Civ 6 Solo Reports

[rho21]

Thanks Sulla; a good read as always. I should point out that battering rams are actually ineffective against post-Steel defences (see page 3, ~1280AD), as I discovered in a PBEM. I think you're meant to bring battleships or artillery and observation balloons to have a hope of taking a Steel-defended city.

[chumchu]

That is just sad. This is significantly worse than Civ 5:s AI opponents. What is also sad is there were demonstrably a lot of easy improvements for the Civ 5 AI that Firaxis never made. After the initial release they seemed to have dropped any idea of working to improve it. BNW actually made it worse as the sloppy coding for AI great work decisions made them eat up something like 25% of processor time. Difficulty was easily improved by mods like Ackens mod made the game roughly 2 levels harder without increasing AI bonuses.

There is probably as much room for improvement in Civ 6 that just is not used is my guess.

[RFS-81]

An interesting read! Did you see any big religious conflicts between the civs? On high difficulties, if I lose to something other than an early rush or barbarians, it's a fanatically religious AI spreading it's religion basically unopposed, because the other civs don't put much effort into theirs. I don't have a religion to fight back with because high difficulty, and I can't spread someone else's because only the leading player has spread their religion to me. I would have thought that could happen with Spain.

Also, I once pushed an AI over the religious victory threshold by conquering a city so that the majority of my cities was following their religion. You should have seen my face when I walked my unit into the city, and then the defeat cinematic started playing. That completely blindsided me.

About 1UPT, I really doubt that Firaxis will walk back on that, unfortunately. There's this idea floating around that Civ 4 combat is dumb because you just smash stacks of doom into one another. It's not true, but that doesn't matter.

[Japper007]

About 1UPT, I really doubt that Firaxis will walk back on that, unfortunately. There's this idea floating around that Civ 4 combat is dumb because you just smash stacks of doom into one another. It's not true, but that doesn't matter.

I don't think Firaxis will go back to stacks of doom, but maybe we could see them apply a limited stack+tactical layer like all the cool kids on the block (Endless series, Age of Wonders). Playing our recent SG together showed me once again how fun that combat is, and the AI can handle it better because the battles are compressed in time, scope and space. 

To play devils advocate I think 1UPT isn't chosen because peopke think stacks are dumb, but because stack combat is not as visually clear to players as having individual units. At a glance there is no direct visual difference between 100 units in civ 4 and 1. Civ 5 brought many new players to the franchise, and in earlier titles the somewhat confusing stack UI turned a lot of people off. Building a stack of counters is also less tactically engaging than manually placing your Archers behind of your swordsmen, though it is better strategically. I've also played some games were 1UPT is decent and occasionaly even fun, Warlock comes to mind. Modders made the AI in civ 5 much better at it as well, but Firaxis just hasn't had enough time dedicated to AI design since the days from 4 when Single Player was still the bestseller.

It's also not like 1UPT has much to do with the issues Sullla pointed out here. The civ 6 AI's failings are strategic long before they're tactical. It doesn't expand, it  doesn't build districts, it doesn't build units, that makes you wonder what it is using all that production cheating on? In civ 5 the tactical AI is atrocious, I've seen it pull way dumber stuff than in 6, but at least the AI makes up for it by just building an ungodly amount of units. I've played Deity civ 6 practically from launch, but I've yet to experience a moment of existential dread as when Wu Zeitian rushed me with 10 Xbows on turn 40. And it wasn't the Civ 5 AI's handling of 1UPT I was fearing there, I was strategically outmanoevred.

[Sullla]

Thanks for the comments! It was a fun game to play although it highlighted pretty well why I don't see much of a future for Civ6 as a Single Player game. And no, I'm not interested in another Multiplayer game either due to the huge timesink involved.

Rho, that's a good point about the extreme difficulty of capturing any cities on the map post-Steel tech. I have no clue what the designers were thinking there; they somehow created a game where the AIs can't ever attack anything effectively. The idea behind city walls was a good one but the implementation was poor. Chumchu, I've also heard that there were community members who significantly improved the performance of the Civ5 AIs, and I understand that there was a project somewhere to do the same thing for Civ6. I don't know if it ever made it off the ground and achieved anything though. If the Civ6 AI would just expand aggressively and pump out units, they would be way more effective. I have no idea what they spend the whole game doing - how can the player have a larger military *AND* double the territory of the AIs on the highest difficulty?!

RFS-81, the AIs spammed my territory with endless missionaries the whole game to no purpose whatsoever. I pretty much ignored them. All four of the other civs had their own self-founded religion and that made it impossible for anyone to make serious progress towards a Religious victory. And Japper, as much as I hate to praise Civ5, the AI does appear to have been better in that game than Civ6. Civ6 has much better mechanics but the AI is truly braindead in this incarnation. It's such a shame because the systems legitimately play pretty well but there's no competition to be had, not in Single Player anyway. (And that's, like, the way that 99% of people are experiencing the game.)

[Alhazard]

Sullla,

Amazing game to even win with the variant and sub T300. However, I am going to disagree that R&F should be ignored. The game seems more challenging from my experience. The AI expands in your face faster and I found struggling just to get 8 cities. Also I think Magnus is way overblown. First of all, the chop bonus is now only 50% and Magnus is not mindless as I thought because there is a 5 turn cooldown before he is active in your city. Many times, I faced the question of do I chop this now or wait 5 turns for Magnus? In someways, Magnus is analogous to slavery in Civ4 because you have to really know the mechanics and tradeoffs to be good at the game, and it just helps you towards your overall strategy. Here is a thought experiment. Suppose that base civ4 shipped without slavery but warlords introduced it. Would every civ4 player abandon the expansion because they thought that game devolved into whipping? As we know, no it has not and the game still has lots of viable options with slavery as just a base mechanic. There are still lots of problems with civ6 primary because of 1upt but I do think you should try some R&F SP games first.

[Japper007]

I've also heard that there were community members who significantly improved the performance of the Civ5 AIs, and I understand that there was a project somewhere to do the same thing for Civ6. I don't know if it ever made it off the ground and achieved anything though. If the Civ6 AI would just expand aggressively and pump out units, they would be way more effective. I have no idea what they spend the whole game doing - how can the player have a larger military *AND* double the territory of the AIs on the highest difficulty?!

There's AI+: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f...searchtext= 

It has a high rating on the Workshop (for what that's even worth, there's an erotica-anime overhaul with the same rating ), but the developer does lament that he can't edit deeper than XML (i.e. weightings the AI assigns, not the AI itself). Again the community gets stopped from fixing the game by Firaxis not releasing proper mod-support  It's such poor form on their part, modding has always been a big part of the civ community. Some people pick up civ IV to this day solely to play FFH or Rhye's and Fall.

You might want to try it, but from what I read in the comments it mostly ramps up AI aggression, which isn't really the problem with civ 6 AI to begin with; it's lunatic Monty aggro already if you violate one of it's stupid "Agendas" or dare to retalliate in a war. Making every game Always War wil ramp up the challenge, but it isn't good AI.

[timmy827]

Nice writeup.  Seeing the AI build so few settlers besides the ones given at the start of the game makes me wonder if they just left in place some weighting from Civ5 where (in their theory) empires were supposed to stay small and just never revised it for a game that rewarded expansion.  Interesting to see the limits of that unique tile improvement carpeting.