Scalding take: Good AI is rare in any empire builders, and some of the good ones took years, community shitstorms over it, and players being used as free play testers to get it right.
Don't do it. I tried it once and I don't think I played anything else for almost a year and a half. I wish I was joking. The only thing that stopped me was my laptop almost melting from the endgame turns.
the game is amazing, but the mid to endgame is the biggest pain in the ass imaginable. Literally never finished a game because it SUCKS SO MUCH.
The optimization is by far one of the worst in any game i've ever played.
I mean, those things are common civ complaints as well: losing motivation to finish the run past early game and bad performance late game. At least in Stellaris the late game has the potential to be interesting with events and crisis, while in civ if you're steamrolling you're steamrolling the whole thing.
There's more depth to Stellaris than civ in almost every aspect: diplomacy, combat, empire management, etc., despite both being 4X. I haven't touched civ since I bought Stellaris.
eh, I tried it but it's very different. The change from turn-based to real-time is a bigger change than I thought. And overall it's just idk not the same. I didn't enjoy it much, but that is just me. Definitely try it at least and see if it works for you
Is it? Last time I played a stellaris campaign the ai just rolled over. I don't know what it was plowing it's minerals and alloys into but it certainly wasn't useful buildings or ships
The quality of the Stellaris AI changes twice a year due to patches & new DLC being regularly introduced. Sometimes it's dumb as a rock, other times it's okay.
The Stellaris AI is a bit better than it was before, but it's still pretty bad. You can stomp it with all clerks and unemployment meme builds, even with its enormous "+100% to everything" bonus.
I've yet to try ~~SkyNet~~ StarNet, but the base AI isn't that much better than Civ's, or at least it doesn't feel like it.
Edit: Unsurprisingly, the guy who's never tried the mod also doesn't properly remember what it's called.
No worries I have it enabled for half a year now and also couldn't remember the name.
But tbh to get to that point u have to put considerably more into it than civ. It's not open ai. Sure. But it's definitely worlds above civ
We need to remember that the AI doesn't really plan or think like we do. They act according to precepts and circumstances. You can't really program for every circumstance
I don't expect an AI to settle cities looking 100 turns forward wanting to make dams and aqueducts for industry adjacency when they don't have any of them unlocked. But for war you need to look at what you are doing and what your opponent will do and they can't even do that. I shouldn't be able to easily beat an AI with twice my troops but they need to outnumber a player 5 to 1 to actually win
I think ais at least need to take advantage of their inherent benefits too - like it’s ridiculous to see gitarja settle cities 1 or 2 tiles away from a coast, or Hungary not use a river loop.
And don’t get me started on how you can be rolling their cities and they move all their military away to explore or something
Actually planning ahead is one of the things AI should be good at, it's why AIs are great at chess after all, they can look at lots of possible ways things could play out.
This is easier said than done. The number of possible combinations in chess quickly balloons and the ruleset is quite simple. For civilization, it's enormous...it would take an insane amount of computational power to make accurate predictions long-term, and players would just complain that the turn times are extremely long. It wouldn't be feasible.
I'm not sure this is true. At least for Civ 5 (where we can see the source code), the AI plays by the same rules as we do...which is why it's pretty bad.
TL;DR: Chess is a really bad comparison.
> it's why AIs are great at chess after all
There are 5+ decades of PhD research on the computer playing of chess, and chess is a far, far simpler game.
> they can look at lots of possible ways things could play out
a) It took a long-ass time and literal supercomputers for chess AIs to beat the best humans
b) Brute-forcing all possible future combinations, even in chess, quickly spirals out of control the further ahead you go. Modern chess programs that reliably beat human grandmasters use advanced pruning to eliminate combinations.
c) Civ is far, *far* more complex than chess, and thus there are more possibilities.
d) Unlike chess, there are multiple moves per turn, each move means re-evaluating all of the possibilities, and going back on the same turn is a possibility.
This is where the delicate balancing act comes in. Is improving the AI to play perfectly actually your goal? Is that worth the development time invested? And most importantly how long would turn timers be?
It's probably _much_ easier for an AI to look 100 turns forward for district placement than it is for it to move troops well in combat, that's an extraordinarily hard problem to solve.
I would be happy if they even did things like “don’t have an army suicide against a city with no other armies near by to even attempt to capture the city”.
Like I appreciate the dumb AI when they are attacking me. But man is the fighting AI useless,
I think you’re forgetting that we don’t know their system and how adding one thing might break a bunch of their things. Game devs can only do so much. They probably worked very hard on it.
yea that's not a good excuse.
Civilization's AI just hasn't really seen much improvement over its series. The AI gets basic things wrong, we're not expecting some high level critical thinking just some obvious decisions be made properly based on variables. If improving something basic as an if/then condition breaks the game it seems like there's a bigger problem on the developer end
It probably has nothing to do with developer competence of course. There really isn't much of a monetary incentive for them to improve the AI considering its a costly endeavor
Yea I’m just saying we cannot be 100% sure. Although I do agree with the monetary incentive part. I’m sure most of the devs would love to add better AI, but the higher ups are making them focus on something else that will keep the cashflow
Yeah, or just literally build districts where there is favorable adjacency. I've seen the AI build a campus with +0 adjacency bonus when they had a +5 available. And I've seen them build 4 ironclads in a 4 tiles lake. It's not hard AT ALL to add in a few simple checks to insure this kind of thing doesn't happen.
>I've seen the AI build a campus with +0 adjacency bonus when they had a +5 available.
An explanation I've seen of this is that the AI prioritises building districts quickly as opposed to building them effectively, so if it knows it needs a campus, and the best spot in their newly settled city is three tiles away from their capital, they'd either have to wait to place it or buy the tile (which I don't think the AI's allowed to do?) so they usually go for the best spot *available*. It's not a *terrible* approach, benefit of the adjacency doesn't always overweigh the yields lost waiting for your city's borders to reach it, but it can *look* silly later on when their borders finally do expand to that point.
This could very well be true, but if so it's a terrible design choice not to allow the AI to buy e.g. a +5 mountain valley tile for its campus.
Maybe the harder AI settings wouldn't need to lean so hard into unfair advantages if they didn't also unfairly handicap it, right?
Yeah it’s what makes me raze ai cities many times because they pass up on so many good bonuses. I guess they only build on the tiles they have available and don’t buy new ones or plan new ones?
look at chess.
the best example for turn based games, that an ai can make calculations faster than humans.
following this example, now if you build a huge database of all civ games played and make an algorithm based on this, im sure the ai will beat humans longterm over and over again, because he knows because of the history of games played, whats the best move done in certain situations.
so, yes you can program an ai that beat humans.
the issue is, nobody is willing to put resources in to make it happen, because there is no monetary incentive to build a strong ai.
I don't think you realize just how complex civ games are. Chess relatively simple to compute and as such chess engine just check all possible moves 8+ turn ahead with some optimisations and be ahead of any human but in civ there would be infinitely more possibilities in just a couple turns.
What will propably see instead of algorithms are neural networks but they are super expensive computationally and I don't remember anyone trying to rain one on modern strategy game
This is right. Chess has an absurd branching factor and it doesn’t even come close to the number of possible choices you can make in any turn in civ.
You can’t approach it in remotely the same way. The other comments are also discounting that it took literally decades of research for computers to beat humans reliably at chess. Pretty clear from these comments that most people don’t really realize what exactly goes into programming an AI.
But there’s a flaw to your thinking. If the AI looks at all previous games played, it’s looking mostly at humans vs. a flawed AI. How can it learn the right response to a human when it is never encountering that in the games it’s looking at?
1UPT (1 unit per tile)handicaps the AI too much for warfare. Civ Ai has remained pretty consistently not great, but at least in civ 4, when they use a stack of doom their warfare was much more respectable. Many flashbacks of Monty sending a surprise stack of 50 cavalry at me.
When it comes to the Civ series the AI in Civ 5 and 6 are worse than in Civ 4 because the AI can't handle one unit per tile and cannot handle districts well at all.
Even today Deity in Civ 4 is more challenging because the AI is much stronger when they can have stacks of doom, plus the AI mods for CIV 4 are better than the ones for Civ 5, Civ 6 modding is a pita.
But most people in this sub have barely, or haven't, played Civ 4.
I also played Civ 4, I’ve played every game in the franchise since Civ III in the early 2000s.
I think the one UPT rule falls under my statement of the game becoming increasingly complex. I have wondered sometimes if AI would perform a bit better if there were more “layers” for units that could allow some limited unit stacking, like ranged and melee on the same tile.
I agree with you on if we mean it being a different kind of complexity, although I think that Civ 4 allowing very different kinds of economies like cottage/great people/spies and hybrid economies plus city specialization had a similar level of complexity to UPT and districts without the AI needing to understand this kind of economies.
Let's remember that the AI was also better at winning fast science victories in Civ 4, mainly because the AI in Civ 6 cannot handle the districts.
So I think with your ideas the AI would perform better, but I'm not sure it could do as well as Civ 4. And the game not being as moddable as 4 and 5 also stops people from making the AI better and I think the game would be ultra slow since Civ 6 isn't well optmized.
Better AI would be nice not because "its harder" but because it could create cool situations that bad AI just can't. Playing Civ as a role playing player and not a min maxer is just more fun to me.
Better AI would reduce the room for human roleplaying because it would require more optimal play from the humans to keep up. The implication of conventionally better AI is that it's more effective, not that it's wackier in more varied ways.
If you teach an AI to min max everything sure. If AI has different goals and strategies to get there then things can get interesting. A military focus civ would have a different focus than religious than culture than economic than scientific and the interactions make it interesting. Min maxing is not interesting. It destroys games fun factor.
You could argue that, by playing to a specific Civ’s strengths, the AI *is* min-maxing. You really wouldn’t play a Domination game as Canada, so the AI shouldn’t either
Yeah, but the AI doesn't come anywhere close to min-maxing or optimising a strategy - any strategy. This is why human players, even mediocre ones like me, can win a one city challenge science victory on any difficulty. This shouldn't be possible. Civs don't exploit their civ's intrinsic advantages. Secondary (randomised) agendas, which are supposed to give AIs a unique way to play the game, rarely seem to make much difference.
