And you, Sir, are worse than Hitler!

[Barchan]

Is it just me, or does the AI seem to think that the phrase "unconditional surrender" mean that *it* will not accept any conditions to *its* surrender? I can't count how many times this has happened:

Me: Give me Tech X.
AI: Never!
(I declare war, beat up a few units, pillage a few things, and generally make it very clear I can make this player my prison b!tch before the guards even know what's happening)
Me: Give me Tech X, and you can have peace.
AI: Never!
(I capture and raze a city)
Me: Ok, now give me Tech X, and you can have peace.
AI: Never!
(I capture and raze another city)
Me: I'll keep this up all day unless you give me Tech X.
AI: Never!

And so it goes until I finally have to raze their capital, storm the bunker, and eradicate their stubborn little civilization from the planet. All for some tech that, more often than not, is one of the "dead-enders" that I didn't want to research 300 years ago but would sort of like to have now.

I guess what I'm ranting at is the lack of any sort of AI strategic analysis toward self-preservation. If they're pissed at you, they won't give you anything decent, regardless of A) the threat posed to their survival and B) the relative cost of eliminating said threat. I can understand not forking over good techs at laughably weak demands, but when you're systematically crushing their forces like bugs, you'd think the AI would be a little more eager to accept whatever terms of peace were being offered up. Yeah, yeah, I know; we will fight them in the cities, and in the fields, and in the hills...we will never surrender and all that sort of stuff, but the Germans hadn't taken England and driven the government to Wales at that point. Perhaps if they had, and then only demanded Radar technology to stop the war, the speech would have been written a bit more pragmatically.

[xxFlukexx]

Nah, I think it's good AI. Up until about late Medieval you can get techs from civs that you have beaten up but after that the beaker cost is too much and they will just never give you anything.

It's more of a "Bah, we're already dead so screw you guys, you won't get our tech!" It's not real life, it's a game, if you want the AI to play like Civ is really life then you are very weird.

[Deity Dude]

Originally posted by xxFlukexx
if you want the AI to play like Civ is really life then you are very weird.

Why is that?

[Grenouille]

Perhabs it would be good to at least get some technologies when you destroy a civilization.. it`s a good think you don`t get them by conquering any city, but if you conquer the entire civ, you should get a little technology.

[Ralph_Jackson]

Of course it could also be viewed as the CIV being "non-strategic / irrational" but also perhaps being a very realistic reflection of how things would often play out in the real world; where Leaders don't make logical decisions but are guided by wounded pride to steer their nation into destruction rather than compromise.

So yes illogical and non-strategic but pretty good artificial intelligence in capturing how a human leader would react!!

Ralph

[Nacht]

Originally posted by Grenouille
Perhabs it would be good to at least get some technologies when you destroy a civilization.. it`s a good think you don`t get them by conquering any city, but if you conquer the entire civ, you should get a little technology.

That wouldn't have been good in my last game. I crushed three civs, but only conquered one of them. In the other two cases some civ, that repeatedly refused to join my war suddenly felt heroic when the crushed civ had only one or two cities left.

[couerdelion]

Is it the AI leaders that you believe lack rational thinking?

I once heard the story of someone who declare war and destroyed another civilisation simply because that other nation would not divulge some highly valuable information that it held.

That’s just plain madness!!

I believe that you weren’t, in the end, talking to their leader at all but to some stooge that he had left in place after going into hiding - with the technology that you desperately wanted – to plan on long-term guerrilla campaign on your barbaric civilisation

[Tammo]

Originally posted by Ralph_Jackson
So yes illogical and non-strategic but pretty good artificial intelligence in capturing how a human leader would react!!

I have to agree...
...if you have a look at the present politicians I would think we would probably do much better with CIV-AIs as leaders :-)

someone said, that in medieval times civs would trade techs if threatened but not in modern times... well maybe this also has todo with the goverment-form they took...
...maybe it is built-in that if a civ is having a certain govermant their leaders will start doing illogical decisions...

in my opinion - just like RL :-)

[Blake]

The situation when a leader should be most willing to comprimise with gifts/extortion is when they are in an equally strong or stronger position, especially when they have a weaker military. If nothing else, the war would be very expensive.

Small civs don't really have anything to gain by co-operating, they should however be easier to "overawe" with gifts, like if you want the only tech they have, even if they don't want to trade it, they should in exchange for a whole bunch of techs. Because an "uplift" is in their best interest.

[narmox]

similar to this, in my current Prince/Marathon game, Mali won't trade any spaceship tech with me - they're red, and the hover text reads "we'd rather win the game, thank you very much"

lol

[Arrian]

I think it just comes down to the beaker cost. Early in the game, you can get several techs for peace, if they're cheap techs. In the late-game, the techs are all thousands of beakers.

-Arrian

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by narmox
similar to this, in my current Prince/Marathon game, Mali won't trade any spaceship tech with me - they're red, and the hover text reads "we'd rather win the game, thank you very much"

lol

How selfish of them. Perhaps they should say that the technology is dangerous and still going through important safety tests first.

Somehow I can’t imagine that idle threats would work too well if you were trying to get “Nuclear Fission”. In fact, trading that ought to land you in trouble with international nuclear proliferation treaties

[LzPrst]

I have ranted against civ4 since it came. I felt it wasnt the finished product that I paid for and a few other annoyances. patch 1.52 has however fixed many of these issues, like the civilopedia and partly, some of the advisors. good going. of course they could have waited a few months and released the game patched at 1.52 and saved a lot of people a lot of annoyances and trouble, but hey... corporate ¤##%¤ are greedy little ¤##%¤ and always will be.

one thing that has NOT been fixed however is the AI relationship and basic "intelligence" issues. the AI is depressingly and disturbingly INSANE and makes decisions that are affected by quite illogical reasons.

I too would like the AI to behave like a somewhat understandable ruler considering the survival of his people\nation\himself to be of some importance. of course there are exceptions in history like hitler and saddam hussein who would rather see their countries bombed to smithereens than surrender. though those are exceptions, not the rule (although, the US were gonna invade iraq regardless of what saddam was going to do, short of suicide, and very likely, even then).

the point is. a slightly better AI could be demanded from a game that at least in some player's mind's is mainly a single player game.

That said, I advise everyone to forget that single player mode ever existed and start gathering your friends in RL and online and get MP'ing. Civ4 is IMO great fun in multiplayer, and somewhat an excercise in futility and frustration in singleplayer.

[Hauptman]

Although i agree that there could be more put into the AI, I do in fact love them. They are true personalities that you learn to love or hate. They did a wonderful job in this version.

Now on multiplayer, yes thats the most fun aspect, the head games you can play on the other players. Bribes, bluffs, show of force, appearing weak. You can do all that to a real person where as an ai cannot fall for it.

However on an offtopic note, why can i not "gift" units to human players? grrrr. Lend lease is a great way to assure i stay in the points lead without bothering to join the war dirrectly.

[gdgrimm]

Re: And you, Sir, are worse than Hitler!

I guess what I'm ranting at is the lack of any sort of AI strategic analysis toward self-preservation. If they're pissed at you, they won't give you anything decent, regardless of A) the threat posed to their survival and B) the relative cost of eliminating said threat.

While I agree that it's rather strange, allowing for it would make an easy exploit.

Declare war, take a city, demand all their techs for peace.

Fall behind in tech.

Declare war, take a city, demand all their techs for peace.

Fall behind in tech.

Etc., etc., etc.

They've set up Civ IV so that war seldom directly provides research. You have to do that yourself.