The combat AI, again, is awful

That scenario has happened in every other Civ title since Civ 1.

BS.
I've played thousands of hours of civ4, and the AI in that spreads like a plague; never do you find a civ that's failed to colonize.
Sure you can out-tech them (on lower difficulties), but only if you play the game properly. (on King difficulty civ4 is challenging)

The civ6 King game I described above was me pissing around, not having an optimised strategy, and researching every tech, and building every wonder.
Yet I'm somehow at least 2 eras ahead of EVERY AI?!
In my experience Civ6 AI simply doesn't know how to play the game beyond a T20 - T50 Warrior rush. (and even that fails most of the time because the AI is afraid to attack cities, even when it outnumbers the defenders 20 to 1)
 
I've certainly noticed that the City States never upgrade units. I'm working (badly) on a science victory, and the city states are all still running around with warriors....
 
This is something I touched upon half a year ago before even Civ VI was announced.

Amazing. You are either a visionary or the pefect example of how self-fulfilling prophecies work.
 
Amazing. You are either a visionary or the pefect example of how self-fulfilling prophecies work.

No, I have watched the AI and its behaviours on the gameplays. Even a passer-by would notice its stupidity.

No, CiV V experience was not the first time they did this. Civ IV, Civ III etc. So you should also expect it on Civ VII launch.

I just hoped that talking about it would help to prevent such situations in the future. But it seems it was a waste of time.
 
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Besides I had the same experience with Civ V, so nothing new. This is something I expected. This is something I touched upon half a year ago before even Civ VI was announced.

Yep, looks like they didn't dedicate a lot of dev time on this...
 
BS.
I've played thousands of hours of civ4, and the AI in that spreads like a plague; never do you find a civ that's failed to colonize.
Sure you can out-tech them (on lower difficulties), but only if you play the game properly. (on King difficulty civ4 is challenging)

The civ6 King game I described above was me pissing around, not having an optimised strategy, and researching every tech, and building every wonder.
Yet I'm somehow at least 2 eras ahead of EVERY AI?!
In my experience Civ6 AI simply doesn't know how to play the game beyond a T20 - T50 Warrior rush. (and even that fails most of the time because the AI is afraid to attack cities, even when it outnumbers the defenders 20 to 1)

It is not BS. You had Civs that were miles behind in every title they have released. Nothing knew. Not saying AI does not need to improve but Civ 6 is not any worse than previous titles. Just stop with the OTT drama please. It detracts from the point; that AI needs improving. Ranting is not going to help.
 
I think its not that the AI is necessarily 'bad' but it seems bugged more then anything. I've read stories about where the AI has done some smart things and I definitely like their aggressiveness as opposed to Civ5. Why the AI doesnt build more cities is beyond me. Isnt that how empires in history have became powerful and well known?? If your 2 cities that limits your production unless you can turn out a unit every turn when being attacked by a larger empire. Its not fun seeing AI not expand and be a challenge.
 
I think some of these issues can be dealt with by using MadDjinn's tech tree.

The vanilla tree has some issues with catapulting people into eras they really shouldn't be in yet, and skipping over large portions of techs that provide essential units.

It's a large part of the reason why many see AI civs not upgrading their units....they may not actually have had the tech to do it, so it appears as though they are not upgrading their units.
 
I kinda have to laugh at the game I just started last night. I am playing at Prince level as Rome. My neighbor is Gilgamesh. He says he loves me then declares a surprise war on turn 30 or something. He sends 2 war carts and a warrior at me, through a bottleneck between the ocean and mountains. So I am able to easily push him back with 2 spearmen and an archer. We sue for peace a few turns later since the war was going nowhere. As Rome, I soon start putting out legions. I also found a second city. I also get a GG and 2 battering rams. I denounce him and declare formal war afterwards. I get an army of 5 legions, with a GG, 2 battering rams and 2 archers which absolutely demolish his small army of war carts. I easily take his capital that had no city walls (!) which was his only city and capture his settler that tried to escape. Gilgamesh is wiped out on turn 70 or so. Funny thing is that his capital had 2 of his unique tile improvements, Stonehenge and a campus district. So basically, AI Gilgamesh focused heavily on his capital, does not settle a second city even, and declares a surprise war on ROME with a couple war carts! WOW! The AI basically handed me a science and religion capital on a silver platter.
 
I'm convinced City States are building nothing but Warriors because they build them early in the game but never get the resources to build anything better. They can't upgrade them so they just stay like that forever.
 
What looks like the same issues on the surface may be different issues in reality.

I've noted certain AI will beeline for social polices ; The Greeks in my first game beelined for democracy . I noticed that because I was way behind.

