Playing Civ3:C in depth, I notice how stupid the AI is

[Node]

mostly it is during war and their decisions that bother me. This post deals with Emporer difficulty level.

I invaded a seperate continent that Sumeria resided in. This was the modern era, everyone had MA, mech inf, railroads. I took a town right in the middle of their continent. Every single damn town Gilgamesh had had two or three mech infs and a tow infantry. He made no attempt to counter-attack me, and just let me waltz through his continent until I destroyed him. I noticed in the replay when I won the game that over the course of 5,000 years he had about 9 military great leaders! Yet I have never seen an AI use an army. EVER. Why?

And in the end, the turn before I built the final piece to the space ship, I launched about 20 ICBMs to Babylon, who was twice my size and had about 10 ICBMs himself. Next turn he used ALL OF HIS NUKES ON ONE WORTHLESS TOWN! It was one of those towns in the tundra on the coast with 1 shield 1 gold due to corruption. It was the closest town to him, even though he was on another continent.

I really wish the AI wasn't so stupid and there was some superpatch that could fix it.

[steven8r]

Strategy has never been the AI's strong point.

It's possible that Gilgamesh didn't think that he had the resources to launch a counter attack and just chose (unwisely) to play defensively.

He probably didn't want to leave his towns undefended. The AI can't reason that it would be better to leave some towns undefended and possibly lose a few to save the rest.

I have played an epic C3C game where I was surrounding a last city and they would occationally send-out 1 or 2 conscript TOWInf. to attack me.

That is kinda strange, though. I've never seen an AI just completely give up and wait patiently for extinction.

Steven

[Plotinus]

What steven8r said. The AI will attack only with units it thinks of as "attacking" units, so it won't use things like Mech Inf to attack with - sensibly, under these circumstances. It's very unusual that an AI will have no attacking units ready to repulse an invasion with, and normally they always seem to have a lot more than I anticipate when planning my invasions. But if it doesn't have the units, then there's no attacking. Perhaps Gilgamesh had just come out of another war in which they were all used up?

Similarly, the AI will never leave any city with fewer than two defenders if it can help it. I don't know to what degree it can prioritise cities to move defenders from one city to another, although as I have just posted in another thread it does do this to some degree, sometimes very impressively. As steven8r says, it would be interesting if the AI could learn to leave some cities undefended, or at least defended only by one unit, as part of this strategy. But it sounds like Gilgamesh's problem here was a sheer lack of units, rather than poor strategy in using them.

[Vince278]

We need a computer like Deep Blue for chess. Or some really good programmers.

[Sarxis]

I was thinking about that too Vince. I wonder when they are going to be able to start do mass positional calculations for games like CIV?

Probably 2025.

[Vince278]

They should program one to teach itself then turn it loose. With proper safeguards of course.

[Cerbykins]

When AI is THAT intelligent, there's no longer a point in have Monarch level and above

This thread is a far cry from the tribal muppet 'I love bashing with Impi' Shaka
If the Ai is getting nowhere with the attackers in it's stack, it'll have a go with the defenders too
It won't clean it's cities out like we might...but it will throw some of the surplus defenders in that stack at you.

No disrespect to the real guy - he was probably very intelligent - more than can be said for this avatar of him

Oh - and I've seen the AI use armies before, when it got leaders while I was fighting it. Then I bombed the army into nothing and squashed it

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Cerbykins
When AI is THAT intelligent, there's no longer a point in have Monarch level and above

Levels have little to do with AI intelligence (or human ). If AI was THAT intellegent levels as they are now would be irrelevent.

Originally posted by Cerbykins
No disrespect to the real guy - he was probably very intelligent - more than can be said for this avatar of him

I am, and the avatar is a race from MOO3.

[Cerbykins]

I know...Harvesters...shame really, going by the plotline the Harvesters did far better as nasty fatal germs than as lumbering bugs
I meant our 'Shaka', the in-game avatar
Not OUR avatars on the forums - my bad

Enough of this, however

It's a pity we can't have difficulties where the AI 'gains'/'loses' certain 'trains' of thought - e.g. thinking to a certain depth, or using certain tactics/exploits.

[Vince278]

[Alex]

I really hope they never create an AI that could play Civ as smartly as a human. Because then the machines would rule the world.

[justjake73]

Skynet became self-aware at 2:14am EDT August 29, 1997

[Kuciwalker]

Then decided to be nice, and instead of nuking the rest of the world, became a chess grandmaster and champion civ player of the world