I actually think the AI in Civ6 is better in this regard, compared to Civ5. Tactically it’s improved, but it was a very low bar. It’s still pretty awful.
The diplomatic/personality AI is just… it’s not even “bad”. Saying it is “bad” is to imply they tried to do something, just didn’t do it well. I don’t even think they tried, the whole thing just feels like placeholder numbers thrown in everywhere and no one got around to actually implementing/tuning it.
I think my favorite is Teddy Roosevelt. He has an Agenda that makes him hate anyone who goes to war with people on his home continent. Sounds cool in theory, but in my first game I started out next to him and realized two things:
He has a combat bonus on his home continent. AI calculates “My warriors are stronger than your warriors” and will declare war every. single. game. Over and over. He makes Montezuma look tame.
This is the one that struck me as pretty funny and indicative of the state of the AI in general. I started on Teddy’s home continent. Some asshole a few thousand miles away bumps into my scout and decides to declare war on me, because reasons. Teddy should get pissed at him for declaring war on a guy on his home turf, right? Wrong. I get a message from Teddy denouncing me for being a warmonger and fighting in his backyard, and he proceeds to doggypile on me for being the “aggressor”.
So, yeah, the Teddy AI hates people declaring war on civs on his home continent, but was never programmed to understand the difference between the person who declares war and the person who had war declared on them. He just sees you’re at war, therefore you must be a warmonger.
I agree with @KevinC. The Civ VI tactical AI is probably as good or slightly better than Civ V’s. The problem is that the diplomatic stuff and the religious spam are both just so much worse than ever. When you add it all together, why bother?
You know I thought they had found a solid middle ground when I heard about Corps and Armies. I thought “Okay, cool, so at first you’re marching around with a warrior here and an archer there, but later you can start combining them in a sensible way. Pikes backed up by musket. Riflemen and artillery moving as a single unit!”. I thought that A) the AI would be able to handle it a lot better and B) In mid-to-late game, it’d be less tedious than having to issue move orders to every single unit every single turn.
Sadly, all it turned out to be was being able to combine multiples of each unit and make them slightly stronger. What a letdown.
Me too. I was imagining something along the lines of Call to Power, sort of like an army builder. But the actual thing in play (you “link” a military unit to a non-military one, etc.) is quite disappointing. Combining units to make 1 stronger unit was a feature in Civilization Revolution, by the way (where e.g. three archers would form an archer “army” that was much stronger than a single archer).
Okay, I have to throw in a positive for Civ6, and it is legitimately a big one: from a technical perspective, the engine feels an order of magnitude better than Civ5. Everything is much snappier, things like Mods work in a sensible way (and even work in MP). I love that Quick Movement/Combat still shows some animation now, not just teleporting. This is important, because I feel like I have to play with both Quick options enabled in Civ5, but when you start getting bombers and the like it’s impossible to track what the hell happened to your units between turns. But if you leave animations on… well, enjoy the 45 second bomber animation every time one attacks. Lordy.
Anyway, in terms of the engine, it’s all thumbs up for me and a big improvement over Civ5, which was a pig (which I’m reminded of constantly now that I’m playing Civ5:VP).
I just want modders to get DLL access and modding tools. Hopefully it doesn’t take 3 years or however long it took them with Civ5. I’m going to be really annoyed if that’s an intentional tactic from Firaxis/2K in order to not compete with DLC or some other nonsense.
Yeah, I have to agree with @KevinC here (as usual) but I believe Civ VI is actually a fantastic entry in the series, with the exception of a few (unfortunately incredibly painful) AI issues. One hopes those issues get ironed out soon, as I’d love a reason to dive back in at some point, but I don’t want to spin my gaming wheels playing it until I can get less aggravated over those AI issues. I suspect it’s all fixable, the question is if they will spend the resources to do so.
As you and others have noted, it’s the high-end stuff, diplomacy and trade mostly, that is the killer. The tactical stuff is handled better than in Civ 5, for sure, though the problems with the diplomacy makes it inevitable that the AI’s ability to wage smarter tactical warfare is undercut by never actually being prepared for the wars the crappy diplo creates.
The completely random nature of the diplomacy, the lack of any real reason or purpose to any of it, and the host of systems that, on their own, are good but which are completely unintegrated into any coherent strategy on the part of the AI is what hurts the game the most for me. Religion is a good example. I still find it unfathomable that no one pointed out the spamming of missionaries and apostles as a problem before the game shipped.
Depends on the phase of the moon. I’ve seen a bunch of attacks working to take target cities, especially city states for some reason. But I’ve also seen a tide of melee units flowing around an enemy city not attacking for turn after turn, lone scouts suiciding on city walls, and enemy builders and settlers blithely charging unescorted up to garrisons.
For me, Civ VI is the first in the series that I really notice the poor AI, and I’m not great at playing. The idiocy of declaring war on me when the AI is woefully underpowered blows my mind, and the complete lack of using any naval force to back up a land attack is ridiculous. That’s just to name a couple of the broad strokes.
But I love playing. I love that the AI is too poor to take me on because I despise having my well built civ be destroyed. I only defend with spies because I can’t stand having enemy spies sabotage my districts. Frankly, the fact that the AI is poor is a bonus to me, not a problem. If it gets better through patches somehow, I’ll reduce difficulty to make it work for me. If it stays as is, I’ll continue playing on Prince, which seems to be exactly what I like.
The AI in the Civ series has always behaved in irrational ways and I was not one of those who expected that would change in this latest iteration. I still enjoy the game. That might be because I gave up on Civ 5 very early on so I’m not as burnt out on Civ as others here might be.
I started a new game with Poland. Seems like a fine upstanding Civ to go bashing your neighbors with. One thing that looks like a bug in this latest version is the AI attacking me, when we are not at war. So I understand that Gorgo is a war hawk, but I didn’t think attacking others without declaring war was a special ability. One of her slingers trooped up to my capital and let loose. We didn’t have open borders, and although she had denounced me as a peacenik, war had not yet been declared.
I wouldn’t go this far, I thought both XCOMs have been quite good. And since this thread has recently been about the AI, I’ll add that the challenge in XCOM by the AI is legitimate. Want a fight on your hands, play either one on classic/ironman.
I should have worded it better. It wasn’t a surprise war either. There was no state of war between us. I checked via diplomacy and the icon on her image was the usual mad face not the X of war. So I decided to spring a surprise war on her instead. I even got the warning that making the attack against her slinger would start a war.
I wouldn’t exactly say the poor diplomatic AI is a bonus for me, but I sorta know what you mean. For me, I’m mostly indifferent to what the AI does. It’s the same lame diplomatic AI it’s always been, and I don’t really care. I just like making my Civ and being left alone. The tactical AI is a little better than it was in Civ 5, but again I don’t care much, as I don’t play Civ to fight wars.
The AI I do care about is the civ-building AI – the AI that decides where to place cities, what to build, what techs and policies to research, etc. That’s the game I like playing. I want to play a fun peaceful empire-building game against other peaceful empire-builders. Difficulty levels give me some of this, but I’d prefer to play against an AI on equal terms. It’d be nice to play a game where carefully designing my cities is the difference between victory and defeat.
That’s not the case anyway? I mean, it’s the economy (= buildings and improvements) that ultimately determines how many and what kind of units you can build, and how/when/if you win, right?
Well, up to King at least (the highest I play at usually), it doesn’t take more than a modicum of attention to things to insure you have a prosperous civilization. I’m pretty sure a nearly random distribution of buildings will work, because, well, in large civs I sometimes end up doing nearly that, and always roll in the money.
