically or creatively to just do the same thing over every iteration.

There's no reason to do something different for the sake of doing something different if you've previously hit on a winning formula.

The semi-randomized personalities you describe do sound better, though I'm not sure they should be mutually exclusive with the agendas. Agendas only account for a couple of friendliness points in either direction, and I don't think spelling them out is necessarily an issue, if the other aspects of personality were suitably attributed through weighted randomization.

The thing is, if every other variable is the same across all civs, those couple of points dictate their entire attitude towards you. I became firm friends with Alexander on my last playthrough merely by declaring a joint war with him; in a previous one simply not declaring war on anyone who didn't already hate me (and hence not backstabbing) made Tomyris an unshakeable ally when the rest of the world hated me. I'm fairly sure Peter's aggression whenever I encounter him early is down to the fact that AI bonuses ensure I'll never be ahead of him in culture or science at the start of the game - which usually leads to him declaring early war and then being wiped out unless he's holed up somewhere especially inaccessible, I have other civs or barbarians (it's sad that barbarians are more of a military challenge than other civs) to deal with, or I haven't devoted enough effort to militarising.

No, agendas aren't necessarily mutually exclusive with the personality system - but they happen to replace it in Civ VI. Civs IV and V both had 'agendas' in the sense that different civs weighted particular player behaviours differently without choreographing them so blatantly or coming up with screens to announce whatever trivial and immersion-breaking reason they have for liking/hating you this time. Agendas would be okay if they were handled a bit more reasonably, and with different civs weighting agendas differently (for instance, backstabbing might reasonably be a cause for Tomyris to hate you enough to go to war. Not having a religion, building too many Wonders or not having enough Great People might represent a small diplomatic malus, but is an outright stupid reason to go to war).

 

[Locke_Daemonfire]

Only skimmed through the SC2 posts, but here are my two cents.

1. The AI in Starcraft II is ok at spending resources and producing units (macro), which is where it gets its advantage. Beginner players often have idle buildings and floating minerals because they forget to make more units, especially while doing other things. The AI can be many places on the map at once and be programmed to react as soon as each units is produced, while the player cannot. This may not be cheating in a literal sense, but it does provide advantages that the player cannot attain. These advantages do not exist in a turn based game, where the player's ability to manage things quickly are not tested.

2. The AI is actually not that great either. I haven't played much since LotV came out, but my recollection before that was that any player above bronze was able to easily beat the highest level of AI. The AI relies heavily on timings that can be performed with nearly no interaction, but falls apart when it has to do anything context-dependent. For instance, it reacts very poorly to harassment, doesn't change its composition to be more effective against the player's units, and doesn't micromanage its units very well in combat. Once you can deal with the first attack, the rest of the game is usually cake - not unlike Civ 6 actually.

 

[Ferocitus]

As the other posters suggested, play some standard size map games at standard or epic (these are more the "default" setting)...

I understand what you're saying, but I have absolutely no interest in Civ
with "standard" settings on their maps. I only play ludicrous (230x115)
size maps. Ynamp has been wonderful; I'm in the throes of making other
230x115 maps that are not Earth/TSL types.

 

[Mechazawa]

Only skimmed through the SC2 posts, but here are my two cents.

1. The AI in Starcraft II is ok at spending resources and producing units (macro), which is where it gets its advantage. Beginner players often have idle buildings and floating minerals because they forget to make more units, especially while doing other things. The AI can be many places on the map at once and be programmed to react as soon as each units is produced, while the player cannot. This may not be cheating in a literal sense, but it does provide advantages that the player cannot attain. These advantages do not exist in a turn based game, where the player's ability to manage things quickly are not tested.

2. The AI is actually not that great either. I haven't played much since LotV came out, but my recollection before that was that any player above bronze was able to easily beat the highest level of AI. The AI relies heavily on timings that can be performed with nearly no interaction, but falls apart when it has to do anything context-dependent. For instance, it reacts very poorly to harassment, doesn't change its composition to be more effective against the player's units, and doesn't micromanage its units very well in combat. Once you can deal with the first attack, the rest of the game is usually cake - not unlike Civ 6 actually.

