some opinions on the AI please.

[aVoided]

heya,

So i have been playing civ4 for quite some time now off game tap. (with warlords expansion). I love this game to death. I finally beat my first game on noble and moving on to the next difficulty.

A question though on the AI. Is the AI going to get a bit smarter as I move up the difficulty level? Or is it just going to be a game like the rest where thier production is just insane fast and I'll have this huge army on my door step just because of some hidden mechanic to make the game feel harder?

One reason I question the AI. Many games I have played on warlord just experimenting and learning. I find the AI never attacks each other. or rarely does. When they do it only lasts a few turns. I have even formed defensive pacts with them but they are short lived. A good example is a game I just played the Egyptians offered a Defensive Pact with me. I accepted. About 15 turns later The Spanish woman declares war on me. I go to war and the following turn Egypt honors the defense pact by war dec'ing as well. 2 Turns later Egypt makes peach with the Spanish, but the spanish wont even talk to me and I'm stuck in war alone, (not that i couldnt handle it) just the fact I felt betrayed.

Also it seems no matter how high on the friendly list I get with a nation I can never squeeze a free gift from them. Yet constantly im hounded my for my techs and resources. The few times I try to get something 100% of the time im turned away. Yet when I turn them away I'm always hated and they end up war dec'ing me down the line because they are free loaders.

I love this game.. the gameplay (though losing most combat rounds that are (50-80% in favour for you are getting annoying, seems like you MUST have 90%+ to ensure a victory.) but the lack luster ai is something to be desired. I have many other ai complaints but this is just a couple.

The AI is just so random and pure statistical its getting boring. Please tell me with higher difficulty levels the AI grows somewhat of a logical sence in its decisions and some realism or even normalism. Otherwise I feel my time remaining will be short in this game and the hopes of an improved (civ5 or something?) gameplay AI will come along.

[Jaybe]

1) Get Beyond the Sword expansion. The AI is more developed.
2) Playing BtS, turn on Aggressive AI. They will then be more aggressive based on relative strength ratings. With you AND other AI civs.

3) Get Civ4 Better AI. See post #64 (but read the thread, or perhaps even the whole FORUM).

[rjmatsleepers]

Re: some opinions on the AI please.

Originally posted by aVoided
A question though on the AI. Is the AI going to get a bit smarter as I move up the difficulty level? Or is it just going to be a game like the rest where thier production is just insane fast and I'll have this huge army on my door step just because of some hidden mechanic to make the game feel harder?

AFAIK, the AI does not get any smarter at higher levels. The AI gets bonuses and you get penalties. That's it.

RJM

[joncnunn]

It's the same AI at all dificulty levels.

Now there is a "Better AI" mod to Warlords/Vanilla you can apply to make it smarter. And most of it was incorporated into base BTS. Incidently that AI betrayer behavior is one of the things that was changed a bit by them.

But if your playing at the Warlord difficulty level, the poor AI has to spend more to research & more to build unts than the humans and consequntely has trouble building enough of a military strength lead to justify a war.

And you need 100% odds to have a 100% chance of victory.

At 60% chance of victory, you should lose 40% of the time.

[aVoided]

yeah well i cant count the number of fights ive lost with 90+ percent win odds.. oh well not really a concern just an annoyance

I dont think i could apply this mod to the game tap style of game. It's played through thier player. guess ill have to grab a copy off the shelf.

any links to this mod so i can read up on it before i do?

Also is there any plans for a newer civ ? expansion or new full version?

[Unimatrix11]

Actually in BTS the AI is quite okay. You still can beat it up with a well prepared war, and the more you do of it, the easier the game will be, but with agressive AI on, you always need to be prepared.

