1787

Honestly I just declare war nonstop. No reason to let the bugs spread. Cities take so long to conquer that i’d rather nip the disease in the bud as it were. Tomyris’ units heal 50 hp when they destroy a unit, so she’s definitely my kind of leader. In the grim dark years of 3000BC, ect.

1788

Right… Its trying to win and to do so it is about to wage war against an opponent that …

  1. Has a far superior military in terms of tech to it.
  2. Is a major trade partner
  3. is not winning the game (and perhaps is close to last place) by nearly every measure of victory condition, such as a religion, culture, domination or science victory.
  4. There is a fairly large dead zone between our borders, hence no border push concerns.

Not to mention there are plenty of weaker players to gobble up.
Tell me again, WHY this is anything but an absurdly stupid decision by the AI?

Oh yea, and it actually had any kind of plan, why did it accept an alliance request?

1789

Please direct me towards any game that has AI half as intelligent as you’re suggesting. I’ve played all the major strategy games. None of them have what you’re asking for. No one has a billion dollars to sit down and design Data from Star Trek to play Civ against you. Sorry, dude. So far the AI seems a fair bit smarter than Civ V, and for 95% of people I think that’s good enough. Sure, we’d all love brilliant, human-like AI. But unless you’ve got some alien technology laying around, it’s not going to happen.

1790

Did you read my original post or just quote it? Try Age of Wonders 3.

1791

95% of people are bad enough to be satisfied with Chieftain-level AI.

Doesn’t mean that this should be the standard. My expectation for AI is that it can play competently on what Firaxis calls Prince level. Competently doesn’t mean it wins, but that it can win if things go very bad for me, and it doesn’t do obviously stupid things like spearmen vs tanks.

AoW3 meets that standard.

1792

Just to add my 2 cents, I agree with Eric here. No one is asking for a human like AI. Just solid decisions.

It has been done many times.

Stardock does a great job of improving their AI, AOW 3, Enless Legend. None of these have AMAZING AI, but it is competant and takes a long time to figure out how to beat it.

Finally, why was a group of modders able to make the AI in Civ 5 so much better with the Community Patch Project?

Personally I need to stop beating a dead horse. Civ games never have good AI. I need to drop them and move on.

1793

Someone needs to create an app like Uber, but instead of calling a car it gets you human opponents to play Civ against you. Damn, I’d love that job actually! D:

1794

Does Endless Legend even have AI? That’s news to me.

1795

Especially when you consider that Queen Victoria was in the series in the past, and she was no more English than Catherine was French.

You could go through the ethnic origins of a lot historical monarchs, and you may be surprised to find that they were often not of the same culture as their subjects.

1796

Yeah, I’m not sure I’d hold Endless Legend up as a standard for good AI here. But a lot of the game is less dependent on moving your spearmen in front of your archers, or arranging your city districts just so, so it doesn’t matter as much.

1797

I think one’s opinion of the AI depends in part on whether one plays a peaceful/builder game. Warmongers are more likely to be disappointed. Those of us who prefer to avoid war don’t have to deal with the AI as often or as directly. We still compete with it, of course, but it’s not in our face; we’re busy thinking about which district to build, where to settle, etc.

Why not try multiplayer? This new Civ has a pretty slick multiplayer system.

1798

A salient point.

I think the QT3 forum is filled with Civilization super players that are able to dissect and deconstruct Civ AI at faster-than-light speeds and declare the games subpar before even the first patch is out.

Yet Civilization V remained in Steam’s top 10-20 most played games (concurrent players) for it’s entire lifespan and is still there! Currently Civ V and Civ VI reside in the top 10 spot. So clearly Firaxis is doing something right and retains an avid community larger than most shooters.

1799

@AntediluvianArk, I’m one of those “just okay” players, because I don’t do the optimal thing – I don’t warmonger. I just like building. If I want war, I play a wargame. This admittedly suboptimal playstyle makes the game more challenging and more fun for me, and it’s why I’m one of those long-term Civ players you describe.

1800

As I said all along with Civ5, I wasn’t expecting some supercomputer quality AI or anything, I just wanted an AI that understood the basic fundamentals of the game. While it certainly has a list of issues that could be fixed or improved upon (as any strategy game does), I feel like I got that with Civ6. It’s a marked improvement over the previous game.

1801

Does anyone know if there’s an XML or settings file I can modify so that it remembers the last game settings I chose? It absolutely drives me nuts when games don’t serialize this information out to disk. Every game I start up, I have to change about 9 different settings (game speed, world size, sea level, map type, etc).

1802

Yeah, that is really annoying. I suspect it is a bug. That shouldn’t have made it past QA.

1803

I like puttering around in Paradox or CA games because they have much more personality. I can’t really play Civ V now even for flavor, it’s just too boring.

OTOH my problem with Civ V was more abstract - I felt that for the huge amount of time I’ve apparently spent playing it I can hardly name anything particularly memorable about the experience. I have a worry that long form, slow burn strategy games are somehow appealing to the lizard brain but aren’t actually providing a meaningful or memorable experience; that the moment to moment experience is enjoyable but the overall experience is forgettable.

1804

I think there’s a bug somewhere in their Barbarian generation algorithm. I’d seen a fair amount of posts talking about barbarian swarms, but I haven’t really had much of an issue as long as I’m diligent at staying on top of them. I just fired up a new game as Egypt, though, and I ended up starting alone on an island that could fit maybe 4 cities or so. By turn 30, there were 4 horsemen, 3 warriors, and I don’t know how many Recon units running around. Keep in mind that this is on Marathon, so 30 turns is only enough time to build one unit and start on another. And the barbarian spawns just seem to be escalating.

Makes me wonder if some part of the algorithm calculates the spawn chance by player proximity or something, and since I’m off here on my own it’s just raining hairy brutes all around me.

1805

Maybe it’s a per-turn algorithm, and marathon just gives them more time to spawn?

1806

I think there’s also a lot of luck involved. If you happen to have their camp spawn near horse resources which are not inside borders, they get horsemen and horse archers and they seem to maybe even get more units. If you don’t happen to get a start like this it seems to be a lot easier to deal with the barbarians, though still rougher than past civs in my experience.

I heard them mention this on a dev stream, but most players don’t seem to know this. It should really be more clear when and why this happens.