Okay, so I’ve been playing Civ 4 for a couple of years now, and it’s still driving me totally insane. Just like every other Civilization game, the AI cheats. The problem is, in previous Civs, the developers admitted that the AI cheats. In Civ 4, the AI cheats in ways the developers won’t admit to. Worse yet, the AI actually lies about combat odds, which makes them even worse than completely worthless, since they entice you into losing strategies. Examples of things I’ve witnessed the AI doing, just in the last few games:
[ul][li] If you don’t have hunting as a technology at the start of the game, you get a warrior unit. I like to do a zerg rush at the nearest enemy civ and try to take their city before they can build their first unit. Problem is, nine times out of ten, the AI will suddenly and miraculously pull a defending warrior unit out of its ass the turn before you can take their city, even when there is absolutely no way it could have built a unit that quickly with a population of 1.[/li]
[li] The AI totally ignores fog of war. It knows where every one of your cities is, and how well defended it is. It also knows what units you’ve built, even if they’re hidden inside cities the AI has never even seen, so that if you have lots of swordsmen, the AI builds buttloads of axemen. Decide to be sneaky and build axemen? Archers and chariots for everyone![/li]
[li] Whatever you’re researching, the AI is researching it too. And faster. Try it. At the start of the game, save the game and try researching meditation to discover Buddhism. Bam! A turn before you finish, the AI has meditation first. Go back and load your saved game, then research polytheism instead. Oops! A turn before you learn polytheism, the AI has invented Hinduism! So sorry![/li]
[li] I just now launched an attack against an enemy city, where I had eight Praetorians and the defenders had 2 archers and 2 axemen. In none of the combats did I have combat odds (supposedly) of less than 66%. I lost every single combat without eliminating a single enemy unit. This isn’t even close to the worst I’ve seen, either. I’ve had combats where I’ve lost four combats in a row with combat odds of 98% or higher. We’re talking struck-by-lightning or winning-the-lottery odds popping up every single game, sometimes several times a game.[/ul][/li]
So what I’m wondering is, does anyone have any idea what the actual rules are of the game? It’s clear that the AI lies and cheats, but the problem is, I can’t figure out what the handicapping is. If I knew that, for example, the AI always got an invisible +30% bonus in combat, I could at least approximate the real odds. Unfortunately, the bonus doesn’t seem to be consistent.
As near as I can tell, the AI constantly tries to “even the playing field” if it sees you’re too far ahead. The problem with this is that the AI is very bad at it. For instance, I might try a zerg rush strategy of sacrificing all technology development in order to put together a big military and hit the AI before it can get enough technology advantage to crush me; the AI decides that because I have twice as much military I must be waaaaay out in front, and now it’s time to cheat. Suddenly I get negative random events every turn for six turns, crippling my production, and my military is getting shitkicked by smaller numbers of inferior units. And – oh, what’s that? – now I have a barbarian invasion.
Lastly, but far from least, the AI strategy is not concerned with winning. It only cares about preventing you from winning. Invade someone and the turn after you declare war, every single city begins using slavery to convert its ENTIRE population into military. They have utterly fucked themselves by doing this, and will never be capable of winning; however, they are now capable of doing so much damage to you, that you, too, can no longer win. Since war is just about fucking useless as a result, the most enjoyable part of the game is now completely eliminated. You might as well be playing M.U.L.E.
Anyone have any ideas? Are there any mods out there which prevent the AI from cheating? I did find one mod which eliminates some of the invisible bonuses the AI gets in production, but because the AI was written to exploit these bonuses, the game becomes too easy. For instance, if you eliminate the secret economic bonus the AI gets every turn, the AI will still try to build huge numbers of military units and bankrupt itself.
I’ve played CIV extensively since it was released. Your first 3 bullet points just don’t happen. The 4th happens sometimes but you’d expect it to happen sometimes. Time and time again I’ve heard people complain about the combat odds. If they ever actually test the odds (eg 100 vs 100 units placed with worldbuilder) the odds turn out to be correct. People just tend to remember when the odds go against them.
The handicapping doesn’t affect combat (barbarians are the exception where the barbarian bonus that the human receives varies depending on difficulty level). At Noble difficulty everything is the same for player and AI. As you move up levels it becomes cheaper for the AI to build units and buildings, they also start with better units (I think at monarch and above they start with an archer instead of a warrier for example). The reverse happens at levels lower than noble.
Basically, the AI doesn’t cheat. I’ve seen it claimed and proven wrong on many occasions.
I agree with ColdPhoenix on most of his rebuttals (as in I regularly beat the AI to techs/wonders all the time), but not this one. I have yet to see a good AI which can hold its own with a human player in a game with fog of war (doesn’t mean there isn’t one out there of course, I’ve just never personally seen one). You’ll notice this quite often when you intercept (far enough out) an AI invasion fleet, or land horde on the march. Shuffle enough of your units towards your threatened border cities to protect them, and watch the horde magically do an about face and go attack someone else (this is on Noble).
This is the main reason I haven’t played the game in several months. Instead of feeling like you are dealing with reasonable leaders who can see the advantages of mutual cooperation, I feel like I am butting heads with stubborn jackasses who are incapable of changing their minds about anything (more notable with certain leaders than others of course, like Monty). As a result most alliances are carved in stone by the midgame, and I typically abandon the game due to ennui.
I still play the Clash of Civilization mod for Beyond the Sword sometimes. It’s a huge Earth map set realalisticaly in 1205 AD and there are 50 so civilizations most of them original so the fun is to take a small empire (Georgians, Danes) and make it a world power, but in 6 or so games after 300+ turns the other nations status quo is pretty much maintained and I am just about the only country that gets anything done at all.
