[Vanilla] The AI still can't take walled cities

Maybe its somehow tied to Information era if the OPs test is actually true.
Because in early eras there seems to be absolutely no issue.

Ha ha, yes, that could be! And his nuke drops are him saying: "Dude, just leave me alone. I wanna be left alone."
 
I really appreciate your efforts and sharing your test results. Here are a few thoughts:

The info era start is an issue for the AI. It is trying to fill several operations with units. Operations have a unit number range so a city siege team could be limited because other units are being used for scouting and escort operations. Machine gun sounds like it was stuck in an escort operation. The AI will hold units outside a city waiting for other units to join it to form an operation group, this sounds like what happened with the Modern Armour.

The AI has no coding that tells it which victory conditions are enabled. Aztec was clearly focused science victory which highly alters it’s build preferences.


AI can definitely take walled cities and do a much better job of it when given a chance to fill their siege operations with a proper number of units.
 
AI sees no context of the map.

I mean... Duel map with one opponent. It is quite obvious here that the victory is a matter of warfare, unlike complex big maps with many factors, cs, civs, landmasses. But Aztecs do not care about that and leisurely develop, anticipating God know what kind of far future civ race, while their only opponent is next door and can potentially storm their capital at any moment.

Put two human players on one duel sized landmass (I played a lot of multiplayer duels in civ5 that way) and unless they agree before "okay pal we just wanna casually develop land and have relax, no war" then it is obvious we are going to fight for victory, not sit for 500 turns trying to outculture each other.
 
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I have really enjoyed reading the test runs you make, and I think that it has uncovered a number of issues. I would love to have you run a detailed, turn by turn test, with some of the alternate parameters people have mentioned. I realize it won't be comparable to your previous tests, but i like your methodology and documentation.

Bug #1 AI doesn't seem to understand what Victory Conditions are enabled.
Bug #2 AI doesn't seem to understand when victory is imminent (if i take this 1 city, I win!)
Bug #3 AI doesn't seem to be able to re-prioritize his desired Victory Condition based on "easier" options.
Bug #4 AI potentially doesn't seem to understand when war mongering penalty is meaningless (I am at war with my only opponent)

I do think that the Information Era start is probably skewing your results. The over the top War Monger penalty and the fact that varied optional end game victories are "in-sight" are probably lowering his desire to just kill you off.

What is the earliest start era that will automatically give your city walls?
 
This is why I haven't bought Civ6 at all no less the DLCs. What's the point if the AI is stupid - it seems to be even worse than Civ5.

It's definitely not worse than Civ V. It's roughly the same.

Anyway, I just witnessed Arabia destroy Sumer. Mostly walled cities fell. A couple cities flipped because of loyalty, but Arabia went beyond that with its army. That was during a dark age too, but it was still producing enough loyalty to pull it off. Saladin went into a heroic age after that, so I had zero chance of trying to get his conquests back by loyalty (I went into a heroic age as well)
 
I didn't have the same experience. I saw several cities with walls being taken by the AI.

Also, why did you add so many irrelevent stuff in your "tests"? Test 1 is useless, if you really wanted to mention it just say "I made two tests, but missed the first one, and in the second one the AI took 20 turns to enter an undefended city."
Which is still only one occurrence.

As far as we know, the AI in defensive wars while having an entirely different goal may have "conquer enemy cities" in very low priority. It makes sense to target enemy units first and keep defensive armies just in case someone rushes to stop you while you're going for science victory. Maybe it's just an occasional bug. In any case, hard to say with just one test.

But people need to stop doing like if their favourite game in the series had the best AI, especially the 5... If you're in love with Civ5 just play it, nobody will blame you for that. But at least acknowledge your personal bias.
There are some key differences between the AI in Civ IV, V, and VI. 4 and 5 are far too different in game mechanics(1UPT) for one, so in my opinion including Civ 4 is purely preference when considering modded AI, though I could never get into Civ 4 as easily. The issue between 5 and 6 is that modders have already made Civ 5's AI capable of playing the game properly without being too gamey (yes @Leyrann , such a thing is possible. Game mechanics being properly used helps clear up the game), so there's no reason for basic things like acknowledging win conditions to still be an issue for the 6th iteration of the Civ series, seeing how it largely carried on from 5.

