The most infuriating diplomacy fails in G&K

[hobbsyoyo]

Just read that thread and got to say I'm pretty disappointed with the implementation. Thats a type of play I get a lot of enjoyment out of and it stinks to hear that the diplomacy is such that it breaks the immersion of working together with the AI. Really hope that can be modded or some of the diplomacy gurus can figure out how to deal with the AI.

Yeah it sucks, but I'm not sure if it can be modded as it *may* access files the devs won't let modders touch yet. It does seem more than just immersion breaking, it seems just broken if what they said was true. Right now I don't even want to load a game and find out; it's that discouraging.

 

[PhilBowles]

Ha ha. Well, maybe they *should* specially hardcode it so that if you are Attila and have a Battering Ram on Turn 15, everyone definitely *should* be AFRAID....

I had an odd situation in my current Duel map game (Immortal) where Maria Theresa had higher score than me, an army twice the size of mine, and if she offered peace at all she wanted my cities for it - and yet she had the neutral tooltip "They are afraid of your great might". I was tech leader, and had just comprehensively smashed her invasion force with the loss of about one unit, but I don't know if the AI takes account of that. She stopped asking for peace on any terms, however inflated, after that (although possibly because I nuked and later razed Yerevan - yes, I could raze it because at that point it counted as an Austrian city).

Or, alternately:
-Start game as trade-based civ. Luck into peaceful neighbors, reign in my expansion so as not to upset anyone, and play all the way through the mid-game holding friendly relations with every other leader in the game. Sign DoFs, RAs, trade/sell luxuries, and get the game I was looking for. Until...
-Turn 282: Two turns after re-upping my long-standing DoF with the Netherlands, for no apparent reason whatsoever Willy decides to denounce Arabia and Ethiopia (who had been mutual friends).
-Turn 283: Arabia and Ethiopia issue denunciations of the Netherlands & warn me about getting too close to them. I apologize.
-Turn 284: Arabia and Ethiopia denounce me.
-Turn 285: The Netherlands denounces me.

This doesn't happen to me - or, more precisely, it seems to be as common in my games for the AI to be on the receiving end of this behaviour as for me to be. Immortal game as Siam at the weekend:

- Shuffle map, turns out to be a 6-civ Pangea. Make early contact with Babylon, Egypt, Polynesia and India. Egypt covets my lands.
- Make friends with India and Babylon. Ramesses randomly turns hostile and insults me, but his army turns back and goes home when my scout spots it.
- With India and Babylon, jointly denounce Arabia. Egypt wants to be friends. So does Polynesia.
- Gandhi offers to joint-declare war on Harun al-Rashid; Nebby joins in. Egypt and Polynesia have a love-in.
- Intermittent war and peace with Arabia; the five-civ alliance remains stable for most of the game.
- Random denunciation. Gandhi doesn't like Ramesses, it seems. Nebby's not too fond of him either.
- Alliance splits into India/Babylon vs. Egypt/Polynesia. I remain neutral (since I don't want the 'war vs. friends' hit for declaring war on Egypt. As annoyed as I am with Nebuchadnezzar for planting Borsippa on a site I wanted for my third city, I like Nebby), but when the war is fought mainly in the middle of my territory, I refuse to reopen borders to Egypt and Polynesia, tacitly supporting my older allies. I have negatives with everyone for DoFs with their enemies, but no one refuses renewals of DoFs (except, eventually, Polynesia, but only after I've refused all their deals, preparing for likely war - oh, and accidentally hit "Stop spying on me", which didn't impress Kamenaha).
- Peace breaks out, and Babylon and India go back to their usual hobby of attacking Arabia, finally making progress.
-I turn down approaches by Babylon and India to go to war with Polynesia, and answer "how dare you?" whenever Ramesses wants me to fight Nebuchadnezzar. Then I'm approached with a war offer against Polynesia ... by his old ally Ramesses. This one I accept, and Ramesses proceeds to nuke every Polynesian city.

By the time the game ended (Egyptian cultural victory, much to my surprise), Polynesia and Arabia were down to a city each, while the only wars I'd been involved in were ones I'd started or been approached to start. Practically every AI civ had been the target of either irrational game-long dislike (Harun), or apparent backstabbing - or at least deterioration of their relations (Ramesses vs. Nebuchadnezzar, Ramesses vs. Kamenaha); possibly the fact that Kamenaha was getting friendly with Harun, and captured a city-state, turned his former ally against him. By contrast I ended the game launching a joint attack on Polynesian cities with the one civ that had been hostile towards me at the start of the game and friendly with Polynesia.