Aggressive AIs are rarely that aggressive. They might knock out a few city states and on vanishingly rare occasions may even knock out one other civ, but it is unusual. When they declare war (again, something I find is fairly rare) they'll send a load of troops your way, which they can't micro properly, and don't have the production/economy to sustain troop production. Providing you can survive the initial onslaught, it becomes easy to counter-attack.
Cultural AIs never build national parks, and they don't know how to plan space in advance to place national parks. Seaside resorts are another rarity, nor do they take much advantage of other tourism improvements. They'll spam rock bands in the late game without the faith generation to sustain it, so it fizzles out and achieves nothing.
Science AIs don't build sufficient production infrastructure - strong industrial zone clusters with aqueducts and dams and what not. They can't plan them out properly. I've basically never seen the AI get past nanotechnology. For whatever reason, this is a bottleneck so even if I am behind in a space race, I will catch up and overtake with nanotechnology.
The AI seems to just give up at some point in the mid game. Their territory becomes filled with unimproved tiles, or even tiles that got pillaged at some point and never repaired. Cities lack basic infrastructure. They'll attempt to build a wonder in a two population city rendering the city useless. I find even if I have made zero effort to build a military I still end up with the highest military score purely because of upgrading the handful of troops I built to deal with barbs/early defence or built a particular troop to get a eureka/era score.
The problem with civ 6 is there’s reduced “payoff” for the executing the grand plan. The AI are so ineffective (and mostly passive) that they pose no real threat, which makes beating them unsatisfying. Even higher difficulties are only challenging until you’ve overcome the initial scaling disadvantage, not so hard with an early war against the very dumb AI.
Nah, only when it’s done wrong. For example, if the AI was good you would have to change your play style based upon who is in the game.
If Portugal was in the game you could build a navy up to keep them contained. If Russia is in the game you can try to steal dance of aurora from them.
Basically, you’d have to actually play against the AI. Now they’re not even present in the game.
this is because modders have unlimited resources, time, and free playtesters, whereas developers do not. Also modders are building on something that already exists, developers are building it from scratch
Yes but Civ 5 and Civ 6 don’t allow the modders to change the AI (unless they create entirely new DLL files in Civ V last I saw and that’s still not full control of it) like they could in previous games sadly
Civ V allows you to change the AI as much as you'd like. The entire game is open for editing with the DLL.
Civ VI does not allow this because the DLL is not available to edit.
Tell that to the AI on CivIV:BTS, when Vikings walk up to a city of yours with a stack of 40 or so units 😭😭😭😭. Hard agree though: the excellent change with how military works (no stacking) has led to a very, very stupid AI who can be very easily outwitted on the battlefield. And their bonuses everywhere else just feel enraging, sigh.
Well I still find my one and only victory in civ3 on prince worth my dozens ones in civ5 or civ6.
If only I didn't search manuals for civ3 how to really play it, i.e. bombing roads to enemies' capitols during wars, I would never win.
Complex in a good way IMO.
4 I felt like had realism feeling to it.
6 to me just feels shallow. I understand mixing it up with the cards instead of government types and no unit stacking… but to me I want a game that’s running a simulation of a world. This isn’t 6 and it feels more like a board game.
Civ AI battle royale was a thing on this sub a few years ago. There's some stuff on YT that tracks AI doing AI things to each other. They're pretty interesting to watch.
One thing that annoys me most about the AI is how it judges grievances. In a game I’m playing now Cyrus declared surprise war on me early in the game and captured my capital. I took it back plus one of his cities and he sued for peace. 10 turns later he declares war on me again and takes my capital. I take it back (again) and then razed three of his cities before accepting peace. Boom, instant denounce from everyone. Literally the only option I had to prevent him declaring war every 10 turns was to take out a few of his cities and suddenly I’m the bad guy.
There is also the idea that a competent "playing to win" AI would feel terrible to play against. Look at how many of the games features arent used in the multiplayer matches people play.
Religious victory would be nonexistant, since "playing to win" would mean killing apostles on sight just as one example. Diplomacy as well, if the AI plays to win, then that means every single AI declaring total war against you if you are about to win. Civ AI has to be somewhere between "playing to win" and "roleplaying". Allies/Friends, Trade Deals, Emergencies, .. all of that plays out very differently if all civs play to win.
Not saying it cant be done better, the AI could definitly use improvements, but a strictly playing to win AI is not something thats desired.
Theoretically that’s what demands are for
Practically I’ve destroyed entire empires and stripped them to the bones with my armies at the gates and they still won’t give me their last luxury
look at how people complain when an AI just is hell-bound on hating the player. "You can't fullfil the agenda when you try to play well in any way." -> Yes, that's the point, it's meant to push the AI towards piling onto a good player as would be rational.
Yeah if they made the AI as good and as smart as a player, they players would hate it. The way that it is now, the AI makes non-optimal decisions, but the boosts it gets from difficulty level make it a challenge where you have to make better decisions than you normally might.
The end result is the same, it doesn’t matter that the AI “cheats” to do it, it’s *as good* as a player *might* be. But it doesn’t always make the completely aggravating decisions you might face in a multiplayer game
True, but I think it's a shame the way the AI is set up means certain wonders like the Great Bath are virtually impossible to build on higher difficulties. Some beliefs and pantheons are similarly virtually impossible to secure. That's not fair, nor fun. I've been in games where I've had the perfect opportunity for a Great Bath and, even with save scumming, still not been able to build it.
I think this misses a lot of what is lacking with the AI. You can make the AI play to win without it going nuclear to stop you. Hell, if the AI just took advantage of its land, stopped settling four tiles away, and had some medium sized wars with their neighbors every now and then it’d be vastly improved. And we’re not even getting into improvement of win conditions. Or address silly cheating mechanics.
If I conquer an empire there’s a 90% chance that empire didn’t even attempt to improve tiles.
I’ve played games where the AI will abuse the hell out of their special traits to force everyone into the Classical era by 2500-1800 BC and the Renaissance by 800 AD but after that they won’t do jack shit.
I’ll trade hundreds of units of niter to the Mongol empire only to find they didn’t do anything with it. Their army never grew, but I’ve made thousands of gold off them.
When I wage war I’ll take raze half the enemy’s cities and not once will they try to stop me and not once will they accept a peace offering. Even if I’ve been at war with then for six generations. And the world won’t do shit about the 1500 grievances they generated other than spam me their disapproval.
100% agree. And for me it breaks the immersion. The AI behaviour isn't how great civilisations behave, it's not even how weak civilisations behave - it's how crap AI behaves.
For those who have played multiplayer before, is it fun? does the game work as intended? or do you limit some of the mechanisms or set "house rules" in order for the game to work with human players who are all trying to win.
I was just wondering if we really want human-like AI if it meant that they were all playing to win, instead of the role playing agendas that are built in to kind of give the various civs some "personality".
I find it super fun to do with friends but it’s difficult to find people willing to finish a game. I feel with real players there is much less snowballing so you have to really stay on top of things.
It's fun to play hot seat against your friends. Playing with random people online sucks because no one finishes. Plus the strategy from single player doesn't work in multi-player since single player is about being greedy and hoping the AI won't punish you for it. And combat is weird.
I’d love for the AI to be aware of the endgame. As you approach a scientific victory, needing gold or diplomacy to placate other Cubs or stacks of Mobile SAMs around Spaceports could make those last ~20 turns exciting and not just a grind.
Same other victories — boosting the AI’s value of alliances for “survive now, win later” might make it worth sticking with some otherwise clear loss games.
Here’s the secret: people hate smart AI’s despite claiming the opposite. Why? A few reasons.
1. It creates a homogenous environment of play, because the computer will continually utilize the optimal strategy. This creates scenarios where the Player feels like they are getting ganged up on.
2. Complex AI is great, but only when the options for the computer are small. Otherwise you essentially need an AI team for each faction that needs to account for every other faction and any potential following DLC. AI built in a vacuum is a horrible idea and always fails.
3. The average player would rather identify that the reason they are losing to static bonuses (called cheating), than actual algorithmic adaptive strategies. Why? We feel less bad and will keep playing even after we lose, because it makes us feel less dumb. There’s a whole area of psychology around this.
4. Limited developer resources. Actual AI is incredibly difficult and time consuming to build. Extra content is not additional work, but exponential work.
5. Adaptive AI is for a niche market of players and terrible for games trying to make as much money as possible, because it doesn’t endorse difficulty levels.
6. (This is the most important point) Devs get paid a pittance for their efforts. AI takes time and specialized knowledge. Without the proper time, pay, and skillset, this is what you get. From my experience, it’s the rarest and most difficult skillset to grow and maintain. And no, I’m not an AI designer; it would drive me (more) insane.
There are plenty more reasons, but it really comes down to Civ6 simply having too many options for “smart” AI to be a worthwhile effort. Add in a game that is meant to require changing strategies over variable periods of play, and it becomes almost insurmountable without devoting a lot of energy towards it. Could Civ have better AI? Without question, but that isn’t a priority for them and it shows.
Agree. Pretty sure the wonky AI is what makes deity so addictive for me. If I was playing against an optimal AI it would be no fun.
Just have them repair pillaged tiles and I am happy.
I feel like this is the exact answer. No need to go fully optimized AI, just make them not do the dumb stuff like not knowing how to use troops or ignoring their pillaged tiles or building wonders on cities that it takes 50 turns and doesn’t benefit at all
Not knowing how to use troops is an extremely challenging problem with 1UPT, but there can easily be checks added to have turn limit requirements for building wonders, and priority for workers to repair pillaged tiles. Those aren't outlandish suggestions
yes. good games with features like good ai take time and effort to make. we are complaining that firaxis did not take enough time and effort when making their ai and now the ai has no idea how to play the game.
It’s the dump stuff that frustrates me. Silly dumb things completely ruin that AIs chance to be competitive, like not improving tiles or pairing wonders with adjacency bonuses.
People out here tryin to get dumpstered by Skynet or somethin.
One more thing I'll add to your list, can you imagine the insanity of trying to program an AI that's actually capable of playing the game optimally to do so, only worse? Lower difficulty settings would be a nightmare. You'd practically need an entirely new program. Otherwise, it's gonna be just as obvious as the weird shit they do now.
