December 14th, 2016, 13:17
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(December 14th, 2016, 13:11)Bobchillingworth Wrote: Played a bit further into a game using AI+. The improvements are definitely noticeable- at turn 200 Peter the Great has an almost 20-city empire and appears to be pursuing a cultural victory (he won't obtain it before I can win by space, but he does have an impressive number of "Great Works" stocked). He also managed to take a fortified late-era city from Egypt using siege tactics, which I've never seen the default AI even attempt. His beaker output is close to 200 per turn. He's currently attacking me with an army of Cossacks and AT units- I'm not in much danger, but would be were I still attempting a Farmer's Gambit.
That said, the other AI aren't faring so well; most are stuck with 4-6 cities, even with excellent land still remaining, which I can attribute only to their habit of declaring war on each other every other turn. The Norwegians or whatever were particularly pathetic, squatting in two barely-developed cities for the first 180 turns or so. After I eliminated them, I found an island off their coast with two Barbarian settlers, plus another in the frozen wastes to their north, so it's clear that the AI still struggles against Barbarian pressure.
Peter in games I play generally plays very well. Always has a high cultural output and expands well, the others that always seem to do well are Pedro and Tomyaris. I think Peter is helped by all tundra being better than plains with his ability, and the fact he gets so many extra tiles on founding - the AI like never buys tiles.
The AI using seige engines is interesting!
December 14th, 2016, 14:12
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I had just a game on emperor (standard AI) where Kongo won a culture victory on t356. Rome had also completed the moon-landing and really working on Mars while Kongo and Paris were both trying to get aman on the moon.
Now I do know that this happens seldom enough (played enough games where there were never a danger that the AI could get to the moon or win culturally) but this result gives me some hope that the base-game itself is sound enough.
I do know that in Civ5 the decision-making of the AI was based on several parameters (10 I think) which got random numbers (in certain limits per AI) each game. And if the got bad luck they became total duds.
I guess the same concept is at work in civ 6 so every now and then an AI might get all the right numbers to really try for a win but more often than not they end as roadbumps.
PS Yes I know that you can win earlier and I could have gone to war and killed him before he won ( I had several joined war-offers too) but I'm happy that the AI is capable to win a game other than by religion.
December 14th, 2016, 18:52
(This post was last modified: December 14th, 2016, 18:52 by antisocialmunky.)
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Has anyone just put themselves on an island with full vision and watched the AIs fight it out back on the mainland?
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
December 16th, 2016, 14:51
Bobchillingworth
Unregistered
I ended up winning my Immortal-level AI+ game via conquest as Germany, deliberately forgoing a space victory to see how well the AI would handle late-game combat. Standard map size, Fractal, low sea level. Some observations:
* Russia's empire was 17 cities at its height, one of those captured from Egypt in the Modern Era and two being city states it overran early on. The rest were settled.
* The second largest AI empires were China and Sumeria, both tied with 7 cities each. All of the AI except Russia were badly behind in terms of technology, generally stalled out somewhere in the early Industrial era. This was almost certainly due to a combination of Barbarian poachers and pointless conflict between the smaller empires, as I captured many unused Settlers in the process of eliminating them.
* The AI did eventually claim almost every reasonable spot on the map which I wasn't already occupying, but it did take them a very long time to get their final cities down, with the exception of Russia (which filled up its territory very quickly).
* When I finally turned my military on Russia, they had almost completed the tech tree and had copies of every strategic resource; making progress against them was alarmingly difficult. Partially this is due to game mechanics; it took around 12 separate Jet Bomber attacks just to lower the defenses of a size 2 city enough for my Modern Armor to not suffer "major defeats" against the city centers. Some of it was also due to unexpected AI brilliance, however. Peter's favorite tactic was to make opportunistic attacks against my MA with his swarms of Gunships, then retreat his wounded units and merge them into armies which both healed them and made them absurdly durable. This was so effective as a tactic that I began to copy it. Whether it was a result of AI+ or a strategy which the AI is already programmed to perform I cannot say.
* I ended up resorting to nuclear weapons to defeat Peter. Nukes are grossly overpowered in Civ VI, with a single use essentially guaranteeing the capture of any given city. They give giant amounts of WW to both your Civ and for some reason the one you're fighting, which led to the absurdity of post-apocalyptic "rebel" MA and Gunships appearing outside Peter's amenity-starved cities. Given how time-intensive it is to take down empires at Information Age parity though they were easily the optimal strategy for securing a reasonably quick win. Nukes utterly ruin any city they hit, so I'm not sure there's any way to actually make Information Age parity warfare profitable in terms of empire expansion, which in retrospect is probably an intentional design choice.
* If lacking nukes, Radar Artillery are more effective than Bombers against city defenses, and by a fair margin. The downside of course is that they're very slow. The "gain +1 moves in friendly territory" war policy is invaluable for advancing them quickly through recently captured territory (plus you should be running it anyway for the extra mobility on Builders).
* War weariness was catastrophic, as one might expect. I settled a couple marginal filler locations just to produce more overlapping Entertainment Districts.
* The AI is more than happy to go on an envoy-spending spree to suddenly transform your allied city states into enemies in the heart of your nation. It was a nasty surprise with "Jakarta" suddenly started chasing Builders in my backlines.
Anyway, I'm not sure how useful any of the above information is, but to the best of my knowledge I'm the first person here to fight a large AI empire where both of us had access to most or all of the endgame units, so I figured I might as well share my findings. I definitely recommend anyone who wants a more dynamic AI experience try out AI+; even having only a single truly dangerous AI opponent made the game vastly more compelling.
December 16th, 2016, 15:05
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Those observations are very helpful, thanks for sharing them.  It makes me a bit more optimistic that we'll eventually get a better AI performance from Civ6, if an amateur programmer with no access to the source code can make that much of an improvement. I hope that Firaxis is working on their own improvements for patches. (For what it's worth, the AI definitely seems better in the first patch compared to the release version.) If not though, it's good to know that the fanbase is working on their own fixes. I might test out that mod for myself if the official patches aren't making enough progress.
December 17th, 2016, 06:40
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FINALLY done with my first game! I greatly enjoyed the beginning parts of the game, but as with every Civilization, the game devolves into tedious busywork in the late game. I forced myself to give it a shot though. Anyway I won't go in-depth with my impressions because I'm way late into that discussion lol.
December 17th, 2016, 10:23
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If you have first impressions of your own devising rather than the groupmind hivethink, that still matters even two months later. Two months is not a long time at all for a franchise whose games have staying power measured in several years.
February 9th, 2017, 15:36
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Bump, seems a good a place as any to mention this: Steam says 20% off Civ 6 this weekend (comes to $47.99).
February 10th, 2017, 03:54
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I'd recommend to wait until it's a lot cheaper. By then, the game might have ironed out the most glaring issues, hopefully. If not, you can always skip the entire game or buy it from the game bin at $5 some time later.
February 22nd, 2017, 03:39
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In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
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