Your characterisation seems more accurate for vanilla Civ V, but I think the AI now recognises that a human player it knows is likely to be superior to itself can be used as an asset. If you're an AI "playing to win", you aren't going to win by trying to beat a superior player in combat, while by contrast if you're an AI whose key rival is a similar AI, the best way for you to get an edge is to "recruit" the human to do your fighting for you. Everyone in that game was eager to have me join in wars on their side. Sure, this doesn't always happen, particularly as the AI likes to try rushing you before you can become either a threat or an asset, but while this is an extreme case - in which I was able to dictate terms and decide my allies without repercussions throughout the entire game - something similar is not uncommon.

 

[ahawk]

I had an odd situation in my current Duel map game (Immortal) where Maria Theresa had higher score than me, an army twice the size of mine, and if she offered peace at all she wanted my cities for it - and yet she had the neutral tooltip "They are afraid of your great might". I was tech leader, and had just comprehensively smashed her invasion force with the loss of about one unit, but I don't know if the AI takes account of that. She stopped asking for peace on any terms, however inflated, after that (although possibly because I nuked and later razed Yerevan - yes, I could raze it because at that point it counted as an Austrian city).

You said you nuked Yerevan? Nukes count as military might. If you had a nuke, she might have had a standing army of more units than you, yet you would have had more military might because a single nuke can take out so much at once. What I think happened is that she probably had more units, but a nuke counts as a huge number of soldiers on the demographic screen.

If you never have, check out how dramatically one nuke raises your number of soldiers on the demographic screen by looking at the demo screen one turn before a nuke finishes, then the turn after it finishes... you'll often see an extra 100,000 soldiers or so! Which is silly, because a nuke is obviously not an army of men, but the game counts it towards army size all the same.

 

[Harv72b]

Your characterisation seems more accurate for vanilla Civ V, but I think the AI now recognises that a human player it knows is likely to be superior to itself can be used as an asset. If you're an AI "playing to win", you aren't going to win by trying to beat a superior player in combat, while by contrast if you're an AI whose key rival is a similar AI, the best way for you to get an edge is to "recruit" the human to do your fighting for you. Everyone in that game was eager to have me join in wars on their side. Sure, this doesn't always happen, particularly as the AI likes to try rushing you before you can become either a threat or an asset, but while this is an extreme case - in which I was able to dictate terms and decide my allies without repercussions throughout the entire game - something similar is not uncommon.

On the (extremely) rare occasions when I've accepted an AI request for a joint DoW, I've generally found the AI to be very good at making peace with our mutual foe ASAP and leaving me to do all the fighting. Either that or DoW'ing but not sending any units into the theater of battle. And while I can see how you've interpreted it as using the human to its advantage, I just don't personally see any indications that such behavior is intentional...it's just the way that AIs fight war.

When you think about it, if you (as a programmer) wanted this AI to have the best chance of winning, you'd program it to avoid war with the human player(s) at all costs because, well, the AI sucks at war. The only time I'll even break a sweat defeating an AI army is during an early game rush on emperor+, and even then it's not really that difficult to at least fight to a standstill. And that's on maps with large land masses...watery maps are ridiculously easy for warfighting. So yeah, while it might be nice on some levels if the programmers thought to plug in some code to make the AIs attempt to manipulate the human into crushing their enemies, even that would be a horrible strategy over the course of the game as it would just allow the human player to amass a large puppet empire & get even stronger.

I guess that's the heart of my frustrations: the easiest way to beat this game is via domination wins, and the diplomacy seems set up to force the player into taking precisely that route. I would love to be able to start a game on Emperor or Immortal, expand out as far as I could before borders started butting up against each other, and then play out a peaceful game while trying to overcome the AI's head start en route to a culture or science win...but it's pretty much impossible to achieve that scenario. Well, I suppose I could use an editor to wall myself in with mountains & make sure Dido isn't the game, but that kinda defeats the point of the exercise (and would only work until Ghandi got his hands on some nukes anyway).

 

[PhilBowles]

You said you nuked Yerevan? Nukes count as military might. If you had a nuke, she might have had a standing army of more units than you, yet you would have had more military might because a single nuke can take out so much at once. What I think happened is that she probably had more units, but a nuke counts as a huge number of soldiers on the demographic screen.

No, she counted as having more units on the demographic screen - although I was never sure where most of them were. And the 'military might' modifier I think remained after I'd used the nuke.

If you never have, check out how dramatically one nuke raises your number of soldiers on the demographic screen by looking at the demo screen one turn before a nuke finishes, then the turn after it finishes... you'll often see an extra 100,000 soldiers or so! Which is silly, because a nuke is obviously not an army of men, but the game counts it towards army size all the same.

Her army was in any case shown as being well over 100,000 greater than mine.

 

[PhilBowles]

On the (extremely) rare occasions when I've accepted an AI request for a joint DoW, I've generally found the AI to be very good at making peace with our mutual foe ASAP and leaving me to do all the fighting.

