Try increase the difficulty settings if you are not satisfied with the AI

[jauggy]

My win rate on Emperor is close to 100%, so I decided to try Immortal.

Settings:
Small map, standard speed, 6 civs pangea, random leader.

It was mid way through the game and I had captured 2 capitals. There were three AI civs remaining. Germany and I (England) were at war with the Iroquis. In order for Iroquis to make it into my territory it would have to pass Germany first. Germany and I were behind in tech with our strongest units being crossbowman and longswords, while the other AIs had rifles already. I massed all my troops in Germany's territory so that we could stop the Iroquis invasion. The Iroquis, while having a tech lead, couldn't make a dent on our defenses. Having longbowman was a good advantage too. I thought I could keep this up indefinitely.

After a couple of turns of my longbowmen killing the Iroquis forces, a message pops up that my worker near MY capital has been captured. I think to myself, "WTF? How did the Iroquis get there? My capital is in the corner of the pangea map and so it couldn't be the Iroquis...

I scan back to my capital and see a couple of rifleman approaching. My capital is completely defenseless with all my units in German territory.

While I was busy concentrating my forces on one side of the map, the Iroquis bought off a city state right next to my capital. The rifleman of the Iroquis' newly aquired ally approaching my capital had nothing but empty space to go through. I didn't have enough gold to rush buy either. I decided to give up this match and I felt I made a big mistake here.

I had never seen such a tactic on Emperor.

 

[Mutineer]

Higher difficulty level - concentrate more on abusing stupid AI.

basically it means they have more cities and more money for you own use.

 

[vmxa]

Not how that makes the AI any different. It just has a bigger handicap as it did in the prior versions. More of a challenge, sure, but the same AI.

 

[TheDisco]

I agree with original poster. Keep bumping up the difficulty until it is challenging. Based on steam statistics, although everybody complains how easy it is very few have actually beaten it at the 3 or so highest levels.

As I move up in difficulty the AI sure seems a bit smarter. I had an epic battle against England in my last game, and after we swapped one of their edge cities back and forth a few times they all retreated around the next city in line. Thought this was kind of smart.

Maybe the AI is so bad on lower levels because it is so out-teched it has almost no winning moves. Like the best chess AI in the world will still suck if it is down a Queen and a Rook...

 

[delra]

Doesn't help at all. I play Deity and AI is still a - only with big bonuses.

 

[Grimo]

It's a stupid idea to dumb down the AI for lower difficulties to begin with, especially if your AI isn't that great in the first place.

Give us the options to play with the full-fledged AI at any difficulty we want so we can actually evaluate how "not dumb" it is.

 

[aimlessgun]

Doesn't help at all. I play Deity and AI is still a - only with big bonuses.

Yup! Definitely still the same dumb AI on Deity.

Your story is awesome, but sounds like more of a fluke than anything

 

[delra]

Deity = AI cheats, I exploit their stupidity with horses...

I hope they are planning to overhaul military AI in the add-on.

 

[Grotius]

Remember that we humans get "cheats", or at least advantages, at all difficulty levels. The AI are required to roleplay their Civs, even if that's not in their interests; we're not required to do that. The AI can't reload saved games; we can. In prior iterations of Civ, the devs (e.g., Soren Johnson) said they prevented the AI from using annoying "win at all costs" tactics. Maybe Civ 5 is different, but I doubt it. We complain about AI diplomatic tactics, but I suspect there are more constraints on AI diplomatic behavior than on our own.

In any case, I don't mind playing a game against a weaker opponent who gets a handicap. In chess, the stronger player might get a bishop or even a rook. I don't have any philosophical objection to that, so long as the resulting game is a fun challenge. If it's given enough units, the AI gives me a fun game.

And yes, the Steam stats indicate that few of us are winning games at the top difficulty levels. Yes, I know some people don't bother to play out their "obvious wins", but there are what, 50 times as many recorded Warlord wins as Deity wins, and I doubt Warlord players are 50x more likely to play a game to its conclusion than Deity players. Put another way, perhaps Steam is under-reporting Deity wins, but if so, it's also under-reporting Warlord and Chieftain wins. And even if fully 3/4 of all Deity players get bored and don't play out their wins, that still means a miniscule win rate at that difficulty level. The game seems to be presenting plenty of challenge to most players.

 

[funny.man]

Doesn't help at all. I play Deity and AI is still a - only with big bonuses.

Right, and you expect firaxis to create AI that will be better or at least comparable to the best human players. Even I this game was 50,000$ per copy instead of 50$ that still won't be possible for a very loooooooooooong time.

 

[delra]

Meh. Your argumentation is silly.

1. Where did I write I want an AI better than best human players?
2. Your numbers make no sense, game costing 50k would earn much less than a game costing 50.
3. They can do much better than that with horsehockyloads of money they are earning on their games.

 

[EEE_BOY]

The ai second in score or an alliance of least scored AIs should at least declare war to the winner and march what ever force they had to the capital if the winning Civ is 20 turns left to any non-dominance victory.

At least I will do that in the last gamble but never had the chance.

 

[Lyoncet]

Right, and you expect firaxis to create AI that will be better or at least comparable to the best human players.

He never said anything anywhere close to that and you know it. Putting words into people's mouths is rude; fabricating entire (poor) arguments and attributing them to another person to debase their comments/opinions is absurd.

 

[Sable]

I do make fun of the AI in Civ, but to be entirely honest, few AIs in any strategy game will ever match up to a human player. The AI in shooters have a hard enough time with intuitively simple things like cover or flanking--when you turn up the AI in shooters, they get more bonuses, not smarter. Civ is no different. In fact, it's probably much harder to come up with a competent (but not OP) AI for something like Civ.

 

[duckn]

the AI of civ5 compared to civ4 is a joke. Its so stupid i cant believe it.
Its even get worse if you play in multiplayer.

 

[bhavv]

In Civ IV, the AI was still as great on Noble as it was on Diety.

In Civ V, the AI is about as smart on Deity as it is on Chieftain in Civ IV.

AI =/= how many cheats, extra cities, and extra units the AI has. I could still get rofflestomped on noble difficulty by Shaka or Monty in Civ IV. In Civ V, when an AI declares war on me now, I think 'YAY!!! Free gold!!!!!'. And sometimes even free resources and a city, without ever having to step outside my own borders.

 

[adam_grif]

I wish that instead of these impenetrable black box difficulty settings that we have to look up online to find out the inner workings of, there were instead several sliding scales for the A.I. so you could customize them as you wanted them to be.

So there would be one slider for tech handicap, resources handicap, starting bias (so they get good starts more often than you etc), "thinking time", and heuristic effectiveness.

The second last one I just mentioned would be the amount of time the computer had to process all the moves available to it; setting it lower would make turn time waits speed up but also make the A.I. less effective. Cranking it up to max would mean they never miss anything and always have the best options to choose from.

The last one would be whether it picks the best option available to it, out of the options it has determined it has. There might be several heuristics that the developers implement, some of them better than others, and the higher the setting on that slider the better the one they use.

A man can dream

 

[delra]

They will never allow playing on Prince with their "smartest" "AI" - because it'd make everyone realize how much ******ed that AI actually is.

 

[Silvis]

Though I would have to agree that the AI definitely needs to be looked at; I am relieved to hear that they actually used tactics. If it takes them cheating to actually start using that then I will have to start playing on higher difficulties

 

[delra]

In general I don't get why can't smartest AI be applied to all difficulty levels. It's not like someone on Warlord will lose because AI suddenly starts bribing right cities instead of bribing wrong ones...

Dumbing down an already weak AI for lower levels of difficulty is awkward.