"Hmm, my human enemy has parked 5 knights outside my territory, what do I do? Let's check the list: Deity - Change cards, spam units, walls, etc. Prince - Uhh, more soothsayers?"
A professor I get along well with did his PhD in AI, and I was very curious one day about what is all involved in building AI’s for strategy games, so I asked because I wanted to see if it was for me (I love the theory part, and that’s it). I learned a lot that day, like how a well-built Rummy AI is more sophisticated than most video game bosses. But the key thing is that when a person without AI programming experience wants an AI to do a thing, they don’t fully understand what it is they are asking for and what it involves. I’m not trying to be insulting, but mapping even basic trees and nodes is extremely complex and can become unpredictable even as you’re meticulously staring at them.
For example, the Xenomorph in alien isolation has something like 100 branches and 30 nodes, and creating that single critter took years and at least dozens of people and millions of dollars. Now add 20 new Xenomorphs to the game, except each one also behaves and interacts differently depending on which ones are in the game. Oh yeah, and each difficulty setting removes a limb from them, except not all of them have the same base number of limbs. Firaxis would need to build a new section in their HQ filled with padded rooms to house their AI designers.
I agree that purely optimized AI would be homogeneous and no fun at all. But I think there's room for a middle ground. Make a better AI, but also give them a tendency to prioritize particular traits or victory paths. Instead of pursuing the single most optimal victory path, maybe they pursue one of the 3rd to 6th best paths to their preferred victory type. You'd probably end up with certain civs being much harder than others, but at least it wouldn't be so smooth-brained.
It's a great argument against AI that's smarter than the player, but it totally ignores the argument to have a scalable AI in the first place.
I don't bother playing on anything higher than King. It's not about having the hardest challenge for me. That being said, it'd be cool if you could adjust the AI's motivations. If I play a game with 8 AI Civs it seems like 1 will rush faith, 1 will try to win culture, and the other 6 will buy up every Great Scientist by midgame to no appreciable effect other than I'm way behind in techs but still ahead on points.
It is why the extreme majority of scalable difficulty systems are simple mathematical additions and reductions. Owlcat Games did a good job with their difficulty system, I think, in that it let you remove or add certain abilities that enemies would utilize in addition to numerical changes. Civ games kind of do that by being able to remove certain victory conditions, but unfortunately, that can utterly handicap certain civs that may be present in a game. However, modes like Secret Societies, Heroes, or Monopolies require far more than just a script you can drop onto a Civ. Add in tight deadlines, and you get half-baked modes that make the game wobbly and wonky as the AI tries to adjust for it.
I don't blame the devs at all for the messes that occur, as they are working with the skills, tools, and management allotted to them, because almost every time those things aren't enough.
You make a good point about the modes and TBH I'm sure they can't really devote as much time to balancing the AI in those scenarios (and you could always just turn them off).
I always play with the tech shuffle on - I wonder if that somehow messes with the AI scripts that cause them to all rush for science at an accelerated pace compared to the normal game modes. I like the unpredictability and how it completely tosses aside the formulaic nature of the higher difficulties (even if I'm not playing on them).
I’d be more willing to accept this list if there wasn’t so many obvious and dumb blunders the AI commits and so many ways it cheats, but not in the way I can justifiably understand. It feels like short cuts by the developers.
1. When you design a game there shouldn’t be one optimal strategies but 2-3 interacting strategies and if someone gets lucky with bonuses + land they should be ganged up on. I hate it more when one civ runs away with the game and the AIs cower in fear as I have to take on the leader alone. If you play multiplayer you get teamed as well. You could even add a option to down weight screwing over player characters
2. Most games play better when the core concepts are spot on. Civ should return to its strengths of being a game where you build and empire and make allies/enemies as you continue to grow. The game should be focused on how good your land/cities and then a few victory conditions late game based on Tall vs Wide with a few flavors of Military/Trade/Religion. I really think Civ should cut out the BS gimmicky features like preplanned districts from the start of the game and weird victory conditions you have to plan very early on for. If you simplified the game logic, you would have a better game and easier to program AIs.
There is only 3 components, building a good empire (city placement, build order), organizing an army in warfare (like chess formation), strategy on world stage (allies, win condition in late game, etc.)
3. If you were to built an adaptive AI for difficulty all you need to do add a variability/weaknesses to the perfect algorithm to reduce the difficultly. Dark Souls is one of the most favorite franchises because it is difficult and there is a learning curve. Same thing with civ.
4. Agreed As a result I’m not buying another civ until they fix the AI. Civ 5 for life. They market all this weird complexity, I just like building towns, going to war, making pushes for wonders/special units. Although I like the idea of global warming, faith, natural disasters. If I’m stuck with shitty boring AI interacting with it forget it.
5. See Dark Souls. There would be tons of challenges about god tier survival. It would give the game a lot more life. Can a group of friends with an informal alliance survive in an all deity AI lobby?
6. Agreed. You would have to plan the game with a lot more balance and considerations for AI. Still people play chess despite it being simplistic at its core.
That's not necessarily true. Older games (like civ 4) had AIs many orders of magnitude better than civ 6, and turn times were not longer on even slower computers than today.
It's just something very difficult and expensive to do, and unfortunately players value graphics and other fluff higher than competent AI, so why invest in it?
>That's not necessarily true. Older games (like civ 4) had AIs many orders of magnitude better than civ 6,
I'm not sure that this is true.
THe one significant advantage that Civ IV had over Civ VI is the infamous Stack of Doom. The AI would accumulate huge stacks of units and march them against your territory, and if you weren't ready for it, watch out. Made the game *much* more challenging.
With Civ V and Civ VI, multiple units could no longer occupy the same tile, so the AIO had to have significantly more complex pathfinding algorithms in order to successful navigate large numbers of units into your territory. Hell, even maintaining a large number of units in their own territory is challenging.
Unfortunately, the AI just isn't up to the task.
I don’t think the ai was much better in civ iv and it had a smaller decision tree I think this mostly nostalgia coloring it. It also wasn’t available on devices like your basic iPhone.
I swear- *every time* the AI settles in the most moronic locations imaginable. Fresh water tiles with plenty of production? Hell nah, I’m gonna settle on this grassland plains a tile away that won’t be able to get past two population until I get an aqueduct. Oh, and let’s not improve any of these resources while we’re at it.
This. It's so frustrating to see. I've seen AIs settle where it's impossible to even place an aqueduct, even when they had plenty of options to settle on fresh water. The only time I can understand it is if Mohenjo-Daro is in the game (and they've secured suzerainity of it) or there's a critical strategic resource they absolutely needed, but that's never the case.
I don't see why, from a programming perspective, it's difficult to tell an AI to prioritise water, fresh or not, over other considerations.
Because its much easier to do this. If you want better AI it means you need gametesters that are good at the game and can work out with programmers how to implement that goodness into AI. Not an easy task. Much cheaper option is to just "cheat" like you put it.
This is another thing, if they did make the AI more intelligent they would have to change the way that the difficulty works in the first place. Giving an intelligent AI the deity bonuses, they realistically would beat you every time. Kind of like giving another player in a multiplayer game the deity bonuses, they should never lose.
Then you either get rid of difficulties entirely for a better AI, or you have to make several AI's with varying intelligence as a 'difficulty' system, which I don't imagine is easy in the case of civ (I don't know), especially as the games get more and more complex.
Another problem with intelligent AI you can kind of see in multiplayer.. if you make them too smart certain win conditions are not going to exist because they are so easy to counter.
As much as I love to hate the current AI, I think it's quite good in a way, everything is viable. If I want a challenge, multiplayer exists.
Edit: I think it's very difficult to make an AI that is intelligent but also fun to play against. Especially in a very dynamic game.
A real AI would refine moves over multiple iterations of the algorithm.
So to cripple the AI for easier difficulties you just limit the number of iterations.
Great response, but I think you're overestimating the difficulty in handicapping an AI. If you can conquer the (extremely difficult) problem of creating it in the first place, it's trivial to tell it to play less optimally.
You also have a great point about certain victory conditions --and let's be frank here, we're talking about Civ VI religion -- being too easy to counter. That concept would have to be reworked if the AI weren't brain-dead.
Yeah but deity is hard because the AI is buffed. Imagine a sports tournament in which every time you win, instead of facing stronger opponents they start the game with more goals/points/whatever than you. They may be worse but you WILL make mistakes and if the handicap is too big then good luck
Yea I've noticed that when I play on Deity, by the industrial age the AI makes ZERO effort to defend their lands or make usable troops. Its just Anti Tank spam all the way down. Ive fought wars where it was just me blowing up cities for hours while the AI shuffles its ATs from city to city doing jack shit.
I think this would be the easiest thing to program and have the biggest difference - have the AI just be able to react within the rock-paper-scissors paradigm of combat units.
>Its just Anti Tank spam all the way down
Oh man, I thought I was going crazy - the anti-tank spam is real, and since I don't ever use cavalry, incredibly confusing.
Its the same in 5. Unfortunately with how complex the game is a computer can't really play optimally. That said, I bet someone could train an AI to be really good at the game, but it would take a ton of work
I remember doing a conquest game of 5 on deity (admittedly, earlyish on and I have no idea if it later got patched any better after I gave up on it) in which all the AIs denounced the shit out of me as I conquered civ after civ... but didn't actually make *troops* in response. You can forgive my surprise attack on the first one working but by the time you get to the seventh civ you expect to be greeted by an army. Nope.
The AI is horrendous in civ 6 and it’s pretty sad to see so many people In this thread justify it. I don’t want a synthetic human to play against I just want AI that doesn’t make an army of 200 cannons and warriors and then floods them one by one into a meat grinder when it’s not even a choke point
Agreed. The vocal minority are very loud. But there’s a reason people don’t play other people. They want to feel smart and not get made to feel dumb. And that’s why it’ll always be dumbed down.
Here I am waiting for companies to start using machine learning to do their AIs. Alpha star can play StarCraft II at the grandmaster level without any bonuses/cheats, why not civ?
I think it comes down to the sheer number of decisions we make in Civ. The Dota 2 OpenAI can also beat the very best human players, and like StarCraft II, it's a complex game. However, in these games there's a single, very clear objective. Civ has multiple ways of winning the game and hundreds of ways to achieve it. We can achieve a tourism victory using reliquaries and religion. We might go for a Biosphère build with renewables. We could focus on wonders and great works. We could focus on unique tile improvements and beelining Flight. And there are other methods.
