They need to hotfix AI agression now

[BSPollux]

AI work is 'never' complete; you can always make new rules and refine old rules and variables especially with a system that weighs various variables. Changing weights of various variables can impact performance which can impact the impression of the AI being improved. So part of the work is simply a lot of play testing and feedback from players from places like this forum.

But theres the problem that some people start to demand changes way to early and way to loud. That very vocal minority can lead to an overblown perception of a minor issue. That may make the devs rush to make a change that leads to real problems.

Some people just dont have the patience to try out new things. Or suffer from the inability to adept. They can have a pretty bad influence on the community

 

[Balerune]

I just want to know how many people have got to turn 300 and how they find AI war declaring and war mongering @ Emperor and above levels. Just some posts from those who have survived or are winning.

A discussion of the AI diplomacy would also be helpful. This seems to be so easy for everyone who complains about it so I would like to know how they do this. Please post the games for study and discussion.

Thanks.

 

[Aristos]

If warfare is not a substantial part of the game...

See, that is where it is very hard to draw the line. I think NOW war is a substantial part of the game, while before it was almost the ONLY part of the game. While you were discussing I was playing my newest Germany game; neighbour Babylon. Huge trading partner, huge wonder spammer, so based in previous speculations/some analysis, Babylon would have been my "safe border", right...?

Wrong! He slowly but steadily accumulated power, showing his friendly face, keeping most routes with me as I was doing with him... building up his army. When it was ready, he launched a surprise attack. Granted, was not turn 50 as some miss, but was it better? Hell yes. I am still fighting an even war of attrition, slowly gaining the upper hand. So even if he was a major trading partner, getting a lot of money from it, even if he was going tall, even if he is not usually the warmonger... he came for me. That is Emperor.

Somebody mentioned horror stories about the BNW Iroquois. Indeed, the horror. I had them my very first BNW game; they completely dominated their entire continent, knocking out two civs, and when I met them, it was too late. I tried, but he made me pay with disaster my attempts at the WC and with inciting revolution. Also Emperor.

Point is, the line is blurry. While some think that the "substantial" part of war was reached with G&K, others think that it was finally reached only now. What cannot be denied, I think, is that at least now the AI tries to compete in all arenas, and what I see is that they usually compete in where they should be stronger IN THE LONG RUN, and not only in the beginning. I have to say that I ALWAYS play Random Personalities (to me, there is no strategy in knowing your opponent's behaviour from memory but in adapting to an unknown one), so I wonder if that could have something to do in my, so far, very good experience with BNW?

 

[Aristos]

But theres the problem that some people start to demand changes way to early and way to loud. That very vocal minority can lead to an overblown perception of a minor issue. That may make the devs rush to make a change that leads to real problems.

Some people just dont have the patience to try out new things. Or suffer from the inability to adept. They can have a pretty bad influence on the community

And that is EXACTLY what I am trying to prevent. Thank you for pointing it out, and hopefully more people will jump into the train. Balance, yes. Back to Shafer's Panzer General with cities in between, no thanks.

 

[Kordanor]

Well, I guess it depends on what you expect from Civ.

If you are coming from Civ4 or previous games you probably have other expectations than if you are a casual gamer coming from facebook games.

In Civilization 4 cities changed owners a lot. Empires rise and fall.
I mean there was even a mod called Rhye's and Fall of Civilization.
For me personally the fun was to saw the world changing. To have a huge world which forms itself new constantly.
Now this already changed in vanilla Civ5 generally as the game gets horribly slow with that many civilizations on bigger maps. Civ5 is more of a simplified board game version of previous Civs, which can be a good thing and also a bad thing.

However with the latest expansion it is also limited to a "rise of civilizations" because there is no fall anymore. Only exception is player originating combat. The world waits for you to shape it. There is absolutely no point in having bigger maps for small. You just add additional entries in a high score and differnet nodes you can use to trade.
There is also almost no use of the replay anymore which they implemented half a year or so after release, which was great fun in Civ4. But all you will see there now is small bubbgles getting bigger and stay big. If one faction is behind, they won't have a chance to compete anymore. There is no scenario like A is weak but when superpower B attacked C, A gained momentum by taking over a city from C.

The most you can see in BNW is if one AI takes over one or two cities. The combination of missing DoWs and horrible AI which isn't able to manage troops and to lead them efficiently to the opponent made Civ almost to a pure fight against numbers. If you are more efficient than your opponents you win. But there is hardly any interaction with your opponent. Like Yatzee, where you can make most out of luck by calculation of chances, but in the end every player is playing on his own.