I meant Starcraft 1, but I get you. In starcraft I the AI outright gets free minerals and vespian gas at higher difficulties, I think they may even get instant tech upgrades. In the Starcraft I map editor there are descriptions about the difficulty levels of the AI and the top AI's get to cheat. So, Civ is similar in that sense when it comes to AI cheating, though in Civ they actually tell you it cheats.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Starcraft 1's AI received extra resources only on "Insane" difficulty, and that was only accessible with the map editor. It is not normally a thing in game as there were no difficulty settings (hopefully they'll change it with the remake) The AI in melee doesn't receive extra resources but it doesn't need to scout and always knows where your things are.

I actually don't think it was bad. The only problem was the horrendous exploits in unit control but it was strategically fairly sound considering it had to be written before the meta was developed.

The insane AI received infinite resources, and thus a lot of people didn't like it because it was basically playing a different game. When I modded the AI, my default version wouldn't be able to beat any experienced player at all (though it was able to trounce the default AI, casual players, and even the cheating insane AI without any resource cheats of its own), so I also made one that got a resource boost from time to time. Despite this, the non-cheating one ended up being popular despite me starting the obvious. Now, granted most of my stuff got downloaded by non-english speakers so I never really knew what they were thinking. We also did some "deity" level AIs with absurd bonuses which were mostly ignored. But my sense is that people don't like playing with things that are artificially propped up, nor do they like ones that just swarm you with units early on and that's it. I set it to it only performing aggression about 20% of the time, with some ridiculous forward base strategy 5% (note to firaxis, that's about as much as you should forward settle), so to keep people honest, but not so they could just mindlessly build units/defense at the start. Because that's boring.

Starcraft 2's AI does not cheat at all until the highest difficulty of which it starts a gathering bonus. It also has to obey the Fog of War. Blizzard did state it cheats, however it doesn't in-game therefore it barely beats Firaxis in the race to terrible documentation. (Why is explaining how your game works such a outdated concept?)

Both AIs are highly exploitable and not a challenge to veteran players so naturally much like in Civ I don't think AI bonuses are too unreasonable. I mean, making an eports level AI is not even something I would think is reasonable.

And yes, as stated before, Blizzard doesn't make good AIs. That's sort of an aside though....

Beginner players often have idle buildings and floating minerals because they forget to make more units, especially while doing other things. The AI can be many places on the map at once and be programmed to react as soon as each units is produced, while the player cannot. This may not be cheating in a literal sense, but it does provide advantages that the player cannot attain. These advantages do not exist in a turn based game, where the player's ability to manage things quickly are not tested.

Well, beginner players in Civ build useless buildings, have poor tech priorities, move units inefficiently, make bad purchases/don't make them at all, and sometimes don't pay attention to various things. I mean, obviously they aren't going to be penalized for not clicking fast enough, but it all boils down to efficiency and game knowledge. In theory people have infinite time to take care of all these things, but I will just say that I often neglect a ton of things despite this.

To me it's all the same thing, and also something an AI should be able to do better than a beginner.

 

[PhilBowles]

Played much of a new game as France yesterday - I had a surprisingly interesting island start in which district placement etc. was much more relevant than I've found it in the past.

I declared war on Germany earlier than I'd have liked (as Frederick demanded to know what I was doing next to his cities) and the cities held out surprisingly well. I was extremely impressed by one play in particular: shortly after I moved on Ulm I saw a Great Engineer headed for the city (unescorted, but you can't have everything). It obligingly withdrew when I threatened it (also an AI failure as it could actually have reached the city), but was back a couple of turns later and did exactly what I feared it would (as the forces I had nearby were insufficient) - rushed Ancient Walls. The city was newly-founded, so it's no fault of the AI that it didn't already have walls (indeed it's possible the AI settled to avoid capture - more impressively still, it actively settled the Pantanal. I've never previously seen an AI in either Civ V or Civ VI prioritise a Natural Wonder). The AI even did something I've only occasionally seen from Civ V AIs - gained suzerainty of a city-state well-positioned to attack me (this could be coincidence - the CS was Stockholm and the AI actually seemed pretty good at prioritising CSes with strong bonuses. Kongo grabbed Toronto from me).