I haven't usually seen that when the AI requests a DoW - but it seems to happen when I try bribing a civ that has no reason to go to war with X to go to war, which is why I never do that. Sure, they'll usually declare peace eventually, often without doing very much (and indeed in this game Gandhi declared war and left me and Nebuchadnezzar to do the fighting), but they don't seem to take the money and run as they do if you bribe them.

Diplomacy in Civ V is also much more about the modifiers you cultivate than about, say, getting an AI to do your gruntwork. If you accept a joint DoW, you may prompt a war the AI wouldn't otherwise launch - which will then set up mutual hatred between AIs for the rest of the game. You will sometimes get the "fought against a common foe" positive even if the AI doesn't do any fighting.

It's the same situation as the "freeloading" people interpret with civs asking for assistance following a DoF. This isn't the system saying "give us a luxury without us giving you 240 gold", it's the system saying "give us a luxury, and as payment we'll give you a positive "you helped us when we needed it" modifier" (which is generally more valuable than 240 gold).

Either that or DoW'ing but not sending any units into the theater of battle. And while I can see how you've interpreted it as using the human to its advantage, I just don't personally see any indications that such behavior is intentional...it's just the way that AIs fight war.

Oh yes, I imagine that's the case. In fact it probably doesn't treat the human any differently from another AI - but that in itself is an advance over vanilla, where "beat the human" rather than "win the game" seemed to be every AI's mantra.

I guess that's the heart of my frustrations: the easiest way to beat this game is via domination wins, and the diplomacy seems set up to force the player into taking precisely that route. I would love to be able to start a game on Emperor or Immortal, expand out as far as I could before borders started butting up against each other, and then play out a peaceful game while trying to overcome the AI's head start en route to a culture or science win...but it's pretty much impossible to achieve that scenario.

Well, that's basically how I played this one - I was able to remain peaceful (and for my part I happily declared war on Harun when asked without sending any units to fight him, knowing that he'd have to go through Babylon or India to reach me anyway). And I started out in 6th place techwise but was in 1st by the mid-game, where I stayed for most of the game.

The only flaw in the strategy is that I had my eye on beating Nebuchadnezzar to a science win or Ramesses to diplo win (and had positioned myself well to do at least the former). I hadn't registered at all (despite Ramesses winning all the cultural quests by a mile, and the tug-of-war over the map's one cultural CS) that he was after a cultural victory until it happened. And with no uranium in my borders I'd have had to give Ramesses juicy Babylonian and Polynesian targets by allying with them against him had I realised, as I'd have no other way of taking Thebes in time.

 

[Kerosene31]

I also agree with nefloyd that the AI just doesn't compute anything other than the units you've already made when it comes to choosing to go to war. It shouldn't be that hard for the AI to be programmed to estimate your hammers/gold per turn based on what turn the game is in and how many cities you have. With just those basic variables, the AI could be programmed to assume you have a pre-set range of hammer/gold values based on, again, your size, population, and the turn the game's in. It might add to turn-end time, sure. But that's one of the few things I wouldn't mind adding to turn-end delays, because it's always ridiculous that someone attacks me, I rush buy 5 to 10 units that are a tech or two ahead of my attacker, and end up having the attacker offer peace with luxuries to me when all I did was defend myself and suddenly have more standing units than the attacker.

That is exactly what is wrong with diplomacy. This has been a problem since the game came out and they need to tweak it. The AI thinks it is being clever and caught you sleeping, but in reality like you said you buy a few units or whatever and you can easily fight them off (plus of course the combat AI still isn't very good and a human player can often win even with a much smaller force).

They need to make the AI a lot smarter in determining who is "weak". Fixing that (and some of the war negative modifiers) would go a long way to making the game even better.

 

[Callonia]

That is exactly what is wrong with diplomacy. This has been a problem since the game came out and they need to tweak it. The AI thinks it is being clever and caught you sleeping, but in reality like you said you buy a few units or whatever and you can easily fight them off (plus of course the combat AI still isn't very good and a human player can often win even with a much smaller force).

They need to make the AI a lot smarter in determining who is "weak". Fixing that (and some of the war negative modifiers) would go a long way to making the game even better.

Naw, don't forget to make sure the ais don't switch attention too easily because i managed to anger the runaway greeks into attacking me inadvertently well to be fair, i had a reason to piss them off. I'm allied to hanoi and marrakech and he goes riding up to me on his horse a turn after he declared protection on those two city states saying that he has noticed my relationship with them and said that's nice but i should leave them to him. I was like very well because i was still building up my military. Mah spearmen and warriors vs his pikemen and knights.

So like, he was busy eating arabia up but i rode by on a single cataphract and bullied belgrade and alexander instantly got all huffy and puffy because i bullied belgrade while it was under his protection. He just up'd his whole army and sent them against me. Too late for him though, already fielding a mixed army of landsknechts and brutes and cataphracts lol. But the greeks haz keshiks xD However land not in his favor. I tough dug in trenched positions.

And because of this, arabia's making a comeback and recaptured medina.