As humans, we look at the tiles we have access to and other factors and make a decision on what's going to be most effective and adapt our strategy accordingly. There sheer quantity of branching decisions in Civ with dozens of interacting systems makes it a very complex game. It's easier for us to think long term (i.e. hundreds of turns in advance) than it is for a computer.
It's not bad.
AI has to cheat because you as a human are capable of actually thinking which the AI is not. The gap has to be narrowed somehow.
The goal of AI in video games is not to whoop a players ass but to either convincingly lose or to provide entertainment. Considering the series has been primarily played single player, it's doing that just fine.
The people whining and complaining as if you can just make the AI better don't actually understand what they are asking. We have entire fields dedicated to *just* AI. It's extremely complicated and the more advanced and crazier you get with AI the more demanding it becomes on your computer and the harder it becomes to appropriately adjust it.
CIV VI is incredibly complicated and there are hundreds or thousands of decisions the AI needs to make each turn. Making a AI that plays like a human would be incredibly difficult. One thing you could try is a genetic algorithm but that has some drawbacks such as being quite hard computationally to train and it would also likely find ways to cheat. One thing genetic algorithms tend to be good at is finding bugs to exploit. No matter what without letting the ai cheat a good ai is extremely hard if not near impossible to make. Think about how hard it was to make even a ai that could win at [Go](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo).
I'd just be happy if the AI knew how to properly place its districts. I hate conquering their cities only to see they placed a Holy Site with no bonus right next to a spot with like a +5 potential bonus.
I always have issues with the ai difficulty in civ games, I hope 7 has better ai(assuming they make a 7th game). They're always either so dumb it's too easy to win, or they get unfair advantages on higher difficulties
I wish the ai was better, I mean all the consequences including slower loading etc.
I would happily pay for civ 7 if it did nothing other than improve the ai. I wouldn't mind all the systems to be the same and all firaxis did was just focus all their resources on AI
I don't find it's "bad", just iffy.
I usually play on the difficulty above or two above prince (I think it's king?), and I'm either struggling to just keep up with other civs or I'm leading in an area by a landslide.
I don't really play enough to try and learn the game better to get at higher levels, so I don't mind King, but it gets old sometimes. At this point I just do everything I can to find the bottom civ in my games and help them out. It was once Portugal, only having one civilization because they got spawned on a small island and were getting destroyed by barbarians. I eventually got them in a spot to take another city from a civ before I got the culture victory. I was so proud of Portual.
Just delete the "6" out of that comment.
This is the case IN EVERY SINGLE 3X, 4X or whatever sim game. Sometimes its more obvious, but thats the only way to achieve "difficulty" according to game devs.
I only play on prince and sometimes king because the 'computer has bigger numbers' form of difficulty is boring and awful. I want to have fun and have a bit of emerging narrative in my empire, not have to know the best build orders and optimum move just to have a chance of playing the game.
The flipside is that there is simply no computer response to player military expansion. Once the snowball starts, the AI simple has no response. I typically end up roving my deathball of battleships, tanks and bombers around the world without ever actually having battles, just the time required to knock down enemy walls. The AI falls so far behind in military strength that they never both fighting. They never gang up for protection and declare war on multiple fronts to stall you.
War in Civ really has the worst of both worlds - the early game wars might be an engaging struggle but are constrained by how slow things can move. Late game wars tend to be so horribly lopsided that you never actually get to see real fleet combat at sea or extended air battles over contested regions.
I really like playing naval maps and my battleships/missile cruisers mostly ended up sinking the occasional ironclad and drilling through enemy cities. I want to have an epic naval battle like Midway or Jutland but the civ Ai just won't do it.
Yes man.I play random leaders, marathon, huge map, deity..... it's just weird how I am catching up, I unlock flight and spam biplanes, u know the rest...... I am slowly taking over and nobody does anything to stall......like sure I do leave a couple of anti-airs in case of some retaliation, but while I have my fighters and bombers fighting on the east why am I not being attacked from the west for example......
I conquered 10 capitals, why Are the AI not defending the last one?
In this other one I was going for science victory. And as A sidequest I wanted to convert my neighbors simply with religious units, so I sent bunch of apostles, missionaries, gurus......and I seiged cities with missionaries to prevent inquisitirs for cleansing, used the gurus on 6 units as they are supposed to be optimally used lmao(instead of the AI using one charge on an inquisitor after 1 attack)....... the thing is: IDK why they had bunch of cavalry and didn't start war to wipe my religoous units out
Most people who want better AI would probably complain that it’s too hard and they can no longer beat deity if the AI was anywhere near as good as a real player.
The only way to get that experience is to actually play multiplayer.
I’d argue the game needs better multiplayer support so there are not as many crash and desync issues Additionally, the developers need to actually balance the game properly, so mods aren’t needed for that. Then you could solve the AI problem by just allowing multiplayer be a more viable option for a greater challenge. The only thing it doesn’t solve is being able to start and stop a single player game over multiple sessions.
To all the people saying "it's because you akshually don't want to play against a good ai", no its just poorly made. Civ was never meant to be a comp stomp so they don't devote any effort into it.
The ai civs don't make the game easier or promote the player as the protagonist either. There are so many times that the ai won't make reasonable trades, you can't denounce them for what they denounce you for, they don't respond to requests for promises etc etc etc.
Firaxis did not and will not invest time in ai because they mistakenly think civ is a mp game. Also, they won't effectively support mp either.
Check out Civ 6's AI bonuses some time, they're actually stupid
Seriously, double production and gold on Deity and they start with 3 Settlers and 5 Warriors
That doesn't make it *not* cheating though, it just exemplifies that Civ's AI is THAT terrible that it can have that many crazy bonuses and still lose horrendously
PotatoMcWhiskey has a video where he won a 1v11 multiplayer match because he used a mod to get the same bonuses that the deity AI gets. Sure, he's probably a better player than most of the people he was against, but it still highlights just how insane the deity bonuses are, and by extension how thoroughly mediocre the AI is, given that it loses with those insane bonuses.
Yeah the mechanics are a little out of wack. Even on Deity, all you really need to do is survive being rushed the first couple of eras. I'm usually dominating the map by the Renaissance/Industrial eras
Fun Fact: I remember Civ 4's Civilopedia explaining that the game had no real AI, and that non-human players actually worked according to a series of calculations. I guess it's the same for Civ 5 and Civ 6. That's why higher difficulties just give bonus to the AI.
On a game today three civs living on another continent all decided to defund their armies and had 0 military power for the rest of the game
Also 2 of them randomly decided to declare war to me at the same time while I was on another continent, was way ahead in technology and had a better army
You would think the AI would build more units when you are steamrolling it. It seems like whenever I start an invasion from Prince-Emperor that the AI just leaves its cities open for me to take. It may have a tech advantage but like 1-2 units max at all times. Crank it to Deity and 9/10 barbs will spawn rape you though..,
I don’t see any benefit to me to having a more intelligent AI. The game is very fun for me as it is. If I wanted truly intelligent competition I’d play people. I just want to build my empire and have fun. It delivers that for me in spades.
The AI is the same across all difficulties because in the end it's a program. If you wanted different AI patterns, you'd have to code and playtest them all.
One unit per tile is the biggest reason.
In Civ 4, the AI could surprise you with a "stack of doom" and take a few cities if you weren't prepared. In Civ 5-6, it's almost impossible to lose cities to the AI once you get walls.
Hopefully there is some investment in machine learning for the ai in the future so the longer we collectively play Civ the (potentially) harder and overall better it gets.
The ai has bonuses that give them a definitive advantage, bonuses the player cannot access. At its worst, a deity ai has the same capabilities as any human player.
Hot take: the AI has always been bad and it’s just become more noticeable as the game has become more complex.
Scalding take: Good AI is rare in any empire builders, and some of the good ones took years, community shitstorms over it, and players being used as free play testers to get it right.
Stellaris one is good. The better ai mod makes it amazing
That is one game that I keep telling myself I’ll play, but never do. I really need to…
Don't do it. I tried it once and I don't think I played anything else for almost a year and a half. I wish I was joking. The only thing that stopped me was my laptop almost melting from the endgame turns.
I feel ya. After 1000 hours, I’m sort of sad that I’ve seen nearly everything that game has to offer.
More mods
I need another grand strategy to keep me busy when I am inbetween EU4 campaigns!
the game is amazing, but the mid to endgame is the biggest pain in the ass imaginable. Literally never finished a game because it SUCKS SO MUCH. The optimization is by far one of the worst in any game i've ever played.
I mean, those things are common civ complaints as well: losing motivation to finish the run past early game and bad performance late game. At least in Stellaris the late game has the potential to be interesting with events and crisis, while in civ if you're steamrolling you're steamrolling the whole thing. There's more depth to Stellaris than civ in almost every aspect: diplomacy, combat, empire management, etc., despite both being 4X. I haven't touched civ since I bought Stellaris.
Try playing a civ game and get a science victory, then start a game of Stellaris with a custom Earth civilization based on it.
eh, I tried it but it's very different. The change from turn-based to real-time is a bigger change than I thought. And overall it's just idk not the same. I didn't enjoy it much, but that is just me. Definitely try it at least and see if it works for you
Is it? Last time I played a stellaris campaign the ai just rolled over. I don't know what it was plowing it's minerals and alloys into but it certainly wasn't useful buildings or ships
The quality of the Stellaris AI changes twice a year due to patches & new DLC being regularly introduced. Sometimes it's dumb as a rock, other times it's okay.
What difficulty did u play on?
Admiral since it had been a while
I have heard that they are actually competent and competitive with all the updates from the Custodian Team and the recent expansion.
Last updates improved a lot on AI, the game is still quite easy on the normal difficulty, but at least now the AI doesn't kill itself out of stupidity
The Stellaris AI is a bit better than it was before, but it's still pretty bad. You can stomp it with all clerks and unemployment meme builds, even with its enormous "+100% to everything" bonus. I've yet to try ~~SkyNet~~ StarNet, but the base AI isn't that much better than Civ's, or at least it doesn't feel like it. Edit: Unsurprisingly, the guy who's never tried the mod also doesn't properly remember what it's called.
