I’m playing on a continents map with Alex the Great. I’m going for a domination victory, but my starting circumstances gave me the opportunity to easily convert two civs because they were on the next continent over with no religion. I’m kind of dual tracking a domination and religious victory. Like Equisilus, I’ve seen religious units but the numbers aren’t the overwhelming spam that I remember from playing the release version.
On a different note, playing as Alexander, I find that I am shooting ahead quickly in the tech and civics trees from all the inspirations and eurekas I am getting through conquest.
Excellent news for Civilization VI Digital Deluxe edition owners!
It’s important to us that wherever Civilization fans live around the world, that the Digital Deluxe edition provides a great value. We saw that prices with certain currencies didn’t live up to the savings we’re looking to deliver, and so we are excited to offer this new content at no additional charge to those who purchase, or already own, the Civilization VI Digital Deluxe edition.
In the coming months, we’ll be releasing two additional Civilization & Scenario Packs for Civilization VI that will introduce three new leaders representing civilizations from Africa and Southeast Asia. This content will appear automatically for purchasers of the Civilization VI Digital Deluxe edition upon release.
Awesome! I wonder who we can look forward to joining the fray from Africa and SouthEast Asia? I also always have to wonder if any of these countries being added are sales/market driven, like, “If we just included x in the lineup we might rack up some sales there…”
So I gave Civ 6 another shot this week as the Aztec which I had not played before, and Eygpt and Greece (Gorgo) which I had at the Emperor. The Aztec are a bit OP with being able to turn defeated enemy units into builders and other advantages.
I played the Egyptians through the Renaissance. If there were significant improvements to the AI I sure didn’t see them. In 3 game, I capture 5 unescorted settlers. Even when the AI managed to concentrate the force instead of moving forward it still shuffles units around allowing my archers to slowly kill them. It also did dumb things like bypassing my new city guarded by a single archer and instead headed toward my walled capital. Not a single city was ever in danger of being captured.
It is really too bad they’ve ruined my favorite franchise.
Thanks for that update, I’ve still been considering buying it. I guess I’ll have to hold out hope that expansions fix it; I didn’t like 5 much until the expansions dropped. Hopefully they can make 6 acceptable as well.
I saw this thread get bumped and I was hoping for the announcement of a DLC that could possibly fix this game. Something like Crusades. Civ6 needs a LOT of help to make it more compelling and challenging.
Similar to Strollen, I decided to give Civ VI another go recently. I hadn’t played the game since release, and even then, only went so far as my second game before I quit due to playing as Pericles and neighbouring another Pericles. It annoyed me more than it should have, and was enough for me to forget about Civ VI and play something different.
Having picked it up again, I sat down and found myself disappointed with the game still. One of my chief complaints that still persists is that the AI does not upgrade its units. Why am I still finding a Civ with archers in the modern era. More to the point, it was a common finding around the globe, city state and major civ alike.
Furthermore, viewing the end game graphs tells a woeful tale of AI ineptitude. Wars were frequently fought but city captures were rare. In fact, I was the mightiest conquerer taking 5 cities in one war, completing destroying the French, while the rest of the AI nations combined took as much over the course of the game.
And playing in the end game sucks. I did space race for something different, and never again will I go that path. The turns drag out, and it felt like a chore to basically hit the end turn button and wait for my final city to finish its Mars mission component. There was never any tension, it didn’t feel like a race, just a casual “I’ve won this game, get the cheevo’s” driving me forward.
I have decided that I am done buying Civ games. Firaxis doesn’t seem to care about AI at all. The most glorious game mechanics do not matter at all if you are playing against an idiot. When the next civ comes out, someone please remind me that the AI sucks and that I do not want to buy it.
The AI did improve…barely. Not enough to matter. I’ve been playing on Immortal.
It can finally take a walled city, IF it outnumbers you 6 to 1. And I don’t mean a 6 to 1 ratio, I mean only 6 units against 1. If it’s any more units than that, it will run into a traffic jam and have no clue how to herd all those units to overwhelm you.
The AI’s one and only shot at beating you is still in the very early first 20-40 turn rush, before walls, before you have a chance to match its massive starting army advantage. That’s it. That’s the AI’s only hope. If it can’t beat you in the first 50 turns then it’s never going to beat you.
That means the entire game past turn 50 is pointless. You will win. It’s just a matter of time. It still can’t win via domination. It still can’t win with space race because the requirements are so ridiculous and the costly space port districts so easy to take out. It still has no idea how to take advantage of tourism bonuses to generate enough to win a culture victory. It can’t win a religious victory because you just declare war and wipe out its missionaries the instant they threaten to convert you.