Personally I hate Yatzee. There are obviously people who like it and thats fine with me.
But I am sad that the chess-franchise I loved transformed to a Yatzee game.

 

[Buccaneer]

Aristos, someone mentioned last week about Random Personalities so there may be some truth to that. By the way, what difficulty level?

Balerune, here's my current game:
Immortal, Continents, Standard, Shoshone
Opponents: Austria, Ethiopia, Hun, Morocco, America, Incas (plus one very early civ eliminated, may be Denmark, hard to tell with Huns)
Turn 250 and every civ (including me) except for the Huns have long had DoF with each other - countless "I see that you are friends with..." messages . The only declaration have been Huns declaring on Ethiopia, the two leaders. After a while, I paid Ethiopia a pittance to make peace and they accepted. Do you think that by turn 250, there would have been more wars among the AI or was it pure luck to have all peaceful civs on one continent (Hun are on a separate landmass)?

 

[Buccaneer]

Well, I guess it depends on what you expect from Civ.

If you are coming from Civ4 or previous games you probably have other expectations than if you are a casual gamer coming from facebook games.

Or SimCity where you only peacefully build. Or from Civilization where you turn off Domination Victories.

The problem with everyone peacefully building is that you will likely win every time. BNW has come the furthest in offering competition in building but it still takes marginal effort to win if you are a good or veteran player. The problem is that they made trading too powerful in this version.

 

[dexters]

Aristos, someone mentioned last week about Random Personalities so there may be some truth to that. By the way, what difficulty level?

Balerune, here's my current game:
Immortal, Continents, Standard, Shoshone
Opponents: Austria, Ethiopia, Hun, Morocco, America, Incas (plus one very early civ eliminated, may be Denmark, hard to tell with Huns)
Turn 250 and every civ (including me) except for the Huns have long had DoF with each other - countless "I see that you are friends with..." messages . The only declaration have been Huns declaring on Ethiopia, the two leaders. After a while, I paid Ethiopia a pittance to make peace and they accepted. Do you think that by turn 250, there would have been more wars among the AI or was it pure luck to have all peaceful civs on one continent (Hun are on a separate landmass)?

Do early wars help or hurt the AI?

I feel like the discussion has devolved completely down to 'no wars therefore broken' rather than an analysis of the metaresult, which could very well prove that the AI is being hurt by it.

If war is the only yardtick, I think it will be fairly easy to 'hotfix' the warmonger civs back into being insane and irrational, or simply having irrational Civs in game who will never like you no matter what.

I'm not sure. If you're platying immortal, chances are you're playing nice to not get stomped in the early game which given current conditions means the AI will likely acquiesce as gold will be at a premium. I do think DoF chains tend to reinforce the status quo and it would take an AI doing something to piss people off, like a WC resolution for that to change. It also gives human players enourmous power to control diplomacy as you can plant spies with the more aggressive/powerful Civs and let the plots leak to all their neighbours, which earns you brownie points and builds up enmity. This for better or worse is something people have asked for, for sometime. It is as far as I can see not broken.

A possibility is the irrational /random bloc system in Civ4, where some Civs will naturally want to be friendlier while others, cold and distant. It was OK until I played Civ5, where coalitions were more organic, based on real world politics and city-state conflicts. I don't want for the hotfix to be that kind of randomness based on an RNG roll. So we're back to Warmonger civs being guaranteed to war in the early game.

Pick your poison.

 

[Kordanor]

It's not about wanting "always war" but about taking opportunities. I am playing immortal all the time (against one other player and 4 AIs) and the AI just does not take these opportunities. It does not attack each other and it does not attack us either if we don't kindly ask it to and flip a dime to them.
The AI just needs additional checks like "how hard would it be to win this war/take this city". And if it's chances are like 80% it should take the opportunity. Right now it doesn't even if they are at 99%, and wether or not it's a warmonger civ does not play a role at all.

 

[Buccaneer]

dexters, the game is already into the Modern Era (barely) so I thought it was well beyond the early phase. Four civs have chosen Ideologies but it seems everyone is mainly concerned with getting gold (for what, I don't know, I don't see armies being built or city-states alliances changing much). Maybe everyone is simply content buying buildings and giving me gold like an ATM. I have 6 routes going out and at one time, 8 coming in which is probably average. Religion is static, nothing more can be done there and it appears all archaeology sites have been dug (still a little fog left).