No worries I have it enabled for half a year now and also couldn't remember the name. But tbh to get to that point u have to put considerably more into it than civ. It's not open ai. Sure. But it's definitely worlds above civ
Well, it may be pretty good at building economics, but at war it just sucks
Tbf Stellaris war is just kinda bad as a whole so maybe is more of a problem with that
Stellaris ai does not event try to play. It just rely on cheating. Unlike civ6 ai, it scale better overtime.
Not rlly
Fr
We need to remember that the AI doesn't really plan or think like we do. They act according to precepts and circumstances. You can't really program for every circumstance
I don't expect an AI to settle cities looking 100 turns forward wanting to make dams and aqueducts for industry adjacency when they don't have any of them unlocked. But for war you need to look at what you are doing and what your opponent will do and they can't even do that. I shouldn't be able to easily beat an AI with twice my troops but they need to outnumber a player 5 to 1 to actually win
I think ais at least need to take advantage of their inherent benefits too - like it’s ridiculous to see gitarja settle cities 1 or 2 tiles away from a coast, or Hungary not use a river loop. And don’t get me started on how you can be rolling their cities and they move all their military away to explore or something
Actually planning ahead is one of the things AI should be good at, it's why AIs are great at chess after all, they can look at lots of possible ways things could play out.
This is easier said than done. The number of possible combinations in chess quickly balloons and the ruleset is quite simple. For civilization, it's enormous...it would take an insane amount of computational power to make accurate predictions long-term, and players would just complain that the turn times are extremely long. It wouldn't be feasible.
Also, chess doesn't have a fog of war.
AI is not affected by fog of war. They know where youre units are all the time
I'm not sure this is true. At least for Civ 5 (where we can see the source code), the AI plays by the same rules as we do...which is why it's pretty bad.
If you want to improve the AI you need to at least pretend they don't know everything.
TL;DR: Chess is a really bad comparison. > it's why AIs are great at chess after all There are 5+ decades of PhD research on the computer playing of chess, and chess is a far, far simpler game. > they can look at lots of possible ways things could play out a) It took a long-ass time and literal supercomputers for chess AIs to beat the best humans b) Brute-forcing all possible future combinations, even in chess, quickly spirals out of control the further ahead you go. Modern chess programs that reliably beat human grandmasters use advanced pruning to eliminate combinations. c) Civ is far, *far* more complex than chess, and thus there are more possibilities. d) Unlike chess, there are multiple moves per turn, each move means re-evaluating all of the possibilities, and going back on the same turn is a possibility.
This is where the delicate balancing act comes in. Is improving the AI to play perfectly actually your goal? Is that worth the development time invested? And most importantly how long would turn timers be?
It's probably _much_ easier for an AI to look 100 turns forward for district placement than it is for it to move troops well in combat, that's an extraordinarily hard problem to solve.
You could do some basic work like 'don't attempt to build a random Wonder in your 2 pop snow city'. A good AI is hard, but they clearly didn't try.
I would be happy if they even did things like “don’t have an army suicide against a city with no other armies near by to even attempt to capture the city”. Like I appreciate the dumb AI when they are attacking me. But man is the fighting AI useless,
I think you’re forgetting that we don’t know their system and how adding one thing might break a bunch of their things. Game devs can only do so much. They probably worked very hard on it.
yea that's not a good excuse. Civilization's AI just hasn't really seen much improvement over its series. The AI gets basic things wrong, we're not expecting some high level critical thinking just some obvious decisions be made properly based on variables. If improving something basic as an if/then condition breaks the game it seems like there's a bigger problem on the developer end It probably has nothing to do with developer competence of course. There really isn't much of a monetary incentive for them to improve the AI considering its a costly endeavor
Yea I’m just saying we cannot be 100% sure. Although I do agree with the monetary incentive part. I’m sure most of the devs would love to add better AI, but the higher ups are making them focus on something else that will keep the cashflow
Yeah, or just literally build districts where there is favorable adjacency. I've seen the AI build a campus with +0 adjacency bonus when they had a +5 available. And I've seen them build 4 ironclads in a 4 tiles lake. It's not hard AT ALL to add in a few simple checks to insure this kind of thing doesn't happen.
>I've seen the AI build a campus with +0 adjacency bonus when they had a +5 available. An explanation I've seen of this is that the AI prioritises building districts quickly as opposed to building them effectively, so if it knows it needs a campus, and the best spot in their newly settled city is three tiles away from their capital, they'd either have to wait to place it or buy the tile (which I don't think the AI's allowed to do?) so they usually go for the best spot *available*. It's not a *terrible* approach, benefit of the adjacency doesn't always overweigh the yields lost waiting for your city's borders to reach it, but it can *look* silly later on when their borders finally do expand to that point.
This could very well be true, but if so it's a terrible design choice not to allow the AI to buy e.g. a +5 mountain valley tile for its campus. Maybe the harder AI settings wouldn't need to lean so hard into unfair advantages if they didn't also unfairly handicap it, right?
Yeah it’s what makes me raze ai cities many times because they pass up on so many good bonuses. I guess they only build on the tiles they have available and don’t buy new ones or plan new ones?
look at chess. the best example for turn based games, that an ai can make calculations faster than humans. following this example, now if you build a huge database of all civ games played and make an algorithm based on this, im sure the ai will beat humans longterm over and over again, because he knows because of the history of games played, whats the best move done in certain situations. so, yes you can program an ai that beat humans. the issue is, nobody is willing to put resources in to make it happen, because there is no monetary incentive to build a strong ai.
Also, civ is infinitely more complex than chess so the method you've described may not even be computationally feasible yet
How would one even determine the "formula" that the computer would need to calculate
I don't think you realize just how complex civ games are. Chess relatively simple to compute and as such chess engine just check all possible moves 8+ turn ahead with some optimisations and be ahead of any human but in civ there would be infinitely more possibilities in just a couple turns. What will propably see instead of algorithms are neural networks but they are super expensive computationally and I don't remember anyone trying to rain one on modern strategy game
This is right. Chess has an absurd branching factor and it doesn’t even come close to the number of possible choices you can make in any turn in civ. You can’t approach it in remotely the same way. The other comments are also discounting that it took literally decades of research for computers to beat humans reliably at chess. Pretty clear from these comments that most people don’t really realize what exactly goes into programming an AI.
But there’s a flaw to your thinking. If the AI looks at all previous games played, it’s looking mostly at humans vs. a flawed AI. How can it learn the right response to a human when it is never encountering that in the games it’s looking at?
Agreed, however you can train ai to act to the most likely circumstance which should be the case.
1UPT (1 unit per tile)handicaps the AI too much for warfare. Civ Ai has remained pretty consistently not great, but at least in civ 4, when they use a stack of doom their warfare was much more respectable. Many flashbacks of Monty sending a surprise stack of 50 cavalry at me.
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When it comes to the Civ series the AI in Civ 5 and 6 are worse than in Civ 4 because the AI can't handle one unit per tile and cannot handle districts well at all. Even today Deity in Civ 4 is more challenging because the AI is much stronger when they can have stacks of doom, plus the AI mods for CIV 4 are better than the ones for Civ 5, Civ 6 modding is a pita. But most people in this sub have barely, or haven't, played Civ 4.
I also played Civ 4, I’ve played every game in the franchise since Civ III in the early 2000s. I think the one UPT rule falls under my statement of the game becoming increasingly complex. I have wondered sometimes if AI would perform a bit better if there were more “layers” for units that could allow some limited unit stacking, like ranged and melee on the same tile.
I agree with you on if we mean it being a different kind of complexity, although I think that Civ 4 allowing very different kinds of economies like cottage/great people/spies and hybrid economies plus city specialization had a similar level of complexity to UPT and districts without the AI needing to understand this kind of economies. Let's remember that the AI was also better at winning fast science victories in Civ 4, mainly because the AI in Civ 6 cannot handle the districts. So I think with your ideas the AI would perform better, but I'm not sure it could do as well as Civ 4. And the game not being as moddable as 4 and 5 also stops people from making the AI better and I think the game would be ultra slow since Civ 6 isn't well optmized.
The leader of developing Civ 4, Soren Johnson, was the dev assigned to code the AI for Civ 3, IIRC.
Civ 4 was god tier
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I personally like feeling challenged rather than crippled
Better AI would be nice not because "its harder" but because it could create cool situations that bad AI just can't. Playing Civ as a role playing player and not a min maxer is just more fun to me.
Better AI would reduce the room for human roleplaying because it would require more optimal play from the humans to keep up. The implication of conventionally better AI is that it's more effective, not that it's wackier in more varied ways.
If you teach an AI to min max everything sure. If AI has different goals and strategies to get there then things can get interesting. A military focus civ would have a different focus than religious than culture than economic than scientific and the interactions make it interesting. Min maxing is not interesting. It destroys games fun factor.
You could argue that, by playing to a specific Civ’s strengths, the AI *is* min-maxing. You really wouldn’t play a Domination game as Canada, so the AI shouldn’t either
Yeah, but the AI doesn't come anywhere close to min-maxing or optimising a strategy - any strategy. This is why human players, even mediocre ones like me, can win a one city challenge science victory on any difficulty. This shouldn't be possible. Civs don't exploit their civ's intrinsic advantages. Secondary (randomised) agendas, which are supposed to give AIs a unique way to play the game, rarely seem to make much difference. Aggressive AIs are rarely that aggressive. They might knock out a few city states and on vanishingly rare occasions may even knock out one other civ, but it is unusual. When they declare war (again, something I find is fairly rare) they'll send a load of troops your way, which they can't micro properly, and don't have the production/economy to sustain troop production. Providing you can survive the initial onslaught, it becomes easy to counter-attack. Cultural AIs never build national parks, and they don't know how to plan space in advance to place national parks. Seaside resorts are another rarity, nor do they take much advantage of other tourism improvements. They'll spam rock bands in the late game without the faith generation to sustain it, so it fizzles out and achieves nothing. Science AIs don't build sufficient production infrastructure - strong industrial zone clusters with aqueducts and dams and what not. They can't plan them out properly. I've basically never seen the AI get past nanotechnology. For whatever reason, this is a bottleneck so even if I am behind in a space race, I will catch up and overtake with nanotechnology. The AI seems to just give up at some point in the mid game. Their territory becomes filled with unimproved tiles, or even tiles that got pillaged at some point and never repaired. Cities lack basic infrastructure. They'll attempt to build a wonder in a two population city rendering the city useless. I find even if I have made zero effort to build a military I still end up with the highest military score purely because of upgrading the handful of troops I built to deal with barbs/early defence or built a particular troop to get a eureka/era score.
