What does the AI actually do?

[Victoria]

Are Barbs counted as one large civ or as numerous small ones? I'm assuming free cities are the same.

Barbs are all civ63 but do have specific ‘clans’ it gets a bit messy but if you look in some of the decision logs you can see how the individual barb units make decisions and that is based on their clan raiding or not for example.

Each free city is its own civ

 

[Kaan Boztepe]

does anyone else see the AI build more cities to keep up with the player civ city count also? whenever i go crazy wide , because i have space and no immidiate war looming i see that the AI also seems to keep pace with me although they are next to each other

 

[Victoria]

does anyone else see the AI build more cities to keep up with the player civ city count also? whenever i go crazy wide , because i have space and no immidiate war looming i see that the AI also seems to keep pace with me although they are next to each other

I see....
An Ai that stops growing for a while before expanding again
An Ai that seems to be slower when you are slower.
Note I use a small i for Ai... because there is no i there at all really.

 

[Minou]

Thank you Victoria, you are this site's greatest hero! I will see if I can find some time to run a game all the way until one of the AI wins (with me doing nothing) and then try and stare at the files until I learn something.

I have so many questions about the A"i" and perhaps some will be revealed.

Why do they sometimes escort Settlers, and sometimes not? It is especially weird when they have spare Warriors and march the Settler to their doom. I see each unit has "missions" but I haven't looked enough to see if one is actually an escort mission that gets bypassed in favor of something else or "escorting" is just randomly two units going in the same direction.

Does the AI queue swap? I suppose they have to sometimes, for example if they are building a district and you place a unit on the base so they can't keep working on it. But often I find an AI I am at war with building a wonder like Oracle the I want to steal and they never seem to finish it if I pause outside that city. I always assumed they stopped working on it to build defense but would love to confirm.

Does the AI wisely use policy cards, like slotting Professional Army or Diplomatic League and using a burst of upgrades/envoys and slotting Agoge and Ikium properly, or do they just slot some junk they prefer?

Which Governors do they prefer? They seem to love Amani and Victor. I wonder if they always move them to help with loyalty p to me they seem to mostly but not always do so.

What makes them choose the districts they do? Holy Site and Campus seem to be super popular, and some spam Encampments while others ignore them, but I always wondered if this was mostly because those unlock first or intentional because they are "aiming" for a SV or RV.

Why the obsession with farms? Farms are just so, so bad, and I wonder if this is intentional or simply because farms are available from the start. I thought AIs started with Mining though....

 

[Victoria]

Thank you Victoria,

NP but pls remove/alter the comment after, many here are very helpful, more so than I.
If you are going to seriously look at these log files you need to turn on some options in the appoptions.txt file, especially I think it’s EnableDebugPlotInfo=1 as then you get co-ordinates displayed on your tile info.
Hopefully now you appreciate that when people complain about something I often ask for their log files.
Also you will find the AI is driven a lot by victory conditions, and particular civ weighting’s and things like farm plots are just down to decision trees which take some getting used to.
Interested to see what you find out.

 

[LeeS]

Ai decision-making, if we can use that word for what it does, is constrained first and foremost by what it can do right now. And then from the list of things it can do right now it picks what it "ought" to do. It does not decision-make based on what it might be able to do 10 turns from now -- hence early Holy Sites in places that make no sense relative to alternative placements that you see as much better placement positions later on when you meet / conquer / destroy. Also why you see Ai cities picking Holy Sites as the thing to do in cities that don't grow very fast and therefore take half the game to plop the sort of district that would be much better than a Holy Site and would have made a much better ROI if placed earlier instead of wasting a District slot on a Holy Site that never had much chance of returning overall game-long value.

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So far as Barbarian Happy Meals (ie, unescorted Settlers), I think I have seen in every generation of Civ since Civ2 patchnotes along the lines of

Ai players will now escort settlers properly

And usually later on for the same game generation

Ai players will now do a much better job of escorting settlers

 

[aieeegrunt]

Lol Barbarian Happy Meals. It’s always been one of my House Rules NOT to grab them because it tilts the game too far in my favor

I have to wonder if the AI is deliberatly hamstrung as some sort of policy to broaden the game’s appeal and thus sales, because I’ve played every Civ since the original board game, and this one has the by far least challenging AI to deal with.

Basically a 4X sandbox