{The List} AI

[Addled Platypus]

I need to vent about "AI"

Just lost two Frigates that were built in a habor, to a Triemene

[Master Zen]

I have to start by saying that the weakest link in Civ has always been the AI. It is frankly terrible and the only reason the harder difficulty levels are hard at all are becuase of the cheats and handicaps that the AI is endowed with.

I won't even mention how bad the AI was in Civ2, but the Civ3 one wasn't particularly better. I still want to see the AI use combined arms effectively and especially, learn to do massive naval invasions instead of sending the lone transport with destroyer escort. And of course, learn to use artillery, somethign that is missing completely in Civ3.

[Nikolai]

DC: I have looked through this part of the List now, and I think it's not much more to do now. I'll make a search for "AI" now, but if I don'tr find anything more to add then, I guess it's finished for now. The AI list haven't been very active, but some ideas thankfully have come, now I only hope more activity will come before the final List.

[DarkCloud]

thank you nikolai- I'll get to work on adding this posthaste

[Addled Platypus]

Does anyone else notice if you pillage enough, the AI will stop making the same improvement?

[Nikolai]

I haven't noticed. Weird...

[DarkCloud]

From another thread:

3.9.0 Variable AI
A good way to simulate this might be to have a variable ai...so at random times for periods of 20-40 turns the ai of a civ will move up a difficulty level, and a t random times for a period of 20-40 turns the ai of a civ would go down a difficulty level. You could maybe tie this in with the first suggestion - during its golden ages the ai goes up one difficulty level and in its dark ages it goes down a difficulty level. All this would occur pretty much in the background and be fairly unnoticeable to the player (although dark/golden age notification for other civs as a popup/newspaper would be cool.)
-Comrade Raoul

[patcon]

1. The AI needs to respect borders. If I'm in their territory I get 1 "OK, I'll leave" and then it's "Leave or war!", but the AI gets 5 (or more?) chances to ignore my polite requests to leave, all the while moving deeper into my territory, until finally the auto-leave takes them all teh way across ny territory to where they were wanting to go anyway, and now they got there even faster. The Civ2 auto-leave where units got sent all the way back to the capital might help alleviate some of this abuse. (Although I will have to admit that I sometimes used that to redeploy my troops closer to home.)

2. The AI needs to recognize the value of trade networks. I have all too often had AIs with resources to trade who refuse to connect their road network to mine, even if I have gone to the trouble of building a road across tiles of open territory just to reach their borders. Then if I try to bring in workers to build a road in their territory to connect up, I am told to "get out". Also, the AI tends not to build harbors that could establish trade routes.

3. It's one thing to have an AI that cheats by knowing the whole map, but I think it is complete and utter bovine feces that the AI knows where resources will pop up, once they discover the appropriate tech. This leads to the absurdity of the AI establishing cities in tundra or desert tiles because oil will eventually show up there. Does anyone know if there is a time constraint on this, as in the AI won't go after a resource it can't use yet more than X turns before it discovers the appropriate tech?

[Nikolai]

Updated, check out in DC's thread with the word file, I chose to update directly there.