The Good, the Bad and Ugly of the CiV AI

[MadRat]

After a new game post patch I decided to sum up a few AI observations

1) The AI builds siege units
GOOD: It builds artillery and Cannon
BAD: It seldom creates catapults and trebuchets
UGLY: It cant use them offensively at all
Suggestion : get rid of the iron requirement it is messing up both human and AI ability to have early game wars. It is actually hurting the AI more.

2) The AI is better at defensive warfare
GOOD: It concetrates its fire to devastating effect
BAD: It does so on weak units or sacrificial lamb units (hey scout I have mission for the Rodina for you!)
UGLY: It would rather kill a weak unit than preserve its own exposed valuable units

3) The AI builds a navy
GOOD: The AI builds ships in a more balanced fashion and sometimes co-ordinates them
BAD: It doesn't seem to upgrade ships from caravels and triremes in modern eras.
UGLY: It doesn't know WTH to do with its navy at all other than charter princess cruises.

4) The AI is bit more responsive to strategic threats
GOOD: I have seen the AI shift strategic goals as new threats arise on land defending threatened cities
BAD: It does so with its entire honking army leaving whole fronts exposed
UGLY: It is very knee jerk in its planning it will shuffle units and armies needlessly in peace and war both lagging up the game and leading to defeat by indecision.

5) The AI builds air units
GOOD: The AI can be devastating in its bomber use at times on both fleets and infantry.
BAD: Doesn't use helicopters and carriers
UGLY: AI has severe SAM infantry and guided missile fetishes (seems like an intentional innuendo)

6) New Diplomatic options
GOOD : You can actually keep a relatively war free existence as long as you do nothing
BAD: AI denouncement hell destroys international relations - one they start flying its all war all-the time on every channel
UGLY: Inane demands (75% of your treasury please - from an ALLY?), illogical denouncements and negative reactions for helping others.

7) Better happiness buildings and purchasable courts
GOOD: War unhappiness can be managed better as can population growth
BAD: The Great Empire of Puppetron is still the most viable real winning strategy
UGLY : The AI still cheats like a maternal fornicator on happiness.

Rat

 

[lietkynes]

good post, not much to add, you said everything

 

[UWHabs]

I don't get how catapults and Trebuchets need iron, but Cannons don't. Definitely I think we need need one of catapults or Trebs to be iron-free, and then slap on an iron restriction on cannons, and that should balance it out better.

And it's really bad at using siege. My game, Genghis was at war with 2 city states. Against 1, it literally had only 1 cannon bombarding it. Using the cannon - great. But it never captured it since it didn't send a melee unit.

And against the other, it did capture it, since it literally filled up every tile within 2 squares of the city with archers, keshiks, and the like. So eventually it set them all up, and attacked with all and took it. But it was definitely a lot slower than it could have been with even 1 cannon.

 

[Ferrum Rex]

Leaving the catapult without iron, would be best. No restrictions on cannons though, its part of phase 2 of resource wars, so those with out Iron can make a comeback with gunpowder. The bigger problem is the tech moving so quick compiled with lack of production that it can still be fairly useless to build them anyways

 

[PEACE!]

if u wanna make catapults iron-free..then i sugest reducing the bonus agaist cities by half,thus making a 15 percent bonus vs cities,because in this case i would be building some melee units..and a TON of catapults..so it's unfair..
and yes i def agree on cannons consuming iron,heck..even the picture of it shoes it's made out of iron

 

[hardcore_gamer]

UGLY : The AI still cheats like a maternal fornicator on happiness.

Only on difficulty levels above prince.

 

[Guardian_PL]

Only on difficulty levels above prince.

Ah, that solves it then. Whew!

 

[Isikien]

Only on difficulty levels above prince.

Oh believe me, it still does on prince

Search 'what would ghandi do' and read the thread.

 

[rschissler]

Pretty clever and accurate too. I love the way you structured it.

 

[Buccaneer]

I would expand a little on AI defensive warfare to include AI Capitals. They are indeed much, much tougher to capture post-patch. It seems to not only concentrates its power effectively, as you mentioned, but its defensive bonuses and quicker heals make for a long siege. I'm trying to take a 30 defense capital and with 4 Knights, 3 Longswords, 3 Swords, a Treb and a Cat plus several sacrificial units like Pikes almost turned me into a suicidal offensives. I don't think I would have nearly this much trouble pre-patch. I love it.

 

[hardcore_gamer]

Oh believe me, it still does on prince

Search 'what would ghandi do' and read the thread.

No. It. Does. Not.

The developers have outright commented on this very issue and stated in their own exact very words that the AI doesn't cheat the happiness system on prince in any way. If the AI gets lots of happiness, its because it has lots of happiness buildings and or wonders.

Here is what Jon shafer (the lead developer) himself said:

"Just to clear some things up - on Prince the AI plays by almost the exact same rules as the human. It receives a marginal discount to unit gold and supply costs, but that's pretty much it. There's no cheating with construction, gold production, happiness, puppet rules, research agreements, visibility, combat odds or whatever else. It has basic insight into the total military strength of other players, but no more so than what's available to the human via the demographics screen.For anyone digging throught the XML files: there's actually a number of fields from Civ 4 which we never cleaned up, and some of them misrepresent what effects there are on various difficulty levels - so don't take all of those numbers as gospel. The values in the AI strategy files are for steering AI preferences, and have nothing to do with bonuses.

If it seems like the AI has a lot more cities/happiness/units than the human at that level, it's merely that the AI focuses much more on those aspects of the game than a human does (perhaps too much so, in fact - at the expense of buildings and gold, in particular). One of our goals going forward is to shore up some of the biggest and most obvious AI deficiencies. The new rules added to Civ 5 pose a pretty big AI challenge, so we're spending as much time as possible working on this part of the game."

