Alstein
4501
Civ IV’s AI had a bunch of problems also. Even Wildmana (a FFH modmod that really did AI boosting) had serious issues.
TBS games really seem to have AI problems- other then GalCiv2, are there any other TBS’s that give a good AI experience?
Isn’t FFH known for being so sprawling that the AI really don’t know how to play it? But there’s so much happening that most people won’t notice.
I don’t disagree with anything Tom (or others saying the same) wrote, but I’m just not that good a player, so I still face a challenge - and I like the changes enough to keep playing.
But I haven’t tried the Dune mod or really delved into FFH, so I might give V a break while trying those while they get a chance to fix some more.
dtolman
4503
Warlords series had a great AI. Shame there hasn’t been a proper followup to the fantastic Warlords 3: Dark Lords Rising.
Tony_M
4504
Yes, but some game designers set thier AI programmers an almost impossible task. A key challenge of good Turn Based game design is to come up with mechanics that are fun for the player, but also managable for the AI.
And by “managable for the AI”, I don’t mean “theoretically possible”. I mean manageable within the schedule and budget allocated to the AI in a commercial game.
Strato
4505
Did you play Civ IV? Of course, in Civ IV, the AI would dogpile the player, typically a result of doing something like neglecting military, or playing the poor diplomatic meta game. Reputation mattered more than anything in Civ IV. Sure, ever since Civ II reputation mattered - I remember one of the key features of Civ II was that the AI would remember if the player was a typical backstabber and thus would be more wary of signing peace treaties. Civ IV however brought that to the fore. I’m not just talking about nancy pancy warlord or noble difficulty here, the AI would respect the player more if they were superior military wise (hard past monarch) or the player was doing a decent job managing the various diplomatic bits of the game.
tl;dr The fact that Civ V has such poor diplomatic options are, I believe a result of the game turning into a veritable “you vs the world” scenario.
It took me a while to parse this, but I get it. The AI plays more-or-less by the same rules you do in both games, but they play the game so badly that you’re playing a puzzle game instead of a strategy game. I.e. in Civ Rev one tactic for defeating Deity is to turtle. A single walled city defended by a catapult and an archer can eliminate a near-infinite number of enemy units, since they come a few at a time and make suicidal attacks. That’s not really “strategy” per se, it’s solving the puzzle of how to hold off never-ending waves of attacks from inept enemies.
What’s interesting to me is the perspective on what the game is supposed to do. I think for myself, I view it as its own entity. I’ve played Civs I-IV and they’e all provided me with something to come back to whenever I was in the mood for an old standby bit of fun. Civ V does that for me as well, but I don’t view it as a replacement for Civ IV and perhaps that’s the failing that a lot of people see in the game.
When I had Civ IV fully decked out, even without mods, I really didn’t have an urge to go back in the series. I really enjoy my games with Civ V, but Civ IV is still in my rotation. The games and their challenges are different enough that they both fill distinct slots.
Maybe after it gets some full-blown expansions (aside - will it? I’ve only heard about DLC), I’ll finally be able to set down Baba Yetu, et al.
Jorune
4508
Regardless, it seems it’s a fact that the AI has issues, in a game where it’s not acceptable (it’s mainly a SP experience). And just as Demigod received shit reviews for having huge connection issues (it’s primarily an MP experience), so too should have Civ V. No one wants to hear a ‘how should a game be rated’ rant, and for that I apologize, but let’s face it, Civ V was rated on it’s potential, which 3 months after release it still hasn’t lived up to.
Or perhaps it just took a lot longer on the Chick Parabola for people to realize the issues the game had and the reviews came out too early.
BTW, Elemental’s (stop groaning) AI is shaping up nicely with it’s multi-threaded capability.
Jorune
ps. I swear I’m not a stardock fanboi. I just wanted Civ V to be better and for me, that means a capable AI.
That was something of my experience with Civ IV as well. Civ II was in every way superior to Civ I, but SMAC and Civ III both had drawbacks that had me cycling back to Civ II on occasion. Civ IV was a breath of fresh air because it felt superior to any of the prior games, unlike the two-steps-forward, one-step-back experience with Civ III.
While I’m not personally rotating back to Civ IV because I really, really prefer Civ V’s combat model, I can see how someone else would since that’s how I was with Civ II.
