The Civ V AI

[Dinner]

Hre's a personal pet peeve. When another nation you have a friendship pack with gets attacked by a 3rd party, the friendly nation then asks you to help them out by declaring war on the 3rd party country which attacked them, you do this for them but then immediately they denounce you as a war monger! I only went to war because they asked me too and I saved their ****ing bacon yet they denounce me for it and set off a cascade of denouncements from everyone else because "a friend has denounced you".

Next, the AI is horrible at fighting wars. They'll often attack a city with just one or two units and instead of actually attacking the city they'll just mill around outside the city giving the defenders all the time they need to slowly archer the attackers to death. I also hate it when the AI marches all the way across the continent to settle right next to my capital and then tells me not to settle near them; still that's better then the AI's usual ICS with no rhyme or reason. Lastly (for this post anyway), I want an AI which actually plays broadly with in the games rules or atleast have a settings option where that happens. Letting the AI ignore happiness/unhappiness simply because the developer is too incompetent or rushing the game out is unacceptable.

[Dinner]

While we are all laughing at the screwed up diplomacy... how much different is it really than Civ IV... when your "good Buddy" and bretheren of the faith attacks you instead of the guy next door who is supposedly his worst enemy

I found most of the time in Civ4 there was a logical reason like the fact that you were way behind militarily while the other neighbor was the attacker's military equal or something.

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

i hate the stupidity of the AI at fighting. as england, i was fighting a war when to my rear area, alex declared war. this seemed like a perfect chance to recruit a CS to protect my flank. there was a 1hex choke point w/i the CS's firing zone. the CS also had 3 rifles, and 2 arts against alex's 6 rifles and 2 caravels, so i'm expecting a stalemate with the 2 arts keeping alex held back. but noooooo, the CS immediately goes on the offensive and puts its rifles in the water where the caravels and alex's cities take out all 3 w/i 2 turns. the CS does keep 1 art in their city, but the other rushes into alex's territory where it gets pounded to its final HP. so instead of the CS defending my flank, i'm forced to divert some SotL and a few rifles to hold the choke point.

the AI has no clue when to play defense, play offensive and which units are defensive, and which are front line. it also doesnt have a clue how to use concentration of forces.

its also stupid how they will sit a unit outside an empty one of their cities and let me bombard it to death.

[Boracks]

I have both Windows and Mac versions, and the latest update on the Win side definitely broke something.

30 turns in an another civ denounces me, no wars had been declared on anyone. Then on turn 33 they ask for open borders. Huh?

Next game I got to turn 52 then had four civ denounce me after I attacked a city state, including 2 I hadn't had any dealings with after meeting them the one time.

Diplomacy? We don't do that.

[Jaybe]

30 turns in an another civ denounces me, no wars had been declared on anyone. Then on turn 33 they ask for open borders. Huh?

So either (1) they needed the open borders despite hating your guts, or (2) denouncements don't mean as much as we thought they do any more. Either is a reasonable rationale.

We only THINK we know what the bleep is going on.
The real problem, of course, is that is also true of the programmers and of the design documents (assuming there are any).

[mkorin]

How about an AI that is already at war with you declaring war. I could go on forever about this subject.

[Boracks]

And then there's your two friends, invite you into two different wars, both are on your side in the second war, a CS on the other side has declared on you (of course), and as soon as you take out the CS, both your friends denounce you!

I know this denouncement stuff has been mentioned before, but its silly enough it bears repeating to emphasize that.

[Ming]

They keep changing the diplomacy, and still haven't even gotten close to doing it right. Originally, they didn't provide us much "info" on how people felt toward you, because I guess they were sick of hearing in Civ IV about how your best buddies would attack you. Now that they gave in and started giving us more info, it just shows how bad the diplomacy still is.

[Dinner]

I recently was playing civ 5 and got the message "An unknown civilization has denounced Oerdin." Oh, man, this game is screwed up!

[Arrian]

[dannubis]

Well, you have been denounced on this forum quite a lot by people who you have never met

[Dinner]

Many of the messages seemed screwed up and not just getting denounced by civs which you have never even met. I just got done playing a game of Civ5 and a nation which was already at war with me gave me another DoW messageand immediately after that (while it was still the AI's turn) another nation across the world also gave me a DoW though this one was at least a new DoW. I suspect the first nation, which was already at war with me, convinced the other AI to attack me which is all well and good but I shouldn't get a new DoW message from a nation I'm already at war with. Next because all of the AI were already at war with me, that happens at the end of every game, I decided what the hell and nukedseveral cities in AI civs; this resulted in the last two CSs in the game, which I was allied with up to that point, DoWing me. Again, no problem, they don't like people who use nukes but the weird thing was the very next turn I got a message that "several city states are still at war with Mongolia and seek help against them." Er, I was playing Mongolia so I probably shouldn't be getting messages from city states I'm at war with asking for help against me. Just more examples of how the diplomacy feature is royally screwed up in Civ5.

[theViking]

In one of my games I had just finished off England when Germany decleard war on England.

[Dinner]

I've never seen that before. I guess that would be another example of the game lacking polish because they didn't do a proper beta and rushed the game out the door.

[ElDonReal]

War with the Aztec shows some fundamental flaws

All on King difficulty. Here's me closing in on the Aztec capital after taking their 2nd city. The situation is hopeless, but through clever tactics the Aztecs could delay my advance or make it cost a unit. Of course with their stupid maneuvering they've lost it before already.

In the first picture one can see how the Aztec chief decided to move a damaged archer outside the protecting capitol so that my archers can easily take it out. The warrior is no match for my horsemen either. Clever move isn't it? IIRC the archer didn't even fire, but even if they did it's just a totally pointless move.



In the next picture you'd thought the Aztecs have learnt, but no they move another archer (their last unit) straight next to my horsemen in the successful attempt to die as quickly as possible. Moving onto the hill consumes all its movement and thus it cannot even fire a single arrow. Is there some kind of suicide mode that the AI enters at some point?



With two archers and one warrior you thought the AI could do a little better. As a human I would have won the war had the AI played my part (I'm not joking, I'm sure the AI would have lost).

Finally, after I took Tenochtitlan I explored beyond the Aztec land to quickly run into some city-states that apparently the Aztec have not yet visited (or does the gold bonus get reset if the civ first visiting them has been eliminated in the meantime).



Note: Apolyton doesn't allow me to post links or images, because I have not yet 20 posts...
Edit: Now that I have 20 posts, I readded the links