Wait, so you are comparing a civilization and a game system that doesn’t exist in vanilla to how it played in vanilla? /confused
Your GOING to overwhelm the AI on freaking chieftaoi. Try the same experiment on Prince, where everything is mostly equal.
KevinC
6082
I was 99% sure this was the case, obviously, but the AI is still mute in MP games and of course no mods. I wonder if I need to pay another $30 to get those enabled as well, or… ? Would be nice if they took a fraction of the budget for the new intro movie and put it into bringing that aspect of the game up to par!
Listen, I’ve put a lot of time into this game and every instance of this game in this series. I understand that Chieftain is an easy mode, which is why I played it at 2 in the morning, rather than something that would require more of my faculties.
As I’ve tried to communicate with my posts: I was surprised by the magnitude of the victory, not the victory itself. Are we clear, or do you feel the need to continue to patronize me?
Fanbois gonna post funny gifs
It’s cool that you’re digging the game and all, but the AI is still atrocious. In your list of smart AI moves (being betrayed in the diplomacy system is a sign of a better AI?), I noticed you didn’t mention how it will park units under ranged fire, march non-combatants blithely into harm’s way, flub the new naval units and air power, and completely mismanage the specific roles of counter units.
I get that some people like Civ 5 as a sort of breezy city builder, and if you just want to win against an AI that doesn’t know how to play the game, that’s fine. But you’re selling people a bill of goods trying to claim the AI has been substantially improved. It’s the same thing that happened with Civilization: Revolution. Firaxis made an essentially dumb game and hoped people would just enjoy the systems instead of the opponents. That game was ported and updated and DLCed to kingdom come and it never got any smarter. The same thing is happening with Civilization V.
-Tom
We are not clear, I feel your testing is fundamentally flawed, but I did not mean to patronize you so I’ll just drop it.
I’m not saying the AI is perfect, or even impressive really. I really don’t think you can say it’s atrocious, though. I may be a fan boy but you are very far on the other end of that spectrum. I don’t feel there will be any middle ground for us to meet on, so I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I will say that I never saw the AI put a unit in harms way of my ranged units unless it had to. I’m not sure what game you are playing where you never need to get within range of an acher, but more often than not if you want to actually be in range to attack something, you sort of have too. I never saw it march a civilian unit near my troops, and they did have a general parked back near their town even. The AI kept it out of the battle, but still close enough to be of use. This war didn’t use the navy at all, and was only about 130 or so turns in so I never saw anything advanced.
The AI didn’t betray ME. Spain betrayed Japan and it was pretty awesome to watch those event unfold, I thought. It very well could have been a fluke of course, but I still enjoyed it while it happened.
All I can do is report what I’ve experienced, and so far I really feel the AI has improved. I don’t even WANT a perfect AI, that would be horrible - I’d never be able to win. Perhaps you grognard strategy gaming gurus do want that, and that’s where the hate for the AI comes from, but I’m pretty happy with where it’s at, and while I hope it gets improved in areas that it needs to as time goes on, as of right now, day 1 of the games launch, I’m pretty happy with my purchase.
I agree with Bleed. I don’t think the AI is atrocious at all. I’ve seen the tactical AI make stupid mistakes, but it’s competent enough to give me a challenge most of the time. And aside from the questionable denouncements, baseless declarations of war, and issues with the AI conducting a front over the sea, which have been largely fixed or least improved upon in the expansion, I have NO issues with the diplomatic/strategic AI.
As a former AI specialist, I say it’s atrocious, some of the worst ever seen in a strategy game. There have been worse, but they’re few and far between. It’s wonderful, too how every phase of it is bad, from tactics to strategy to diplomacy.
Sure, it can give you a challenge. It gives me a challenge when at a high difficulty level I’m struggling to spare the time to build 3 archers by 2500 BC and suddenly 16 enemy units appear from nowhere. But that is not because the AI is any good, and it’s not like those 16 enemy units actually succeed in accomplishing anything.
robc04
6090
Do you and Jon Shafer have a standing agreement not to talk about Civ V when working together on Three Moves Ahead? :-)
Out of curiosity, what strategy games do you consider to have the best AI?