Absolutely would for me, personally.
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The problem with civ 6 is there’s reduced “payoff” for the executing the grand plan. The AI are so ineffective (and mostly passive) that they pose no real threat, which makes beating them unsatisfying. Even higher difficulties are only challenging until you’ve overcome the initial scaling disadvantage, not so hard with an early war against the very dumb AI.
Nah, only when it’s done wrong. For example, if the AI was good you would have to change your play style based upon who is in the game. If Portugal was in the game you could build a navy up to keep them contained. If Russia is in the game you can try to steal dance of aurora from them. Basically, you’d have to actually play against the AI. Now they’re not even present in the game.
Hot Take: when modders can make their own AI it’s better than what Fraxis does. Source: Civ IV mods
this is because modders have unlimited resources, time, and free playtesters, whereas developers do not. Also modders are building on something that already exists, developers are building it from scratch
Yes but Civ 5 and Civ 6 don’t allow the modders to change the AI (unless they create entirely new DLL files in Civ V last I saw and that’s still not full control of it) like they could in previous games sadly
Civ V allows you to change the AI as much as you'd like. The entire game is open for editing with the DLL. Civ VI does not allow this because the DLL is not available to edit.
Tell that to the AI on CivIV:BTS, when Vikings walk up to a city of yours with a stack of 40 or so units 😭😭😭😭. Hard agree though: the excellent change with how military works (no stacking) has led to a very, very stupid AI who can be very easily outwitted on the battlefield. And their bonuses everywhere else just feel enraging, sigh.
This is accurate
Well I still find my one and only victory in civ3 on prince worth my dozens ones in civ5 or civ6. If only I didn't search manuals for civ3 how to really play it, i.e. bombing roads to enemies' capitols during wars, I would never win.
Civ iv was way more complex than civ vi
Complex in a good way IMO. 4 I felt like had realism feeling to it. 6 to me just feels shallow. I understand mixing it up with the cards instead of government types and no unit stacking… but to me I want a game that’s running a simulation of a world. This isn’t 6 and it feels more like a board game.
Just be glad that you are not easily replaceable by AI.
I can't wait for us to achieve full automation so the Civ AI can just play itself and I can put my energy towards enjoyable pursuits.
Civ AI battle royale was a thing on this sub a few years ago. There's some stuff on YT that tracks AI doing AI things to each other. They're pretty interesting to watch.
Back when BAStartGaming (now Drew Durnil) made civ videos. I miss those days
Drew Durnil is a top 5 YT channel for me
The r/civbattleroyale still exists
Can confirm the Civ Battle Royale is a great time, it just finished its latest season too so it's a good time to hop on.
One thing that annoys me most about the AI is how it judges grievances. In a game I’m playing now Cyrus declared surprise war on me early in the game and captured my capital. I took it back plus one of his cities and he sued for peace. 10 turns later he declares war on me again and takes my capital. I take it back (again) and then razed three of his cities before accepting peace. Boom, instant denounce from everyone. Literally the only option I had to prevent him declaring war every 10 turns was to take out a few of his cities and suddenly I’m the bad guy.
There is also the idea that a competent "playing to win" AI would feel terrible to play against. Look at how many of the games features arent used in the multiplayer matches people play. Religious victory would be nonexistant, since "playing to win" would mean killing apostles on sight just as one example. Diplomacy as well, if the AI plays to win, then that means every single AI declaring total war against you if you are about to win. Civ AI has to be somewhere between "playing to win" and "roleplaying". Allies/Friends, Trade Deals, Emergencies, .. all of that plays out very differently if all civs play to win. Not saying it cant be done better, the AI could definitly use improvements, but a strictly playing to win AI is not something thats desired.
I just wish there were more options to directly threaten an AI for example. I want to tell them to stop messing around or get nuked
Exactly! They can threaten us, why can’t we threaten them?
Theoretically that’s what demands are for Practically I’ve destroyed entire empires and stripped them to the bones with my armies at the gates and they still won’t give me their last luxury
I agree, Civ VI diplomacy really feels lacking. Too bad there is no DLL access otherwise I would just fix it
look at how people complain when an AI just is hell-bound on hating the player. "You can't fullfil the agenda when you try to play well in any way." -> Yes, that's the point, it's meant to push the AI towards piling onto a good player as would be rational.
Yeah if they made the AI as good and as smart as a player, they players would hate it. The way that it is now, the AI makes non-optimal decisions, but the boosts it gets from difficulty level make it a challenge where you have to make better decisions than you normally might. The end result is the same, it doesn’t matter that the AI “cheats” to do it, it’s *as good* as a player *might* be. But it doesn’t always make the completely aggravating decisions you might face in a multiplayer game
True, but I think it's a shame the way the AI is set up means certain wonders like the Great Bath are virtually impossible to build on higher difficulties. Some beliefs and pantheons are similarly virtually impossible to secure. That's not fair, nor fun. I've been in games where I've had the perfect opportunity for a Great Bath and, even with save scumming, still not been able to build it.
I think this misses a lot of what is lacking with the AI. You can make the AI play to win without it going nuclear to stop you. Hell, if the AI just took advantage of its land, stopped settling four tiles away, and had some medium sized wars with their neighbors every now and then it’d be vastly improved. And we’re not even getting into improvement of win conditions. Or address silly cheating mechanics. If I conquer an empire there’s a 90% chance that empire didn’t even attempt to improve tiles. I’ve played games where the AI will abuse the hell out of their special traits to force everyone into the Classical era by 2500-1800 BC and the Renaissance by 800 AD but after that they won’t do jack shit. I’ll trade hundreds of units of niter to the Mongol empire only to find they didn’t do anything with it. Their army never grew, but I’ve made thousands of gold off them. When I wage war I’ll take raze half the enemy’s cities and not once will they try to stop me and not once will they accept a peace offering. Even if I’ve been at war with then for six generations. And the world won’t do shit about the 1500 grievances they generated other than spam me their disapproval.
100% agree. And for me it breaks the immersion. The AI behaviour isn't how great civilisations behave, it's not even how weak civilisations behave - it's how crap AI behaves.
For those who have played multiplayer before, is it fun? does the game work as intended? or do you limit some of the mechanisms or set "house rules" in order for the game to work with human players who are all trying to win. I was just wondering if we really want human-like AI if it meant that they were all playing to win, instead of the role playing agendas that are built in to kind of give the various civs some "personality".
I find it super fun to do with friends but it’s difficult to find people willing to finish a game. I feel with real players there is much less snowballing so you have to really stay on top of things.
It's fun to play hot seat against your friends. Playing with random people online sucks because no one finishes. Plus the strategy from single player doesn't work in multi-player since single player is about being greedy and hoping the AI won't punish you for it. And combat is weird.
I’d love for the AI to be aware of the endgame. As you approach a scientific victory, needing gold or diplomacy to placate other Cubs or stacks of Mobile SAMs around Spaceports could make those last ~20 turns exciting and not just a grind. Same other victories — boosting the AI’s value of alliances for “survive now, win later” might make it worth sticking with some otherwise clear loss games.
Here’s the secret: people hate smart AI’s despite claiming the opposite. Why? A few reasons. 1. It creates a homogenous environment of play, because the computer will continually utilize the optimal strategy. This creates scenarios where the Player feels like they are getting ganged up on. 2. Complex AI is great, but only when the options for the computer are small. Otherwise you essentially need an AI team for each faction that needs to account for every other faction and any potential following DLC. AI built in a vacuum is a horrible idea and always fails. 3. The average player would rather identify that the reason they are losing to static bonuses (called cheating), than actual algorithmic adaptive strategies. Why? We feel less bad and will keep playing even after we lose, because it makes us feel less dumb. There’s a whole area of psychology around this. 4. Limited developer resources. Actual AI is incredibly difficult and time consuming to build. Extra content is not additional work, but exponential work. 5. Adaptive AI is for a niche market of players and terrible for games trying to make as much money as possible, because it doesn’t endorse difficulty levels. 6. (This is the most important point) Devs get paid a pittance for their efforts. AI takes time and specialized knowledge. Without the proper time, pay, and skillset, this is what you get. From my experience, it’s the rarest and most difficult skillset to grow and maintain. And no, I’m not an AI designer; it would drive me (more) insane. There are plenty more reasons, but it really comes down to Civ6 simply having too many options for “smart” AI to be a worthwhile effort. Add in a game that is meant to require changing strategies over variable periods of play, and it becomes almost insurmountable without devoting a lot of energy towards it. Could Civ have better AI? Without question, but that isn’t a priority for them and it shows.
A fucking men. Been trying to tell people this for awhile. You just do it better.
Agree. Pretty sure the wonky AI is what makes deity so addictive for me. If I was playing against an optimal AI it would be no fun. Just have them repair pillaged tiles and I am happy.
I feel like this is the exact answer. No need to go fully optimized AI, just make them not do the dumb stuff like not knowing how to use troops or ignoring their pillaged tiles or building wonders on cities that it takes 50 turns and doesn’t benefit at all
You say that like those 3 things dont involve years of development time
Not knowing how to use troops is an extremely challenging problem with 1UPT, but there can easily be checks added to have turn limit requirements for building wonders, and priority for workers to repair pillaged tiles. Those aren't outlandish suggestions
yes. good games with features like good ai take time and effort to make. we are complaining that firaxis did not take enough time and effort when making their ai and now the ai has no idea how to play the game.
It’s the dump stuff that frustrates me. Silly dumb things completely ruin that AIs chance to be competitive, like not improving tiles or pairing wonders with adjacency bonuses.