Diplomacy i dont enjoy doing with an AI anyways. Any AI in any game so far feels way too generic and the options of communication with it far too limited to make it feel real to me. And it will stay this way for a long time, i think, since in order for me to feel real, i´d have to be able to negotiate lines of interest, exchange of border tiles etc. with as well as just communicating general concerns (´we´d like you to remove your army from X´) and intentions to the AI. Alpha Centauri´s options seemed to go into the right direction. In short, ´talking´ to the AI should ideally feel like table talk in a board game - and it wont anytime soon. Hell, even MP on the net with strangers couldnt quite do the trick... (Maybe Next Civ´s MP-mode should feature MP-profiles, so that you could check on your opponents in game and have a face - at least i dont wanna have me being remembered as the guy who looks like the burger king in case i draw the HRE in an MP-game with strangers)

Slightly related but off topic: Did Blake do the Col-AI, or where did he go ?

[ce61agg]

Re: some opinions on the AI please.

Originally posted by aVoided

Also it seems no matter how high on the friendly list I get with a nation I can never squeeze a free gift from them. Yet constantly im hounded my for my techs and resources. The few times I try to get something 100% of the time im turned away. Yet when I turn them away I'm always hated and they end up war dec'ing me down the line because they are free loaders.

well, if you ask for something reasonable from a pleased/friendly civ, you will sometimes get it

you really have to time your requests, it takes the AI a lot of turns to "forget" your previous requests, so dont go knocking on their door every 5 turns...you could probably manage to get at least 1-2 freebies in each game

as for giving techs/gold/resources away, sometimes you might as well do it, you'll actually get a diplomatic bonus and possibly avoid war (so you can declare on them when you're ready, hohoho)

[Blaupanzer]

Once you have decided to kill them, timing is everything. So give them any non-war techs/resources they ask for as long as your attack is to be launched soon, BUT more than 10 turns from now. When they give you resources, they buy a 10-turn period of guaranteed peace, the minimum length of a trade agreement. Presumably, this works in reverse when you give them a resource.

[Willem]

Originally posted by aVoided
Also is there any plans for a newer civ ? expansion or new full version?

Although they've mentioned nothing specifically, Firaxis has strongly implied that there will be no new expansions for the game. And no announcement has yet been made for Civ 5.

[joncnunn]

I think your looking at gap in years between Civ 4 and 5 similar to the gap between Civ 2 and 3 rather than that between 3 and 4.

[Blaupanzer]

Originally posted by joncnunn
I think your looking at gap in years between Civ 4 and 5 similar to the gap between Civ 2 and 3 rather than that between 3 and 4.

That is probably true because Civ 4 doesn't contain any game-ruining problems, similar to 2. Firaxis had to replace 3 before it completely ruined its development reputation. Thus the time to Civ 4 was much compressed. Nothing like a deeply flawed flagship to ruin distributors faith in your company. Civ 4 has plenty of replayability for me!

[joncnunn]

In hind sight Civ IV vanilla initial release was a bit too compresed because most of the new notebooks at the time vanilla first came out weren't up to the graphic requirements. (Most notably not having dedicated VRAM and T&L Hardware support)

That took about the time Warlords first came out for the new hardware on notebooks to catch up.

Civ II was even easier to win than Civ III though; there were far more AI exploits in it than in Civ III.
Examples:
1. Stack-combat model of Civ II
2. AIs building forts for you to use against him
3. AIs building rails for you to use against him
4. Don't want a city nucked? Just remove all defenders and place them one tile away. (This trick also worked in SMAC)
5. Suicidal AI waited until you were too powerful to possibly defeat and then declared war on you.

[aVoided]

Well warlords has been brushed aside for me. I went a copy of Colonies. Though the AI is just as dumb there, I'm a sucker for Micromanagment :P and there is a bit more of it here.

I'm loving how you manage goods AND they can be moved between cities and your peasant population can become your army at any time, provided you have the equipment. I hope the basics of this game influence the next civ but instead of colonial period do the full time line in this manner.

but like i said the ai is no different in this one *sigh* plain dumb and purely statistical

[Thoth]

Originally posted by Unimatrix11


Slightly related but off topic: Did Blake do the Col-AI, or where did he go ?

He joined a Buddhist monastery.
See this thread for details

[Jaybe]

Thanks, Thoth. I hadn't seen that thread.