Saying that the AI has other goals is a poor excuse for not being capable of decent gameplay. Whoever coded those other goals clearly didn't make a successful game the goal.

Edit:
All that said I can't wrap my head around people that run tests on duel size...
 
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The bigger news here seems to be the AI actively using bombers and nukes? I'm not quite to the end of the industrial in my first game as Korea so looking forward to seeing this action.

They were definitely using bombers last patch. Though in one of my previous tests I had an encampment and they just bombed that over and over and over even when it had no health...

The nuke was new for me, not seen an AI use one before this test.
 
"AI still can't take walled cities"

FALSE.

I've seen them take a city-state with a wall before R&F, and in my current R&F game they took one of my own walled cities. And quite fast, I would like to add.

I'm starting to think more and more that this way of testing is very flawed.

(oh and before that I had to start over three times because I was about to lose, but I'm not counting those games because I didn't have walls yet)

Late era starts have pushed the AI to underperform relative to same difficulty level at 4000 BC since at least civ 4, probably since nearly the mechanic was introduced to the franchise. That said, the sequence in the OP is still really weak.

All that said I can't wrap my head around people that run tests on duel size...

Despite improvements, performance is still not this game's strong suit.
 
I think there's a difference when the AI declares war to when you declare war. The AI doesn't want warmonger penalties taking your city - it is just defending I guess. It makes sence. If the AI declares war like VSoma tried, then it's another matter - it has an objective.

Exactly this. I've seen some very solid emergency behavior too. I think a good example is to watch what city states do when they follow their suze into war against someone who is nearby. City states can really move a combined arms force to a target and put "warheads on foreheads" if they want to.
 
If the issue really is "AI is too scared of warmonger penalties to take the undefended final capital of the game" (which is bad AI already), then you'd think that would prevent them sending units into city strike range of the city they've decided not to take.
 
yeah, having just come out of a game where the AI kept declaring war on me as a hobby but refusing to ever actually invade (other side of or on a different continent all together) I rather doubt the AI declaring war has anything to do with actually wanting cities... there is the "i give you this so you dow that" element but there you have to question the sanity of the ai. Early on a peaceful neighbor dow'd me alongside an aggressive one, aggressive was too far away to touch me and peaceful did not have a single wall or proper army, I basically waltzed through taking each city with a total army of 2 (legion & archer) causing an "emergency" that did diddly squat to me since the only other civ close enough took part in this emergency but never made a single proper move against me.... it did not even manage to pillage one tile in a stupid in-out-in-out troop dance... of course having a handful of city state allies possibly battering him halfway to me DID help. Also had a nearby enemy city state that threw all its troops at the capital I just took and basically break his army against it since he could neither take nor destroy it... barbs are STILL better at war than AI civs and city states are better than barbs but castrated it seems. In the end the "emergency" that should have sealed my fate ended up rewarding me for staying put.

And honestly "warmongering" being "taking cities" instead of "starting fights it cant win all the time just for stupid political posturing" will never make sense to me but I guess I just have to live with it. The AI's complete inability to understand logistics (nvm physical obstacles like mountain ranges) is another problem, perhaps this "human war=you are bad and you should feel bad" & "ai war=playing the game" SJW nonsense is merely a masking of truly terrible AI for the canvas it got plonked on. It's not that the AI is bad, it's that the dev's are only focusing on making a multiplayer game with AI as an extra but don't want to come out and actually admit it because for a "single player" game they can bloat the price more.... like what happened with Call of Duty.

Yes I know it wasn't a "vanilla" game but the same AI is used either way.
 
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I tried the last patch (minus R&F) to see if they had finally made some progress on the AI. Very disappointed. I am not expecting much, but the only reason I don't win every single time is because I decide not to invade everyone... not fun any more. So I decide to reinstall V and see how it went with the Vox Populi mod. Wow! What a difference! I've had a couple of wars were I was actually challenged and the enemy did sneak attacks, hiding their troops through the flanks. Of course it's not perfect and eventually you can win if you have the numbers and technology, but you have to be on your toes. And this was on Prince! I love the districts in VI but the AI makes it unplayable for me.
 
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