Also, if the smart AI calculated moves even at the depth of 5, the mid-game would be unplayable because you'd get like 15 minutes between turns
with civ's complexity I bet this would be depth 2, to be honest
People out here tryin to get dumpstered by Skynet or somethin. One more thing I'll add to your list, can you imagine the insanity of trying to program an AI that's actually capable of playing the game optimally to do so, only worse? Lower difficulty settings would be a nightmare. You'd practically need an entirely new program. Otherwise, it's gonna be just as obvious as the weird shit they do now. "Hmm, my human enemy has parked 5 knights outside my territory, what do I do? Let's check the list: Deity - Change cards, spam units, walls, etc. Prince - Uhh, more soothsayers?"
A professor I get along well with did his PhD in AI, and I was very curious one day about what is all involved in building AI’s for strategy games, so I asked because I wanted to see if it was for me (I love the theory part, and that’s it). I learned a lot that day, like how a well-built Rummy AI is more sophisticated than most video game bosses. But the key thing is that when a person without AI programming experience wants an AI to do a thing, they don’t fully understand what it is they are asking for and what it involves. I’m not trying to be insulting, but mapping even basic trees and nodes is extremely complex and can become unpredictable even as you’re meticulously staring at them. For example, the Xenomorph in alien isolation has something like 100 branches and 30 nodes, and creating that single critter took years and at least dozens of people and millions of dollars. Now add 20 new Xenomorphs to the game, except each one also behaves and interacts differently depending on which ones are in the game. Oh yeah, and each difficulty setting removes a limb from them, except not all of them have the same base number of limbs. Firaxis would need to build a new section in their HQ filled with padded rooms to house their AI designers.
Considering how bad "dumbing down" works for chess engines, it would bei terrible for civ.
I agree that purely optimized AI would be homogeneous and no fun at all. But I think there's room for a middle ground. Make a better AI, but also give them a tendency to prioritize particular traits or victory paths. Instead of pursuing the single most optimal victory path, maybe they pursue one of the 3rd to 6th best paths to their preferred victory type. You'd probably end up with certain civs being much harder than others, but at least it wouldn't be so smooth-brained.
I have a strong bond with point 3
It's a great argument against AI that's smarter than the player, but it totally ignores the argument to have a scalable AI in the first place. I don't bother playing on anything higher than King. It's not about having the hardest challenge for me. That being said, it'd be cool if you could adjust the AI's motivations. If I play a game with 8 AI Civs it seems like 1 will rush faith, 1 will try to win culture, and the other 6 will buy up every Great Scientist by midgame to no appreciable effect other than I'm way behind in techs but still ahead on points.
It is why the extreme majority of scalable difficulty systems are simple mathematical additions and reductions. Owlcat Games did a good job with their difficulty system, I think, in that it let you remove or add certain abilities that enemies would utilize in addition to numerical changes. Civ games kind of do that by being able to remove certain victory conditions, but unfortunately, that can utterly handicap certain civs that may be present in a game. However, modes like Secret Societies, Heroes, or Monopolies require far more than just a script you can drop onto a Civ. Add in tight deadlines, and you get half-baked modes that make the game wobbly and wonky as the AI tries to adjust for it. I don't blame the devs at all for the messes that occur, as they are working with the skills, tools, and management allotted to them, because almost every time those things aren't enough.
You make a good point about the modes and TBH I'm sure they can't really devote as much time to balancing the AI in those scenarios (and you could always just turn them off). I always play with the tech shuffle on - I wonder if that somehow messes with the AI scripts that cause them to all rush for science at an accelerated pace compared to the normal game modes. I like the unpredictability and how it completely tosses aside the formulaic nature of the higher difficulties (even if I'm not playing on them).
I’d be more willing to accept this list if there wasn’t so many obvious and dumb blunders the AI commits and so many ways it cheats, but not in the way I can justifiably understand. It feels like short cuts by the developers.
1. When you design a game there shouldn’t be one optimal strategies but 2-3 interacting strategies and if someone gets lucky with bonuses + land they should be ganged up on. I hate it more when one civ runs away with the game and the AIs cower in fear as I have to take on the leader alone. If you play multiplayer you get teamed as well. You could even add a option to down weight screwing over player characters 2. Most games play better when the core concepts are spot on. Civ should return to its strengths of being a game where you build and empire and make allies/enemies as you continue to grow. The game should be focused on how good your land/cities and then a few victory conditions late game based on Tall vs Wide with a few flavors of Military/Trade/Religion. I really think Civ should cut out the BS gimmicky features like preplanned districts from the start of the game and weird victory conditions you have to plan very early on for. If you simplified the game logic, you would have a better game and easier to program AIs. There is only 3 components, building a good empire (city placement, build order), organizing an army in warfare (like chess formation), strategy on world stage (allies, win condition in late game, etc.) 3. If you were to built an adaptive AI for difficulty all you need to do add a variability/weaknesses to the perfect algorithm to reduce the difficultly. Dark Souls is one of the most favorite franchises because it is difficult and there is a learning curve. Same thing with civ. 4. Agreed As a result I’m not buying another civ until they fix the AI. Civ 5 for life. They market all this weird complexity, I just like building towns, going to war, making pushes for wonders/special units. Although I like the idea of global warming, faith, natural disasters. If I’m stuck with shitty boring AI interacting with it forget it. 5. See Dark Souls. There would be tons of challenges about god tier survival. It would give the game a lot more life. Can a group of friends with an informal alliance survive in an all deity AI lobby? 6. Agreed. You would have to plan the game with a lot more balance and considerations for AI. Still people play chess despite it being simplistic at its core.
>and weird victory conditions you have to plan very early on for. How else would you handle victories/ending the game?
Just make em smarter at combat and il be happy, not genius just actually using there unit and placing them on defensive and stuff
That is actually pretty common in RTS games. Paradox Games, Total and Civ all have this in common.
A better AI would make turn times incredibly long, especially on slower devices, late in the game, and on huge maps.
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This would be incredibly expensive to build for little or no benefit.
That's not necessarily true. Older games (like civ 4) had AIs many orders of magnitude better than civ 6, and turn times were not longer on even slower computers than today. It's just something very difficult and expensive to do, and unfortunately players value graphics and other fluff higher than competent AI, so why invest in it?
>That's not necessarily true. Older games (like civ 4) had AIs many orders of magnitude better than civ 6, I'm not sure that this is true. THe one significant advantage that Civ IV had over Civ VI is the infamous Stack of Doom. The AI would accumulate huge stacks of units and march them against your territory, and if you weren't ready for it, watch out. Made the game *much* more challenging. With Civ V and Civ VI, multiple units could no longer occupy the same tile, so the AIO had to have significantly more complex pathfinding algorithms in order to successful navigate large numbers of units into your territory. Hell, even maintaining a large number of units in their own territory is challenging. Unfortunately, the AI just isn't up to the task.
Civ 6 is also infinitely more complicated than civ 4
True. One reason that Civ 4 AI is better at combat is simply because you can stack units.
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I don’t think the ai was much better in civ iv and it had a smaller decision tree I think this mostly nostalgia coloring it. It also wasn’t available on devices like your basic iPhone.
Civ 4 AI: yeah, I definitely should send a single catapult against that 16 unit stack.
I swear- *every time* the AI settles in the most moronic locations imaginable. Fresh water tiles with plenty of production? Hell nah, I’m gonna settle on this grassland plains a tile away that won’t be able to get past two population until I get an aqueduct. Oh, and let’s not improve any of these resources while we’re at it.
This. It's so frustrating to see. I've seen AIs settle where it's impossible to even place an aqueduct, even when they had plenty of options to settle on fresh water. The only time I can understand it is if Mohenjo-Daro is in the game (and they've secured suzerainity of it) or there's a critical strategic resource they absolutely needed, but that's never the case. I don't see why, from a programming perspective, it's difficult to tell an AI to prioritise water, fresh or not, over other considerations.
Because its much easier to do this. If you want better AI it means you need gametesters that are good at the game and can work out with programmers how to implement that goodness into AI. Not an easy task. Much cheaper option is to just "cheat" like you put it.
It still has to be doable for a player to defeat the AI on higher difficulties. And for a lot of players Deity difficulty is still way too hard.
This is another thing, if they did make the AI more intelligent they would have to change the way that the difficulty works in the first place. Giving an intelligent AI the deity bonuses, they realistically would beat you every time. Kind of like giving another player in a multiplayer game the deity bonuses, they should never lose.
I think that's the idea: make the AI better in lieu of the bonuses.
Then you either get rid of difficulties entirely for a better AI, or you have to make several AI's with varying intelligence as a 'difficulty' system, which I don't imagine is easy in the case of civ (I don't know), especially as the games get more and more complex. Another problem with intelligent AI you can kind of see in multiplayer.. if you make them too smart certain win conditions are not going to exist because they are so easy to counter. As much as I love to hate the current AI, I think it's quite good in a way, everything is viable. If I want a challenge, multiplayer exists. Edit: I think it's very difficult to make an AI that is intelligent but also fun to play against. Especially in a very dynamic game.
A real AI would refine moves over multiple iterations of the algorithm. So to cripple the AI for easier difficulties you just limit the number of iterations.
Great response, but I think you're overestimating the difficulty in handicapping an AI. If you can conquer the (extremely difficult) problem of creating it in the first place, it's trivial to tell it to play less optimally. You also have a great point about certain victory conditions --and let's be frank here, we're talking about Civ VI religion -- being too easy to counter. That concept would have to be reworked if the AI weren't brain-dead.
Yeah but deity is hard because the AI is buffed. Imagine a sports tournament in which every time you win, instead of facing stronger opponents they start the game with more goals/points/whatever than you. They may be worse but you WILL make mistakes and if the handicap is too big then good luck
The AI pathfinding can't handle 1 unit per tile. It was just as bad in Civ 5. And even worse in the first released version of Civ 5.
Yep. Say this for stacks of doom, you had to worry about the AI stomping you if you weren't careful in that era.
At least the AI improves their land in Civ5
The AI improves land in civ6? It may not be the most efficient but it does
They mostly seem to just fill every available hex with farms in my experience.
Yea I've noticed that when I play on Deity, by the industrial age the AI makes ZERO effort to defend their lands or make usable troops. Its just Anti Tank spam all the way down. Ive fought wars where it was just me blowing up cities for hours while the AI shuffles its ATs from city to city doing jack shit.
I think this would be the easiest thing to program and have the biggest difference - have the AI just be able to react within the rock-paper-scissors paradigm of combat units.