I’m not even an expert at this game. I was never able to win any Civ 4 games beyond Monarch difficulty, yet I’ve never lost a Civ 6 game on Immortal (barring the super early rush). I’ve never been in the slightest danger of losing to any of the victory conditions. The AI just completely lacks the ability for the final push needed for culture or scientific victories, and a human player will never lose to a religious victory.
Honestly they should turn this game into a solo city-(country)-builder, with occasional random barbarian incursions or revolutions to motivate the armed forces. There’s just no point playing into the middle game in the current release.
For masochistic fun I too played a game recently. England (and some other random country on the far side of the world) declared war on me out of the blue on that idiotic “player is too far ahead” basis. They attacked my musketeers and cannons with a force entirely composed of archers. 100% archers, swear to god, a dozen of them at a time. In effect it was just a way for me to conquer them without incurring war costs, which are negligible anyway. Come on, even if I just hit end-of-turn a hundred times they still would have been physically unable to take a single city.
Just chiming in. I also played (or started to play) a game this weekend, and it was just an abysmal experience, from the ai to poorly implemented gameplay decisions.
What a mess.
Started a game of Civ IV, lost 5 hours in a blink.
[quote=Brad Wardell]
Re why was the OS/2 version better at AI?
Primarily because it was the only GalCiv game that I designed and programmed and thus the AI and the gameplay were in perfect sync.[/quote]
It seems to me that as games have gotten larger, you end up with a few people designing that game and one poor sod who’s unenviable task it is to try to make an AI to play that game. This results in very interesting game designs that would theoretically be fun to play if the AI opponent actually had a clue what it was doing.
Is a good single-player strategy game basically reliant on having one super-dev who can design all the basic gameplay mechanisms and the AI to deal with them? I used to think the AI dev needed to have a veto on all design ideas, but now I’m thinking even that’s not enough.
It’s sort of a double-whammy. The gameplay is more complex, so one person can’t keep as firm a grasp on it, and it’s exponentially harder to write good AI code form complex gameplay.
Still, I think if the AI dev has more control over gameplay design, they can steer the gameplay mechanisms to forms where they know how to write a stronger AI. Like says the combat balance between units (or unit design) is based on a specific logical structure that the developer can encode and optimize for.
Do not forget that OS\2 was superior to Windows in every regard, almost up to todays standards (It has REXX for one thing). Only thing better would of course be AMiGA (Which has AREXX).
I wonder if there is such a thing as an “AI” pack you could buy and add to game engines, sort of like how HAVOK did physics and Speed-tree did shrubbery.
Game design is an incredibly important part in regards to AI performance, but talent and resources are the other. I think it’s the latter in particular that is the problem with Civ games these days. Firaxis simply does not care. The AI in Civ5 was abysmal but the game sold like hotcakes to rave reviews, so why invest money in that area of the game?
I remember Firaxis (I think it was Jon Shafer) saying during Civ5’s AI development that Firaxis’ policy was to have the lead designer also be the AI guy, to make sure that the AI knew how to play the game. So they are certainly aware of how important the design aspect of the game is. The problem is they just don’t see value in a competent AI, so devote no resources towards it. AI requires many, many, iterations to get right and it’s clear that they just can’t be bothered.
From a design aspect, 1UPT on a scale of Civ is going to be a problem. But on the other hand, there’s so much low-hanging fruit hanging around Civ5 and Civ6 that could be solved. Things like in Civ5, how for years the AI didn’t understand a Great General wasn’t a combat unit itself and would charge ahead of the army. Or the ridiculous “diplomacy” in Civ6, where Teddy Roosevelt declares war on me for being at war on his continent, despite the fact that it was the Aztecs that declared war on me. Or building tens of thousands of missionaries to carpet every single hex in the game. Or any number of other issues where the AI is so flawed it should probably be categorized as a bug.
I don’t get upset with AI not being great when we’re talking version 1.0. I understand that the AI can’t really be tuned until the game systems and balance are mostly in place, so it needs to be done at the end of the project. But I expect to see heavy work continue on this aspect of the game, especially when there is a business model that supports ongoing development (expansions, DLC for a new Civ, etc).
Firaxis lost me for quite a while after Civ5. I didn’t pick up either XCOM game, I skipped Beyond Earth. Given my 20 year love of the Civ franchise I thought I’d give them one more shot with Civ6, but I am done with the franchise and the company at this point. All the cool design ideas (and I thought there were several) in Civ6 don’t make a difference when the AI is this inept.
EDIT: I should point out that the modding community in Civ5 was able to make drastic improvements to the AI in that game, once they were given the tools to do so. This clearly demonstrated to me that it wasn’t technical or design limitations that kept the AI back, it was simply lack of effort/resources on Firaxis’ part.
The XCOM games are really good (especially the second one), but I’m probably off Civ games until they show me something. I played Civ5 a ton despite the AI…the Civ6 AI is too much.