 

[dexters]

dexters, the game is already into the Modern Era (barely) so I thought it was well beyond the early phase. Four civs have chosen Ideologies but it seems everyone is mainly concerned with getting gold (for what, I don't know, I don't see armies being built or city-states alliances changing much). Maybe everyone is simply content buying buildings and giving me gold like an ATM. I have 6 routes going out and at one time, 8 coming in which is probably average. Religion is static, nothing more can be done there and it appears all archaeology sites have been dug (still a little fog left).

Perhaps for the ATM, but AFAIK late game wars are not an issue, I've seen relations deteriorate overtime just from the various pressures of diverging interest DoF or no, or are you wishing to expand into that territory as well.

The early Denmark elimination would seem to run counter to the whole premise that there aren't enough early game wars, which is like 90% of all the complaints here. Seems like you just have a particularly peaceful game, on a continents map no less. None of the other civs you listed are problematic. Of all the remaining Civs, only Austria could be the nexus of an international war. But There's no one to compete with Austria for CS or be ticked off by CS buying. Ethiopia is a religious nut and regular turtler and that's it. Inca's aren't really known to have a strong personality. So yeah.

Assuming Huns are a rump Civ and therefore in no position to warmonger, but given you didn't tell us how the lay of the land is, I expect to be proven incorrect on a technicality and my entire point discarded.

 

[jaldaen]

One thing that might be interesting for modders to try out is making it so that the civ that declares war "pillages" all the trade routes going to it and takes this added income into account when deciding to go to war. Might make for an interesting effect of a civ thinking, "Hmmm... this guy is a great trading partner, must mean he's got lots of goodies I could take from him."

 

[Aristos]

Well, I guess it depends on what you expect from Civ.

If you are coming from Civ4 or previous games you probably have other expectations than if you are a casual gamer coming from facebook games.

I AM coming from Civ4... and 3... and 2... and 1. I know my expectations, and they are based on that long history, and only now is Civ5 closer to them. You want to start the "gamey" comparisons? Fair enough: I did not want a mediocre clone of Panzer General in the first place.

See? I can also make silly, without sense comparisons. That does not help.

Please do not tell us that Civ5 before BNW was true to the series; it was closer, granted, but not there yet. Vanilla... let's not even start.

I can give you that there is need of balance in some things, even adding some others... but going back to Panzer General with cities from where we are now will never be going closer to Civ4.

 

[Aristos]

The AI just needs additional checks like "how hard would it be to win this war/take this city". And if it's chances are like 80% it should take the opportunity. Right now it doesn't even if they are at 99%, and wether or not it's a warmonger civ does not play a role at all.

And who told you that the checks are not there??? Dig into the code and you will find them; I did. I hope you do not expect me to copy paste the entire dll code here; go in there and look. It's there, and frankly, I found it amazing to find that the AI is checking even that. Just a spoiler: it checks for probability of winning the war, AND also for degree of destruction (how much it will cripple the potential target). It is, together with many other factors, part of the modifiers for the MAJOR_CIV_WAR_APPROACH stance.

Go check it. It's fun. More importantly, it's an urban legends killer.

Again, my point being: it's amazing how much more sophisticated the AI became under Beach et all. It may be in need of balancing, but its trying to "rationalize" the most unimaginable things. It surprised me a lot to find things like, well, what you are saying it needs.

In other words, we shouldn't just assume that because we are not understanding the new AI behaviour, that the behaviour is not coded. First, let's go and look. That is why, among other things, they gave us the DLL (and this time, on time).

 

[eric_]

A couple things:
First, if there is truly a balance in the game as far as which victory the AI is likely to choose, some favoring one, others favoring another, etc, then over the course of many, many games, we should expect about 1/4 of the civs we encounter to aggressively pursue a military victory.

If the AI engine has good randomness built in, it's quite possible to encounter a string of games where military is downplayed across the board, and then another string of games where war is hard to avoid.

Second, I played very few G&K games, but it sounds like it was quite war heavy. Is it possible that some people devised successful tactics for avoiding DoWs in that environment that are even more successful in BNW?

 

[Aristos]

If the AI engine has good randomness built in, it's quite possible to encounter a string of games where military is downplayed across the board, and then another string of games where war is hard to avoid.

In fact, there is a random component to the WAR weight, previous to the last factor; it's the last modifier to be added/subtracted to the weight before the difficulty-dependant AIDeclareWarProb is factored into it. That makes the weight less deterministic.

A good possibility is to play with the range of the random distribution (which is modifiable in the code), and give the weight much more variance. That would need a modified dll though (as far as I remember... it may be the case that the max and min of the range are already in XML, I don' recall... need to check some more).