The war dragged on a long time and indeed was ongoing when I ended the session, but in all that time the AI never moved garrison units up (save incidentally, and then they were melee units), never created new units in cities under attack, and launched occasional suicide attacks with Warriors and Chariots against swords and crossbows. It was very late when it moved missile units up, and I was reliably able to keep units near death alive by moving up with a new unit and trusting the AI to prioritise it over a damaged one that couldn't get out of range. It held out entirely because it was in an area I wasn't able to quickly reinforce, I had too few siege units, and encampments are very good at stopping attacks (and, in fairness, this one was placed fairly well). What's more the AI was so wholly non-aggressive that I could settle almost next to Seoul (the city I was attacking) without repercussions, although the AI evidently had units available - at one point a pikeman army was sitting in Frankfurt while I had a knight three hexes away.

Overall the AI performed quite a lot better than I expected, though I started with low expectations based on past (including post-patch) experience, and in some areas was close to Civ V level. But it still has some way to go and can only present a military challenge by stalling, it can't go on the offensive.

 

[earlc]

Not everybody hates cartoons, but you'll find people who do where you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who takes exception to live action. And many of those who like cartoons wouldn't consider them appropriate in a putatively serious strategy game of Civ VI's scope. You can get away with cartoonishness in things like Blizzard games more easily because something like Starcraft has a fairly absurd premise to begin with, even when it's trying to tell a serious story.

I don't think they have to be worried about offending anyone who hates cartoons with their slightly stylized leaders. The cartoon comparison (which I made) isn't even a direct comparison, as the leaders are far, far less stylized than your typical CGI movie or a Blizzard game. Really, they're just right. I find it a major success in character design.

Quite possibly that's why Civ V has gigantic screens with large characters front and centre - and while their gestures aren't extremely caricatured to the extent of Civ VI, they're anything but muted. Does Askia seem subtle to you?

Well, they really were not as you say here, and that has been my criticism against them. Many of the characters are not at all front and center, and they really can be anywhere on the screen from civilization to civilization. There's no consistency whatsoever - not in location, not in depth, not in pose, not in how much of the body is on screen. It's whiplash. And they're all dwarfed by their massive background, which occasionally is more interesting than them. Unless they're randomly not and take up half the screen front and center, like Rome.

I'm still seeing no connection between these observations and Civ VI's character portrayals. Gandhi's no less immediately recognisably Gandhi in Civ V than he is in Civ VI, nor are any other of the returning characters. And I learn a lot more about Pedro's personality from his Civ V setting than a black backdrop.

See above. And sure, a several of the V leader screens are quite likable in some vacuum outside of everyday gameplay. Others really are not that great regardless.

They do all have their own backgrounds in VI too, they're just muted.

People need exaggerated gestures and don't want to look for small characters, so a shrunken disembodied head in the middle of the screen, flanked by much more prominent trade details that require your attention, "gets it right"? I'm not sure how that's internally consistent.

I don't see where you're confused about having consistent leader-heads, right where you expect them, immediately recognizable for their civ, with emotions right up front. 1-4 got these aspects right where V did not. VI is an improvement otherwise.

There's no reason to do something different for the sake of doing something different if you've previously hit on a winning formula.

Obviously. The point is V wasn't a winning formula - at its very best you might call it inconsistent. If anything, your comment applies to V more than VI. They broke the winning formula, tried something new and partially failed.

I wouldn't mind if they revisited the V style a little and fixed it...next time around. Maybe each leader on first contact could have a brief opening cinematic in their specific setting, which is then partially obscured and muted as they take their position front and center.

 

[Ferocitus]

@Ferocitus

Keep in mind marathon skews things quite a bit. I only play giant earth marathon x2 (jealous of your ludicrous dang you). I certainly agree the ai builds, actually spams, commercial and industrial. Once it can.

But most folks play much faster and more condensed maps. I bet the game is pretty much over for warmongers before they get to the phase where the ai is building 4th and 5th districts.

And that's okay. Its not district choice that is hurting the ai so much as it is tactics.

But the better the ai becomes at tactics, the less choices the player will have, because the optimal choice will then be at a premium, and poorer choices will have a larger negative impact.

I think really what the mongers want is to see far fewer *stupid* actions by the ai. They want competent decision making. They want a field that will make them pay for their own stupid mistakes. Not necessarily a balls-to-the-wall killer ai.