By whom – you? I enjoyed Civ5 in its release state, and so did the guys on Weekend Confirmed podcast, for example. I absolutely have not put 100+ hours into the game based on potential. Don’t assume everyone thinks the AI issues are crippling. As far as I’m concerned they are a minor nuisance, nothing more.
Has anyone else noticed post patch that the AI will build a lot of its cities really close together? Rome, Egypt, China…all cramming four cities in an area where I might stick two.
Troy
They’re somewhat more than “minor nuisance,” but they’re not crippling. The game is still a challenge to win on Emperor for me, even if the AI still does things like advance a cannon into my territory without any kind of protection. I suppose you could argue it’s “almost crippling” that the AI still has no concept that sending embarked units out into the water when you control the sea is suicide. “Almost crippling” in the sense that the AI can’t launch seaborne invasions. It also loses a unit or two by stupidly using water as a shortest path, but that’s less important.
I haven’t, particularly. But one thing I learned, pre-patch, is that terrain has surprisingly little effect on city viability. Before Happiness improvements were nerfed, it was completely practical to plant cities the minimum distance apart, which is 3 hexes. The main concern was hills for hammers.
Post-patch, I’m primarily concerned with getting things like luxuries and the occasional path of iron. It’s not at all important to space cities carefully, since only a few cities will get above size 10, and the bigger cities will eventually have a couple of specialists.
Jorune
4514
No, not the only one. And even other posters here think it’s more than a minor nuisance. But I feel for a SP game like Civ, AI should have a heavier rating than others have given it. Of course YMMV. But I don’t play 4x games to watch the AI do stupid things. I tend to lose the immersion factor when they do. But it shouldn’t be rated so highly with these problems.
Jorune
jpinard
4515
This is a disappointing design issue with Civ V. The joy of finding the premium city placement has been greatly diminished. That’s one of those things that removed some of the “fun factor” of the game.
Miramon
4516
Yes, I suspect it’s deliberate to overlap city fields of fire to make it harder to take them so quickly. On higher handicap levels it makes it blatantly obvious how big the handicap is, because these cities are generally poorly placed, messing up other city working zones, and sometimes have no production resources at all.
Well for the AI player clearly city placement doesn’t matter, since the AI spams cities all over the place.
However, I try and choose my 5 or cities very carefully. The wonders now add another element to site selection process. The individual bonus (wheat deer) don’t matter as much as the did in Civ V, but luxuries are every bit as important as they were in Civ IV. Strategic resource also matter especially iron which tends to be in short supply. Finally rivers are significantly more important now than they were in Civ IV, the extra food for most of the game and the extra commerce are a typically 33% to 50% more than non river squares. For instance a gold mine was 6 in Civ IV on 7 a river vs 3 and 4 for a river in Civ V.
I tend to space out my cities very far apart 5 or even 6 hexes at times.
jpinard
4518
Wasn’t one of the design goals to cut down on city spam? This seems counter to that idea.
Dejin
4519
Germany has crammed quite a few cities in in my current game. As you say probably building twice as many as I would have. Also they built a city down in the Tundra completely detached from the rest of their cities (and blocked by my territory) next to some furs, which kind of made sense. But then they dumped another two cities on the Tundra. Maybe they just don’t care about Cultural Policies, but those last two Tundra cities made no sense to me – although I suppose it’s possible it knows there’s Oil or Uranium down there, and I don’t.
Civilization is a very complex game and people have different aspect they value the most - so it depends on how you rank individual parts of a huge sprawling game. Look at all the stuff Troy lists that he loves - he even writes that he’s not going back to IV. As stated before, I’m not a hardcore computer strategy grognard and I don’t play multiplayer games (of that sort). To me the likes Troy lists are much more important than the AI.
The most broken part is the diplomacy, but as others have pointed out, that has never lived up to it’s potential.
I gave Civilization 5 out of 6 stars after playing more than 100 hours. Not because I didn’t notice the AI, but because I ranked that feature lower than Tom.
Now, would I like to see better AI? Sure. Would I like more complex diplomacy? Absolutely. Do I think Civ V has potential to be a better game? Yes. But do I feel like playing vanilla IV instead of V? Absolutely not. I’m at 232 hours played and if I’m taking a break, then it’s because of other games, not because I’m done with Civilization V.
