Will Rise and Fall have proper AI, finally?

[idl0r]

The AI has been way too easy/stupid when it comes to war. There have been several complains already. It's just stupid compared to Civ. V. So I wonder whether it's being improved in the expansion to finally get an AI that fights, attacks and defend itself properly?

[xNECROx]

I was just about to make this exact thread. Firaxis has been very quiet on AI in this expansion or changes to it, I'm very very worried... They either need to fix the damn AI or open it up to modders to fix, IDC which!

[Martin]

I doubt the ai will be much improved, they may have fixed the pathing errors etc, maybe alert function, but we'll need to wait until the expansion and expected update patch that usually comes with it to find out.

That said, after a few hours of warmongering last night, I got 6 ai civs all declare war on me and send monster armies which took out 4 of my cities before I could even react, 3 of which were destroyed. So ai is good enough for me atm.

[DryRot]

They haven't had to so far. People keep buying the game, complaining, and playing, and buying, and complaining, and . . . There is no reason to fix something that people continue to buy (and often defend as great despite how poor the product is).

[Starwars]

The AI won't be fixed in the expansion. AI will be improved in patches and it will be little by little just as it has been in the previous patches.

For Rise & Fall, we can hope that the new mechanics and stuff happen to be laid out in a way that it's easy for the AI to benefit from it. Of course, chances are that it will be the opposite.

But yeah, AI improvements will come little by little in patches, not fixed in an expansion.

[Kokoro]

Originally posted by Martin:

I doubt the ai will be much improved, they may have fixed the pathing errors etc, maybe alert function, but we'll need to wait until the expansion and expected update patch that usually comes with it to find out.

That said, after a few hours of warmongering last night, I got 6 ai civs all declare war on me and send monster armies which took out 4 of my cities before I could even react, 3 of which were destroyed. So ai is good enough for me atm.

weird...i declared war on everyone and they only sent a few units to just wander around my empire doing NOTHING.

[leandrombraz]

Originally posted by xNECROx:

I was just about to make this exact thread. Firaxis has been very quiet on AI in this expansion or changes to it, I'm very very worried... They either need to fix the damn AI or open it up to modders to fix, IDC which!

They talked about improvements they did to make sure the AI can use the new systems, specifically loyalty and forward settling. So far it seems a lot better, the AI seems to understand that they need to keep their cities close to each other, they don't seem to settle cities where they will start to lose it to loyalty as soon as they settle. They conquer cities that they will lose to loyalty though, CSs to be more specific.

There's hours of R&F gameplay on youtube, both from dev livestream and people playing it. You can see how the AI behave, it's not like Firaxis is hiding it. So far it seems like another step forward but still a long way to go.

[Twelvefield]

That's what I've seen as well: some incremental improvements. The new rules ought to prevent the AI from doing some of its stupider things, but I don't consider that as being a smarter AI in the same way that putting your child on a leash to prevent them from being run over by a bus doesn't earn them a MENSA membership.

Nobody is saying much about the end game, since the media demo went only 150 turns. There are new endgame rules that hopefully will mitigate runaway civs. Might make things better, might make things worse, since I don't see much improvement on how the AI choses to move units.

[Sohzu]

Paid 12 bucks for this game and a few others on humble monthly, I say its a great game with great AI so far for $12 :) sucks for all the people that paid 60

[Nats]

We will almost certainly see a few AI improvements in the patch that accompanies the expansion. There will definitely be doing a lot of work on the AI to accompany the expansion because of the new systems that the AI will need to adopt, but how much of that will be an actual improvement in basic intelligence who knows.

[dvdbf]

So you think the ai is better on civ5 my 1500 hours says it's not.

[TidBuryFukles]

I fear the AI will be worse with R&F. Mostly because there are a lot of new mechanics that will further stupify it. And why would post R&F patches fix it? The game is a year and half old, at least 4 patches later it is still poor at best.

As for modders, yes, that would be the game's only hope but only if they open up the capability to mod the AI. I dabbled in modding this game for the AI and found it completely useless. They allow you to tweak a handful of XML statements for it and that's about it. It's a joke. They need to open up the DLL. Until then don't hope for a good AI mod (and YES I tried both of the ones out there and they don't do much).

Personally the one thing (of many) that the AI kept doing that made me shelf the game was
1) Declare a war, early game, not having much of an army to use
2) After 10 turns, when neither it or me attack each other.
3) Ask for peace AND give me a bunch of resources for free!!!

The stupid thing did this every game I played. I haven't played since.

CAN THEY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AT LEAST FIX THIS RIDICULOUS DIPLOMACY BUG!??

[dbemont]

Yeah, the AI does some pretty bizarre things, no doubt. Some particulars will be fixed up, but overall, this game is never going to have a strong AI.

For one thing, it's a basic tradeoff. The more a game adds multiple interlocking systems with interesting consequential decisions, the less effectively the AI is going to play the game. Certainly not within any reasonable budget. And multiply this many times over if the game systems keep changing, which most players definitely want.

Second, the most egregious AI problems involve military tactics, and as best as I can see, the developers have made this primarily a grand strategy game about building a civilization over the centuries, as opposed to a military strategy game. There are games out there that do military conflict very well, and they do it by focusing the game on that. Civ is not that game. You can disagree with their decision, but it would probably be more productive to go find a good wargame to scratch that itch.

That said, for those who (accurately) look at this as primarily a builder game yet are haunted by the ease of breaking the game simply by going war-monger... I think that the new loyalty system combined with improved alliances will go some distance to paper over that problem. The improved alliances are going to benefit civs who pay attention to diplomacy; doesn't mean you can't take some cities from a neighbor, but if you are a serial attacker, you are going to miss out on benefits from higher level alliances. And if you have more conquered cities than governors, low loyalty is going to give you headaches. Thus, the fact that you could, in theory, take away any particular city through warfare becomes less the elephant in the room.

And if this just doesn't cut it for you, you might want to wait for a while until the day they release the tools for modders to make substantial improvements to the AI, as they did in the past.

[Skeev]

Originally posted by Sohzu:

Paid 12 bucks for this game and a few others on humble monthly, I say its a great game with great AI so far for $12 :) sucks for all the people that paid 60

Actually not for me.
Preordered the deluxe version and the expansion. So I do not regret ;-)

[MaxDoomSWE]

The developers have been very unwilling to even mention the game breaking issues with the AI (its inability to wage war after a 100 turns or so depending on game speed chosen, its inability to use naval units and most other military units, its broken diplomacy where it gladly hands over everything it has to you etc), so it doesnt seem likely that they will fix it. Apparently it is working as intended. And that might feel good for new players or players who never do combat in their games. This is the problem. I think many people will buy this coming expansion, believing that it fixes the AI, but so far we havent seen the devs even admit that the AI sucks ass.

[SketchyCoffee]

I was trading with china and picked one of their most precious stratigic resources and clicked "what would it take" they then listed the resource I wanted, and 60 gold per turn given to me plus theyed join my war against another civ....I mean, maybe they just love me that much?