 

[Kordanor]

Well, it's not that I don't believe you that it's in the code. ^^
But apparently it's either weighted sooo little that it does not play a role or it is coming after a conditional and is therefore not checked.

Fact is, that warmongers dont attack you at turn 100 or even 150 (normal speed) even if you only have one unit to defend your empire (if you don't actively provoke them otherwise like spamming their boarders with several cities).

And as far as I remember war never played such a small role in civ's AI as it does now.
And with that I don't mean that it doesn't think a lot about it now, but it doesn't help if it's last thought is always that it's too expensive anyways.

 

[Aristos]

Well, it's not that I don't believe you that it's in the code. ^^
But apparently it's either weighted sooo little that it does not play a role or it is coming after a conditional and is therefore not checked.

Fact is, that warmongers dont attack you at turn 100 or even 150 (normal speed) even if you only have one unit to defend your empire (if you don't actively provoke them otherwise like spamming their boarders with several cities).

And as far as I remember war never played such a small role in civ's AI as it does now.
And with that I don't mean that it doesn't think a lot about it now, but it doesn't help if it's last thought is always that it's too expensive anyways.

Well, first, you shouldn't believe me, nor anyone else... this is the Internet. The best I could hope, if anything, is to drive enough curiosity to make some (many?) go and look themselves instead of loosely speculating based on first impressions, or at the least make them stop believing the "prophets", many of them experts in landscaping their nonsense in long and beautiful paragraphs. That's all.

Second, YES!, the weighting is what we should discuss, not a non-existent broken nature.

Third, I cannot see a "small" role of war in BNW... I can see a "smaller" role, but the adjective is relative, as I and many others saw the previous state of affairs as "too dominant" war... and then again, it has not been my experience that war is "too small" or non-existent. I cannot agree to what I fail to see, so I go and look for an explanation inside the only thing that is real (the code), and find it, share it, and even after that, some people (not referring to you) insist on minimizing that and keep going with the pseudo-myth.

Anyways... I am slowly tiring of this... maybe I should just quit and let the prophets say what they want.

 

[BSPollux]

Fact is, that warmongers dont attack you at turn 100 or even 150 (normal speed) even if you only have one unit to defend your empire

Thats not a fact, thats an impression you got. And its not true, because I was attacked early on allready, even though I was defended.

You made this up. You are not honest about the situation.

Well, I guess it depends on what you expect from Civ.

If you are coming from Civ4 or previous games you probably have other expectations than if you are a casual gamer coming from facebook games.

I have played every civ game since part1, and many others here did the same. You are trying to impersonate some sort of 'advanced gamer' who knows better, but you are not. Your opinion is worth just as much or a little as everyone elses.

The most you can see in BNW is if one AI takes over one or two cities. The combination of missing DoWs and horrible AI which isn't able to manage troops and to lead them efficiently to the opponent made Civ almost to a pure fight against numbers. If you are more efficient than your opponents you win.

First: I saw sweden whipe out a huge continent, killing like half a dozent nations. YOur point is, again, entirely made up and there is no thruth about it. You are making things up, again.
Second: Theres nothing bad with the most effective player winning. And for me its hard to see how it could be a problem. 'May the best player win'.

But I am sad that the chess-franchise I loved transformed to a Yatzee game.

And finaly you are right about something! You dont like what happened. That is a real shame and I wished it wasnt so and you could enjoy it, but if you cant then I'm realy sorry. But honestly: Thats bad luck. Some versions of the game(s) have been more war centered, some have been less war centered. Obviously you will like some more and some less. But thats all there is about it, its your personal opinion and it doesnt mean its broken and has to be fixed.

 

[pilot00]

There are no facts, only opinions and speculation. My games in BNW have enough wars for my liking. Thats no fact, just an opinion. And if you disagree its nothing else either, because theres no way to meassure what 'the right ammount of agression' is. No matter now much you think your own opinion is suprior to others, or more important, or what the devs wanted, or what the game needs. You = your opinion, me = my opinion. No facts.

I am saying one thing and you reply with a completely different answer. If you like it kudos. I never said to anyone not to like it, however the shortcomings are there, weather we like or not. The only fact is that its not a complete work and this has been proven time and again.

Trade routes cant be stolen. Most wars are just not worth fighting. Its nice that the AI is smart enough to understand it. And its strange that some people are not ;-)

Thank you for calling me stupid, I wont bait though. Rather I would advice to look at the game a bit further than how much you like it and accept its short comings, it will help it improve. Also know that civility or lack thereoff cannot be hidden with emoticons, your intent is quite clear to everyone reading it. Thank you again. You just shot down any of arguments you made in this thread by one single action.