I can broadly confirm above posters suspicion that AI not upgrading may not be one monolithic issue but be multiple issues unique to civ6 because the AI is actually fairly OK as teching and beelining for techs and civcs to what it's grand strategy wants it to be. Beeline also means lots of things are skipped.

So while previous games had similar issues of AI not upgrading units the reasons aren't analogous. In one of the earlier civ games the reason was mostly economic. the AI didn't prioritize holding on to gold long enough to upgrade. the gold issue could still be an issue on Civ6 but there's certainly a lot more going on.
 
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If they don't grant city states free access to strategic resources, they need to reprogram them to build mostly archers and spearmen, and their upgrades. With exceptions for when they actually have the resource in question, like if they have iron sure build a few swordsmen. But not too many since you can't upgrade them anyway.
Or (didn't civ 3 do this for niter?) let a tech eventually give you free access to that resource. Like for example a medieval or ren tech that unlocks iron, industrial era tech that unlocks niter, atomic era coal, modern oil. This way everybody could eventually upgrade their units, but a good bit later than when those units were top-of-the-line killing technology.
 
Now people start to realize how terrible the AI is. But when I tried to point this out before, I was percevied as "hater".

People cannot accept that terrible AI. Even at launch! That said.

I will repeat. If you accept it, buy the game, give positive reviews, you will always be getting the same result even when Civ 10 comes out.

It's great to see this argument here. Sometimes I think devs say among themselves -- lets give them the basics, modders will do the rest. Why sweat over AI? :(
 
It's great to see this argument here. Sometimes I think devs say among themselves -- lets give them the basics, modders will do the rest. Why sweat over AI? :(

I suspect a only a small minority of players actually play with mods and even fewer with modded AI in Civ5. I don't expect that to change. They'll get the unmodded AI to someplace fun where players like quill can play on immortal and not diety in a relaxed way.

I also want to say that Darko82 is not a hater but a realist. if you read what he is saying, he's saying they can't get the AI right on release all things equal. And optimism around AI happens with every new civ before release and is usually dashed on release. (HE is absolutely right) It takes years of patching and play testing to get things to a place before the modders even get involved.
 
Well I myself am not looking for anything perfect. As of right now, I just can't get enthused about playing my third game since on Immortal (and I'm a casual, mind you) I feel completely unopposed! If we can get a bit more strategic aggression and balance out tech a bit so units start getting upgraded by the AI, I'll be happy :3.
 
I'm actually still a little hopeful that the underlying AI isn't that bad, it just has some bugs and glitchy behavior that's causing issues. I actually like the diplomatic modifiers ok, and from that standpoint so far it's mostly made sense how they behave. Things like spamming horseman, and having one city with a settler parked in it the whole game, and DOW in 1998 with catapults and spearman, that can't be by design.
 
There will be lots of patches on the months to come. I'm not concerned at all.

They needed to launch the game well and all indications are good. we'll hear about how well it sold soon enough.

Im Not appealing to popularity but If it sells within or above expectations the funding will be there for patches. I might get a bit concerned if it underperformed. But considering how Firaxis fixed up vanilla civ 3,4 & 5 I'm actually surprised people doubt them at all.
 
The broken AI is a show stopper for me - sadly I'll need to wait a year or two to see if Firaxis can fix it.

I still maintain that the Civ IV AI was way better than Civ V. Why? Because it was better match with the game's mechanics. Having a SoD show up on your door step definitely gave you a shot of adrenaline. Yes SoD was a bit cheesy, but the point is the AI and game mechanics were in balance to give the player a challenging and fun experience. The Civ IV AI could also expand in a sensible way and develop their cities and units reasonably well. Was it perfect? No, but it was fun.

With Civ V and seemingly Civ VI, it seems the game designers added features (like 1 upt) without thinking through whether their AI or any AI could actually deal with the mechanics in a credible way. The result is an AI that can't develop cities, can't plan an attack, mount a defense, etc. which results in boring and stupid game play. I think the designer have created an AI programming challenge that is NP-Complete and therefore a decent AI will not even be theoretically possible.
 
On lower levels where I am hanging out trying to figure out how things work it is so easy to take cities as the civs sometimes take all their units to attack something like a city state and with only a few key units I can take a city as they are left defenseless - even the capital. It is just too easy. Especially since units are so cheap to build compared to anything else. Hopefully the AI plans better on higher level
 
They do occasionally pillage my tiles. In fact, pillaging is the only thing they can do. Only on my deity game did they attack my city. But once I wounded their troops enough with my archers, they backed off. They could have possibly taken my capital if they pressed on with the wounded units. Instead they backed off to heal.
 
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