Besides, no matter how good the ai gets, the player should always have a huge advantage, because the player can meld tactics and strategy and change both in a single turn, feinting and reacting. Only a true ai will ever be able to do *that* well. Fake it, sure, easy, no problem. But not actually do it.

I agree the AI can do a lot better, but it's also less than a year since
the release. I don't expect Civ6 to be anywhere near complete for
another 2 years, maybe 3.

Another advantage that human players have on the Earth maps is
that they know the whole map (or at least remember most of it)
without having to explore it all. Different resources will appear in
each new game, but that initial knowledge is a huge advantage,
and one reason I'm trying to add some additional areas to the
ludicrous size maps.

Of course the AI will not be able to play many tactics that humans
can, for example buying a tile at certain times to stop other civs from
exploring a region you want to keep them away from.
They don't have anywhere near enough RAM or processing speed, and
won't have for many years.

 

[PhilBowles]

I don't think they have to be worried about offending anyone who hates cartoons with their slightly stylized leaders. The cartoon comparison (which I made) isn't even a direct comparison, as the leaders are far, far less stylized than your typical CGI movie or a Blizzard game. Really, they're just right. I find it a major success in character design.

They're good cartoons, sure, but that's still a poor fit for the sort of game this is. Granted Civ has had cartoonish graphics in the past and Civ VI has an overly-bright colour palette, but those are details your attention mostly isn't drawn to. Peter in a huff is a fine comic stance, but it's not what a Civ game ought to be drawing attention to. It's not that the Civ VI leaders are bad - they're simply in the wrong game,

Well, they really were not as you say here, and that has been my criticism against them. Many of the characters are not at all front and center, and they really can be anywhere on the screen from civilization to civilization.

Many are offset from centre, which is exactly where they should be - the human eye is drawn more to the sides of an image than the centre. This is why photographs with subjects dead-centre look somewhat flat and are less engaging than those with the subject to the left or right, and why game interfaces tend to put the most immediately relevant information panels towards the left or right of the screen. It's also why every Civ VI leader is right of centre, incidentally. Some of the ones who end up in the centre move in from the left, such as Alexander and Genghis. I'll grant that the execution wasn't perfect in every case - screens like Elizabeth's or Gandhi's were uninspired - but that's not a strike against the overall approach any more than Hojo's attempt to escape off the righthand side of the screen is a mark against Civ VI.

There's no consistency whatsoever - not in location, not in depth, not in pose, not in how much of the body is on screen. It's whiplash. And they're all dwarfed by their massive background, which occasionally is more interesting than them. Unless they're randomly not and take up half the screen front and center, like Rome.

Not a single Civ V leader comes to mind whose body isn't wholly onscreen (save the feet of a couple who are right upfront).

I wouldn't mind if they revisited the V style a little and fixed it...next time around. Maybe each leader on first contact could have a brief opening cinematic in their specific setting, which is then partially obscured and muted as they take their position front and center.

Maybe you had lower-quality settings, but the Civ V leaders did exactly that on first meeting at least at the high graphical settings - Genghis and Alexander rode in, for instance, Gajah Madah and Harold strode forwards, William looked up from his scroll, and so on and so forth.

 

[HF22]

I think the "its only been out for x months / years!" excuse needs to be retired. The game, by DLC6, will be pretty much a year old and a long way from vanilla. While expansions will undoubtedly add extra stuff to the game, I think the basic strengths and weakness of the game are pretty much set in stone by this point (i.e. the AI is always going to be below par etc).

And based on its patch history, even for unfinished mechanics which I expect will get a lot of work in the expansions (like diplomacy), it is pretty clear those expansions will bring with them all entire new set of bugs.

When Civ 6 was released, I thought it was an unfinished game with lots of potential. Sadly, at this point, I think we are finding it doesn't really have that much potential at all. If you don't enjoy it now, its unlikely future changes are going to turn that around.

 

[Ferocitus]

I think the "its only been out for x months / years!" excuse needs to be retired.

You can retire it all you like, but I had different expectations.
I didn't care what state the game was in when released. I would have
bought it in an even rougher state if it was available 6 months earlier.