People who insist the AI cheats happiness on prince are just angry about the AI doing better then them in this regard and thus just dismiss the AI's progress as being little more then cheating.

There have been plenty of players who have posted screenshots of them obtaining similar levels of happiness as the AI on prince.

 

[Tokira]

After a new game post patch I decided to sum up a few AI observations

1) The AI builds siege units
GOOD: It builds artillery and Cannon
BAD: It seldom creates catapults and trebuchets
UGLY: It cant use them offensively at all
Suggestion : get rid of the iron requirement it is messing up both human and AI ability to have early game wars. It is actually hurting the AI more.

I agree with the rest but I'm not sure about this one. I've actually seen pretty many AIs building trebuchets and catapults. For example in one of my games the Romans had atleast 50% of their army consisting of trebuchets. Though they did have a lot of iron (if I remember correctly, they had like 3x 6 iron mines and some 2 iron mines).

I do agree that there shouldn't be the iron requirement and that the AI has no idea how it should use the siege weapons. In my example Caesar just sent the trebuchets in front line and moved them around; with his 5-10 trebuchets he fired just one shot.

 

[lietkynes]

If you don't have any iron, you can't take a city with walls and castle until you can build cannons. Granted, Chivalry and Chemistry are not so far from each other in the tech tree, still it's quite silly.

 

[Isikien]

No. It. Does. Not.

The developers have outright commented on this very issue and stated in their own exact very words that the AI doesn't cheat the happiness system on prince in any way. If the AI gets lots of happiness, its because it has lots of happiness buildings and or wonders.

Here is what Jon shafer (the lead developer) himself said:

"Just to clear some things up - on Prince the AI plays by almost the exact same rules as the human. It receives a marginal discount to unit gold and supply costs, but that's pretty much it. There's no cheating with construction, gold production, happiness, puppet rules, research agreements, visibility, combat odds or whatever else. It has basic insight into the total military strength of other players, but no more so than what's available to the human via the demographics screen.For anyone digging throught the XML files: there's actually a number of fields from Civ 4 which we never cleaned up, and some of them misrepresent what effects there are on various difficulty levels - so don't take all of those numbers as gospel. The values in the AI strategy files are for steering AI preferences, and have nothing to do with bonuses.

If it seems like the AI has a lot more cities/happiness/units than the human at that level, it's merely that the AI focuses much more on those aspects of the game than a human does (perhaps too much so, in fact - at the expense of buildings and gold, in particular). One of our goals going forward is to shore up some of the biggest and most obvious AI deficiencies. The new rules added to Civ 5 pose a pretty big AI challenge, so we're spending as much time as possible working on this part of the game."

People who insist the AI cheats happiness on prince are just angry about the AI doing better then them in this regard and thus just dismiss the AI's progress as being little more then cheating.

There have been plenty of players who have posted screenshots of them obtaining similar levels of happiness as the AI on prince.

Since your knee jerk reaction was to dismiss this idea rather than looking into it like I suggested, how about I hold your hand and SHOW you what exactly we've been labbing?

For the purpose of proving my point, I started a game, modded only with InfoAddict, which touches none of the core aspects of the gameplay or difficulty level. It is prince level on pangea with 10 civs, standard.

I meet Washington



The blue graph shows he has a happiness advantage from turn 0

Still not convinced? Check 'Net happiness'.





How about MORE proof?





No luxuries either, and that marble isn't linked.

Of course, don't mind me, feel free to totally ignore the above images and repeat what you said, despite many of us labbing this weird circumstance.

Derp.

 

[Aldor]

5) The AI builds air units
GOOD: The AI can be devastating in its bomber use at times on both fleets and infantry.
BAD: Doesn't use helicopters and carriers
UGLY: AI has severe SAM infantry and guided missile fetishes (seems like an intentional innuendo)

The AI does use helicopters (can't tell about carriers tho). Ramses was in conquering mode and had half of a continent to himself (I was playing a mostly peaceful game on the other side). Eventually I declared war against him, and to my surprise saw several jet fighters and helicopters attacking my buffer city state. Looked quite impressive tbh

I think its more the limited resources that prevent AI from building those units, but Ramses certainly had enough aluminium that game!

 

[MadRat]

That is great point about resources. The more I play CiV the more I realize what they are just like happiness a speedbump that in fact actually hurts the AI more than the player. I find it really funny that with the exception of uranium and perhaps horses all the other resources are relatively common in reality but so rare in game.

If we are to keep resources as required for unit, especially late game (where trade is non-existence because everyone has hate-ons for everyone else) make the resource simply a cost discounter rather the required to build. It can look really stupid when a civ cant build factories because there is no coal or a space age civ that can't build modern air units or a Rome that cant build legions!?

Rat

 

[qemist]

Since your knee jerk reaction was to dismiss this idea rather than looking into it like I suggested, how about I hold your hand and SHOW you what exactly we've been labbing?

So the devs straight up lie to the buying public? That's disgraceful if it's true.

 

[Glassmage]

AI's don't get bonus happiness on Prince, it is the human player that get LESS happiness. Go check out Handicap xml. AI's play on Chieftain so the happiness given for Chieftain player is 15. Human player on Prince according to Handicap file get only 9.

 

[sleepysteve]

wow the devs should seriously apologize for straight the f up lying to us!! preety ridiculous... credibility down the tube on that one!

 

[ggmoyang]

4 and 5
- When AI can build carrier, AI masses carrier over destroyer or battleship. And carrier without fighters!
- I didnt saw AI builds a single bomber, but they masses fighters.
- They build heli, but not much.