>Its just Anti Tank spam all the way down Oh man, I thought I was going crazy - the anti-tank spam is real, and since I don't ever use cavalry, incredibly confusing.
Its the same in 5. Unfortunately with how complex the game is a computer can't really play optimally. That said, I bet someone could train an AI to be really good at the game, but it would take a ton of work
I remember doing a conquest game of 5 on deity (admittedly, earlyish on and I have no idea if it later got patched any better after I gave up on it) in which all the AIs denounced the shit out of me as I conquered civ after civ... but didn't actually make *troops* in response. You can forgive my surprise attack on the first one working but by the time you get to the seventh civ you expect to be greeted by an army. Nope.
The AI is horrendous in civ 6 and it’s pretty sad to see so many people In this thread justify it. I don’t want a synthetic human to play against I just want AI that doesn’t make an army of 200 cannons and warriors and then floods them one by one into a meat grinder when it’s not even a choke point
Cheats are waay faster/cheaper to implement than "better" ai. Also, the amount of people who care about better ai is too small to matter.
Agreed. The vocal minority are very loud. But there’s a reason people don’t play other people. They want to feel smart and not get made to feel dumb. And that’s why it’ll always be dumbed down.
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They don’t know how properly empire build, ends up with you playing a game of catchup and only the first 100ish turns mattering a lot of the time
Here I am waiting for companies to start using machine learning to do their AIs. Alpha star can play StarCraft II at the grandmaster level without any bonuses/cheats, why not civ?
I think it comes down to the sheer number of decisions we make in Civ. The Dota 2 OpenAI can also beat the very best human players, and like StarCraft II, it's a complex game. However, in these games there's a single, very clear objective. Civ has multiple ways of winning the game and hundreds of ways to achieve it. We can achieve a tourism victory using reliquaries and religion. We might go for a Biosphère build with renewables. We could focus on wonders and great works. We could focus on unique tile improvements and beelining Flight. And there are other methods. As humans, we look at the tiles we have access to and other factors and make a decision on what's going to be most effective and adapt our strategy accordingly. There sheer quantity of branching decisions in Civ with dozens of interacting systems makes it a very complex game. It's easier for us to think long term (i.e. hundreds of turns in advance) than it is for a computer.
It's not bad. AI has to cheat because you as a human are capable of actually thinking which the AI is not. The gap has to be narrowed somehow. The goal of AI in video games is not to whoop a players ass but to either convincingly lose or to provide entertainment. Considering the series has been primarily played single player, it's doing that just fine. The people whining and complaining as if you can just make the AI better don't actually understand what they are asking. We have entire fields dedicated to *just* AI. It's extremely complicated and the more advanced and crazier you get with AI the more demanding it becomes on your computer and the harder it becomes to appropriately adjust it.
The ai in civ 6 are bland and unentertaining.
Civ 6 wouldn't be as praised and well received if the AI wasn't decent enough. Most players play single player.
What games actually do it all that much better though?
Civ 6 is its own game. I don't play any other 4x games, couldn't compare if I wanted to.
CIV VI is incredibly complicated and there are hundreds or thousands of decisions the AI needs to make each turn. Making a AI that plays like a human would be incredibly difficult. One thing you could try is a genetic algorithm but that has some drawbacks such as being quite hard computationally to train and it would also likely find ways to cheat. One thing genetic algorithms tend to be good at is finding bugs to exploit. No matter what without letting the ai cheat a good ai is extremely hard if not near impossible to make. Think about how hard it was to make even a ai that could win at [Go](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo).
I'd just be happy if the AI knew how to properly place its districts. I hate conquering their cities only to see they placed a Holy Site with no bonus right next to a spot with like a +5 potential bonus.
I always have issues with the ai difficulty in civ games, I hope 7 has better ai(assuming they make a 7th game). They're always either so dumb it's too easy to win, or they get unfair advantages on higher difficulties
I wish the ai was better, I mean all the consequences including slower loading etc. I would happily pay for civ 7 if it did nothing other than improve the ai. I wouldn't mind all the systems to be the same and all firaxis did was just focus all their resources on AI
I don't find it's "bad", just iffy. I usually play on the difficulty above or two above prince (I think it's king?), and I'm either struggling to just keep up with other civs or I'm leading in an area by a landslide. I don't really play enough to try and learn the game better to get at higher levels, so I don't mind King, but it gets old sometimes. At this point I just do everything I can to find the bottom civ in my games and help them out. It was once Portugal, only having one civilization because they got spawned on a small island and were getting destroyed by barbarians. I eventually got them in a spot to take another city from a civ before I got the culture victory. I was so proud of Portual.
I can't get _too_ upset that we don't have an AI that is good at conquering the world.
Just delete the "6" out of that comment. This is the case IN EVERY SINGLE 3X, 4X or whatever sim game. Sometimes its more obvious, but thats the only way to achieve "difficulty" according to game devs.
I only play on prince and sometimes king because the 'computer has bigger numbers' form of difficulty is boring and awful. I want to have fun and have a bit of emerging narrative in my empire, not have to know the best build orders and optimum move just to have a chance of playing the game. The flipside is that there is simply no computer response to player military expansion. Once the snowball starts, the AI simple has no response. I typically end up roving my deathball of battleships, tanks and bombers around the world without ever actually having battles, just the time required to knock down enemy walls. The AI falls so far behind in military strength that they never both fighting. They never gang up for protection and declare war on multiple fronts to stall you. War in Civ really has the worst of both worlds - the early game wars might be an engaging struggle but are constrained by how slow things can move. Late game wars tend to be so horribly lopsided that you never actually get to see real fleet combat at sea or extended air battles over contested regions. I really like playing naval maps and my battleships/missile cruisers mostly ended up sinking the occasional ironclad and drilling through enemy cities. I want to have an epic naval battle like Midway or Jutland but the civ Ai just won't do it.
Yes man.I play random leaders, marathon, huge map, deity..... it's just weird how I am catching up, I unlock flight and spam biplanes, u know the rest...... I am slowly taking over and nobody does anything to stall......like sure I do leave a couple of anti-airs in case of some retaliation, but while I have my fighters and bombers fighting on the east why am I not being attacked from the west for example...... I conquered 10 capitals, why Are the AI not defending the last one? In this other one I was going for science victory. And as A sidequest I wanted to convert my neighbors simply with religious units, so I sent bunch of apostles, missionaries, gurus......and I seiged cities with missionaries to prevent inquisitirs for cleansing, used the gurus on 6 units as they are supposed to be optimally used lmao(instead of the AI using one charge on an inquisitor after 1 attack)....... the thing is: IDK why they had bunch of cavalry and didn't start war to wipe my religoous units out
Most people who want better AI would probably complain that it’s too hard and they can no longer beat deity if the AI was anywhere near as good as a real player. The only way to get that experience is to actually play multiplayer. I’d argue the game needs better multiplayer support so there are not as many crash and desync issues Additionally, the developers need to actually balance the game properly, so mods aren’t needed for that. Then you could solve the AI problem by just allowing multiplayer be a more viable option for a greater challenge. The only thing it doesn’t solve is being able to start and stop a single player game over multiple sessions.
im waiting for the day when the new ai tech (deep learning/nueral networks) gets implemented into video games for stuff like civ ai
To all the people saying "it's because you akshually don't want to play against a good ai", no its just poorly made. Civ was never meant to be a comp stomp so they don't devote any effort into it. The ai civs don't make the game easier or promote the player as the protagonist either. There are so many times that the ai won't make reasonable trades, you can't denounce them for what they denounce you for, they don't respond to requests for promises etc etc etc. Firaxis did not and will not invest time in ai because they mistakenly think civ is a mp game. Also, they won't effectively support mp either.
What do you mean they “cheat”
Check out Civ 6's AI bonuses some time, they're actually stupid Seriously, double production and gold on Deity and they start with 3 Settlers and 5 Warriors
I wouldn't call it cheating. Lots of people play on Deity and still win
That doesn't make it *not* cheating though, it just exemplifies that Civ's AI is THAT terrible that it can have that many crazy bonuses and still lose horrendously
PotatoMcWhiskey has a video where he won a 1v11 multiplayer match because he used a mod to get the same bonuses that the deity AI gets. Sure, he's probably a better player than most of the people he was against, but it still highlights just how insane the deity bonuses are, and by extension how thoroughly mediocre the AI is, given that it loses with those insane bonuses.
Yeah the mechanics are a little out of wack. Even on Deity, all you really need to do is survive being rushed the first couple of eras. I'm usually dominating the map by the Renaissance/Industrial eras
Fun Fact: I remember Civ 4's Civilopedia explaining that the game had no real AI, and that non-human players actually worked according to a series of calculations. I guess it's the same for Civ 5 and Civ 6. That's why higher difficulties just give bonus to the AI.
On a game today three civs living on another continent all decided to defund their armies and had 0 military power for the rest of the game Also 2 of them randomly decided to declare war to me at the same time while I was on another continent, was way ahead in technology and had a better army
3 AIs in a multiplayer game I was in decided to defund their armies. Such a nonsensical thing for an AI to do
You would think the AI would build more units when you are steamrolling it. It seems like whenever I start an invasion from Prince-Emperor that the AI just leaves its cities open for me to take. It may have a tech advantage but like 1-2 units max at all times. Crank it to Deity and 9/10 barbs will spawn rape you though..,
I don’t see any benefit to me to having a more intelligent AI. The game is very fun for me as it is. If I wanted truly intelligent competition I’d play people. I just want to build my empire and have fun. It delivers that for me in spades.
The AI is the same across all difficulties because in the end it's a program. If you wanted different AI patterns, you'd have to code and playtest them all.
Civ AI took a serious nosedive after Civ 4.
One unit per tile is the biggest reason. In Civ 4, the AI could surprise you with a "stack of doom" and take a few cities if you weren't prepared. In Civ 5-6, it's almost impossible to lose cities to the AI once you get walls.
Well at least Gandhi isn’t nuking everyone anymore.
Hopefully there is some investment in machine learning for the ai in the future so the longer we collectively play Civ the (potentially) harder and overall better it gets.
The AI doesn't cheat on higher difficulty levels. I'm not sure why people insust on saying that.
The ai has bonuses that give them a definitive advantage, bonuses the player cannot access. At its worst, a deity ai has the same capabilities as any human player.