If you pass on any game that lacks a flawless AI you are going to be pretty bored (though I suppose you’ll save a lot of money).
Alstein
6102
All AI’s are flawed. What I expect from an AI is that it can give me an interesting game on “fair” difficulty settings, or at least do something right like Warlock’s AI. Cheaply exploiting an AI in a ridiculous fashion to me is not part of a “fair” difficulty (though the definition of ridiculous is going out of your way to do it)
The GalCiv2 AI spoiled me- it wasn’t perfect, but it was so much better than anything else I had played before it. Civ 4 BTS AI was decent as well for the most part.
Giaddon
6103
If Warlock’s (massively cheating) AI is good enough for you, you should find many games worthwhile.
I didn’t like the game itself, but I agree that GalCiv2’s AI was good. Similarly (I don’t like the game, but the AI looks good), take a look at AI War.
I don’t really consider matches against the AI to be real “games.” They’re more, uh, interactive thinking-and-clicking experiences. Or something.
KevinC
6104
Is the Civ5 AI not predictable in it’s randomness, though? I’m honestly asking, it’s not a rhetorical question. The way I typically play Civ5 is that, since I know the AI is bloodthirsty and wildly bipolar, I just refuse to be friendly with anyone. I can pretty much be assured they’re going to wig out at some point and attack me, so there’s no reason to open my borders with them or to try to appease them. Is your experience fairly different than that?
Sort of. Even in Vanilla you could stay friends with an AI all the way through, though it did help to have a bigger standing army. The biggest thing is that if you think of it like a board game, and not a simulation, at some point the AI WANTS TO WIN and in that context, I’m okay with having three AI’s gang up on me when I pull way ahead and am 40 turns away from a cultural victory, for example.
If it was a simulation you could easily persuade the AI to be allies with you, pick the two closest players and ensure there loyalty and steam roll the rest of the AI. Then we’d just be having an entirely different bitchfest about the AI.
That said, they (reportedly, I’ve been at work all day so I haven’t been playing) the developrs have indicated AI improvements include not holding a grudge for as long, actively seeking trades and making friends (that one I have seen with Spain in my current game), and improvements to the city-state stuff to help smooth things out as well.
Alstein
6106
Warlock’s AI works only because of the type of game it is, or maybe because my expectations are much lower since it’s a cheap game.
Janster
6107
Shogun 2 AI deserves honorable mention, and any game with simple rules, is where the AI will pwn ur ass.
rezaf
6108
Warlock’s AI IS much better at coordinating it’s combat than Civ5’s.
Though it helps that units can move much farther - 1UPT just IS a bad fit for a global-scale game.
But yeah, even Warlock’s AI works pretty situational and the “global” AI is pretty horrible - especially if an AI is fighting on more than one front (which is pretty common), it often abandons the fight at one front completely - even if it was JUST in the process of winning - to relocate the units somewhere else entirely. The AI also has a hard time developing towards higher tier units and thus is provided the free dragons. Without them, it’s a walkover. Admittedly less so with the improved city defenses, but still.
rezaf
Byrdman
6109
The Shogun 2 AI was decent, especially on the campaign map. It still can’t assault a castle to save its life though.
That brings me back a bit. In the mid-90s I was doing a lot of beta testing for Atomic, and in at least one case (Crusader, I think, the desert war WWII game they did) I remember playing scenarios and recording my moves so they could code or script the AI to behave properly. Well, “properly” if you consider my less than Rommel-like abilities better than the unscripted AI, I suppose! But that was one trick they used, scripting stuff based on human play throughs. I have no idea how extensive that practice was, and I don’t think it would work in a game like Civ with more emergent gameplay, but it was an interesting approach. Wargames tend to use that approach more than other genres I think due to the nature of the beast–a historical battle has a baseline “AI” script already, in effect.
Prince Culture Victory, Theodora again, Turn 365 – once again, ending the game with a disgusting amount of resources.