Speaking of strategy games, AI and Tom Chick.
(not about Civ 5, so semi offtopic)
Your complaints of bad AI would be more fair and admissible if they were applied to the rest of games. I remember you liked CoE3, you had several positive articles about it, and the AI in that game is, lacking for a better word: atrocious.
I don’t understand how someone like you, who puts always attention in if the AI is “playing the game” as the player and if is enough good to make an entertaining game, somehow didn’t notice the horrible AI problems in CoE3.
Oh God, this. For the longest time I felt like the game was providing me a significant challenge during war because this giant, roiling swarm of enemy units would show up out of nowhere and start streaming into my territory from every angle.
And then I realized that aside form a game or two where I had no military at home or just plain screwed up obvious moves, I never lost those sudden invasion-style wars. The AI would grossly mismanage its troops against my much smaller groups, die en masse, and give me a mass of highly promoted troops to upgrade on into the modern era to steamroll the world with.
For all those dissatisfied with Civ V’s AI, you’re welcome to join us in one of the many Civ V GMR games we’re playing. Just don’t whine when you get schooled by the HI. :-)
The funny thing about the Civ V AI is that it would actually be harder if it were less intelligent. Just give it large economic bonuses, build a ton of trash and point them towards you and send them screaming to their inevitable deaths. The AI was in Civ V vanilla (ive only played like 20 turns last night in the expansion) indecisive and of two minds about what to do. It would amass a large invasion force but then worry about each casualty it took instead of keeping an eye on the larger picture or realizing that trading 2:1 is fine when you outnumber the enemy 3:1. Warlock is much better at cycling units though, probably because armies are much more mobile in Warlock.
If Civ V worried much less about saving units it would be considerably more challenging. The AI delimma it faces seems to be that it just can’t figure out when it is a good idea to cycle units, and it might be that kind of AI is too sophisticated for what is present now. So removing unit cycling would probably upgrade the difficulty faced by players.
Blips
6096
They should hurry up and open up the SDK to allow for AI modding already. I’m sure more than a few people would be capable of improving the AI.
KevinC
6097
And MP modding. PLEASE. Are they ever going to release the full SDK, though? The AAA industry seems pretty shortsighted on it these days and (IMO) views it as competition to DLC spam.
Miramon
6098
Well, I must admit few games have really good AI. With all the claims that good AI is too frustrating for players to deal with, there are few strategy games that can be called on to prove it. In particular, the Civ series has always been pretty weak.
But within the Civ series, SMAC had better AI than most of the others; far superior to Civ V, anyway, and the leader personalities even had some vague distant relation to their behavior. Civ IV wasn’t great in this regard, but it also wound up with better AI than Civ V, especially the inexplicably bad Civ V diplomacy, which would only require a grain of common sense to improve, not deep understanding of AI systems.
Within the hex-based wargame world, some of the Atomic games titles weren’t all that bad. Fantasy games tend to have bad AI, but Heroes III at least had predictable, understandable AI, unlike the whimsical apparent randomness of Civ V.
So yeah, the whole industry has a lot of room for improvement, but Civ V is worse than most.
Alstein
6099
How would you improve the AI of other major games in the series, and what’s the gold standard for AI in your opinion?
AI is very important for me- and I’m going to 100% pass on this game now due to this.
Hmn. I think I’d prefer whimsical random AI to predictable AI personally. I treat CiV as a board game, and as such I like that when I run into a given Civ I don’t quite know what to expect (the only game setup option I use is “random personalities”).
It’s also maybe good to bring up the issue of reloading. I never save my game until I am ready to take a break, and I never reload if things go sideways. Do people that think the AI is really, really bad tend to be the same people that reload every time they blunder themsleves, I wonder?
