roscoepfox
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2014
- Messages
- 69
I think the main problem is how the AI behavior is portrayed to the player especially because of the "denunciation" system.
In my last game I was condemned by practically everyone at one time or another. I had never fought ANY of them. As a matter of fact, the only factions I was next too were ARC and PA. I can kind of understand either of them condemning me , especially ARC because we were smack next to each other from the beginning. They literally landed right next to my explorer as he was doing an expedition.
Of course they then accused me of searching for salvage in THEIR lands. My telling them to piss off probably is why we never really got along throughout the game. But that's the thing, huh? There's no way I would agree to not look for slavage and I think most of us would ignore the AI's request for that anyway. They say "Do I have to escalate this?" yet I've NEVER seen them do anything about it.
Every single value that is meant to determine the likeliness of an AI to declare war on someone else is shown as something that they feel like a direct offense against themselves.
Because of that the player often reacts surprised or baffled asking himself "why is this AI pissed at me?"
The human player expects a valid, rational reason for someone to be angry at them, and the AI appears to be completely illogical in that.
But if the AI appeared to be not angry but rather simply greedy "I have nothing against you, but I really like your wonders and your land, sorry, nothing personal", that would be something that most people would understand as a logical reason to wage war.
It would be hypocritical not to.
Yep. Out of the blue the Asian lady contacts me to condemn me? Why? Affinity? Maybe. I dunno. (she was harmony I was Supremacy). But we were far apart and literally had only seen each others units once in 300 turns. It doesn't 'feel' right. Like earlier civ games where the AI would hate the human player just for being the human player. I think a little dialogue tweaking would help. If the AI had just said what the reason(s) were it'd feel sincere. Instead she's going to tell the world "my sins". What sins? I didn't attack ANYONE the entire game.
"You're an easy pray and a perfect target for my expansionist ambitions." is something that we all can understand, I think.
"Your military is weak! How dare you! I'm going to denounce you and tell the whole world that you must be eliminated!" Not so much...
I would like that. But then they'd have to attack me first. None of the AIs has attacked me yet. I'm surprised at that because there have been times when I had a pretty shabby military and they could have if not take me out completely, get some bases from me. I'm usually outgunned until midgame.
The other reason Civ V/BE AI is disliked is because of its inherent hypocritical nature. They expect you to don't settle near them without any previous agreement but they get angry at you simply for asking the same. They hate you if you conquer cities but they wage wars themselves. It is okay if a few leaders acted like that as part of their irrational personality, but not all of them.
Its the war thing that bothers me the most.. I rarely attack another civ for no reason....if I start a war its for land/resources, and in BE it's easy to get those things. I wish the 'warmonger' thing gave the player a small amount of leeway. I don't really know how at the moment but I'd like the ability to at least tell an AI that gets caught spying "This means war!" without a giant diplo hit. Apparently if I preemptively strike an obvious hostile civ I'm a big bad warlord.