Scripts are good, they will force the AI to avoid stupid stuff, I played Crusader, what a really complex game.
in CIV 5 I don’t see this, instead we see some kind of adaptable AI that doesn’t cope.
AI is important to some, I am pretty good at strategy games, and most of the time I can’t play against humans, so I have to settle with AI.
Empire, Total War is the best of the series imho, but the AI is so bad I cannot play it without feeling that I have to gimp myself…
AI matters.
That doesnt surprise me; Civ V vanilla was very constrained in resources, and now faith adds additional resource generation.
This is my speculation about how Civ V tactical AI works, just based on observing play:
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All units have a tactical goal such as “take this target city”, “scout this region”, “garrison this city”, or “destroy enemy units near this location” and so on. These goals are assigned to groups of units, but this is as close to unit coordination as you’ll ever see. The code that determines these goals seems to be stupid and stubborn, but that’s probably just a contingent quality of the code, not an architectural feature.
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Based on the combination of unit type and goal, a set of action rules is provided for each unit. These rules are very simple and are also iron-clad. So for example, you will never see an AI scout attack a barbarian unit even if the barbarian only has 1 strength point left and the attack would result in taking a camp and winning friendship from multiple city states. For another example, an AI melee unit adjacent to both a barbarian and to an enemy player unit will always attack the barbarian in preference to the player unit. Barbarian units seem to roll dice for their decisions, but AI national units don’t seem to do so.
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Over the course of an AI game turn, each unit decides, in order, what its best move is based on the rule set determined in 2), and the unit executes its move at that moment. In Civ 5, this decision is itself often stupid from that units’ point of view because the rule sets aren’t very well made, but even if the choice was ideal for that unit at that moment, the lack of unit coordination would often result in stupid large-scale play. This apparent lack of unit coordination is at the heart of the Civ 5 AI badness.
3.1) After the utterly imbecilic results seen in early Civ 5 AI, I speculate an attempt was made to patch some problems with 3) by attempting an intelligent ordering of units with the same goal. For example, if range units can fire without moving, they could in theory be prioritized to go first so that melee units won’t waste strength if they don’t have to. Sadly, these ordering rules do little to address the underlying problem, and there are evidently some broken rules here that are little more than bugs.
Given an architecture like this – if I’m right about it – there’s just no amount of code that can fix the underlying problem. You just have to scrap the whole thing and start with a new AI architecture that can handle coordination of multiple units. This coordination problem wasn’t so bad in some earlier Civs because unit stacking meant that there were fewer units to consider with more open space to move to, and that poor choices for movement could still be covered for by defensive units in the stack.
KevinC
6115
Does Ceremonial Burial (+2 gold per city following the religion) count only for YOUR cities or is it ALL cities, including foreign?
In vanilla Civ V, the AI doesn’t want to win, though. I’ve seen no evidence of it playing differently when you’re close to winning. I had a game on King where I easily turtled to a culture victory as India and nobody ever declared war on me. I got threatened once, but for the most part everyone was friendly up until the very end.
There’s some weird weight given to the way and manner you communicate with other civs. If you for ex. declare friendship and then break you’re word you’re a liar liar, but if you don’t declare friendship but just warmonger, you’re a dirty warmonger, but if you ask for a city first and then declare (on a civ that covers your land) you have a casus beli and everything is peachy. Or something; the strange intention of the diplo system is to anthropomorphise the AI by hiding the numbers/
I get all sorts of Civs demanding I stop converting their cities to my religion, which, being a nice guy for now, I say I’ll stop.
But when they convert my city, I can’t find any option in Diplo to bitch them out. (So I just declare war on them, instead) But is this not an option for the human player?
All Cities, regardless of owner.
Oh, I hate when this happens. In so many 4X games the AI get to bitch and menace the player or ask for money when X happens, but when they do it to you, you don’t have the equivalent option in the diplomacy panel.