After 8 or 9 hours of playing I look out at a Venetian Empire on which the sun never sets and everyone else is pretty much where they started and then I stop caring.
I have a somewhat diferent criticism. In Civ 1 or 2, the big factor differentiating the AI from the human was that the human was much more capable of strategic planning. That was what the game was about, and your only real advantage.
By the time Civ 3 and 4 came along, it felt like the game had devolved into little more than figuring out ways to game the system. It was all about exploiting the AI’s weaknesses and finding ways to cheat the system within the rulesset. Frankly, that’s not very fun for me. I want to compete, not figure cheezy ways to exploit things. The AI is indeed designed to do little mroe than hinder me. If I am good enough, I will always win by using its set-in-stone weaknesses to screw it over. If I am not, I just irritated or frustrated because I’m not allowed to do anything much of use.
Better AI is included in the latest patches and the latest expansion pack. It does improve the game a lot. Better AI was created and first worked on in Apolyton. The mod in CFC has probably had improvements beyond those that were included in patches.
This sums up my feelings for the game recently … have tried many noble games and they all end up feeling that you have to build city after city even though it cripples your economy (yet the AI seems to do the same and continue getting techs) … you have to build a massive army … you have to give free techs to the AI or it gets annoyed …
Generally agree that stopping you winning seems to be too much of a focus - sure the Civ AI has always ‘cheated’ or has advantages , but in Civ 4 it just feels more obvious. The one real frustration is that (on noble and higher) the AI can have 8 or 9 cities to my 4 or 5 yet still be able to build lots of units AND keep up in techs whereas I find it hard to balance money/research. Something doesn’t seem right!
I also agree it is now much more of a ‘have to do x or you can’t win’ or ‘do x or the AI will definitely attack you’ rather than the apparently more flexible earlier versions.
It’s just that the AI has got a lot better at competing not that it’s cheating.
You don’t have to build lots but can do fine with fewer, specialised cities. In the older games you could just keep building cities and win easily, now it takes more skill to balance building cities quickly and keeping up research. Expand to quickly and you can mess up your economy. At noble it is possible to not only keep up with but out-expand and out-tech the AI, at that level they don’t have advantages but is just playing the game well (apart from warfare, it’s still pretty useless at that).
I have been plying casually Civ4 a few nights now and then, mostly on Chieftain setting since I’m not really all that good at it. My civ wins either time-victory or space-race 9 out of 10 times as well as seems to be technologically advanced throughout the game. Yet I always end up with a ‘Dan Quayle’ ranking…now I don’t really care for the ranking I jusy like to play the game for a few hours and that’s it but it does get to me to get constantly ranked/compared to Dan Quayle
The ranking is based on score which is calculated based on population, number of wonders built, number of techs researched, land area and difficulty level.
If you want a higher ranking try increasing these as much as possible. Score’s really a measure of size more than anything else so I don’t pay too much attention to it.
The biggest factor the previous poster didn’t mention is time of victory – win faster, and you’ll score higher. (This does typically bias against space wins as opposed to other sorts.) But mostly you probably need to figure out how to play on higher levels. On Monarch, for instance, a mid-1900s space victory will get you Augustus Caesar with room to spare.
First off, this is just wrong. Civ 4 actually removed much of the “cheating” from previous versions. – it’s better in that sense, not worse. And you can check for yourself, if you know any programming, as the game was designed to be moddable to a very large extent – most of the game mechanics you speak of below are exposed in public code. You can see how the combat functions, for instance.
Even if true and not exaggerated, this is the expected consequence of a bad strategy, not a sign of cheating. Even on the lowest level, with all the production handicaps the AI has, and with unfavorable terrain, it can build a warrior in about ten turns (assuming normal speed). How often do you find an AI civ and reach their capital earlier than that? In addition, capital borders reach the second level on turn 5, so the AIs have two turns warning of your intentions by the time you declare war – if they have a forested plains hill in their borders to work for those turns, that’s almost half their cost for a warrior right there. So even if you frequently do show up outside the borders of an undefended AI capital around turn 7 or so and immediately declare war, there is absolutely nothing suspicious about the capital usually being defended by the time you get to the point of attacking.
And on any reasonable difficulty level, the AI will have a warrior for capital defense from turn zero, so the strategy is not scalable in any case. Forget it and try something better.
(As an aside, the AI is prevented by hard-coding from attacking you in the early days when your capital is likely to be undefended, while you are under no such constraints. If anything, that’s “cheating” in your favor.)
Based on other comments it seems you play Beyond the Sword. I have three words for you: spies, espionage, religion. The AI understands and uses all three to get visibility of your territory – completely legally, no deception of any kind – without you directly being able to know what they can see. Don’t blame the game because you yourself don’t understand those factors. Instead, learn to use them yourself and beat the AI to the punch.
What exactly do you expect? Many civs start with mysticism and can therefore research meditation or polytheism off the bat. Most of those are coded to prioritize religion, and it seems to be random as to which one they go for. You start a game with more than one or two of these civs, and odds are quite good you’ll wind up with at least one chasing Buddhism while a different one chases Hinduism. So what exactly is surprising or cheating about that? You’re simply not fast enough.
And on high levels you’re never fast enough. Chasing Buddhism or Hinduism on high levels is a fool’s errand, and often not ideal even on the lower ones. Worker techs generally provide a stronger and more flexible start.
[quote]
I just now launched an attack against an enemy city, where I had eight Praetorians and the defenders had 2 archers and 2 axemen. In none of the combats did I have combat odds (supposedly) of less than 66%. I lost every single combat without eliminating a single enemy unit. This isn’t even close to the worst I’ve seen, either. I’ve had combats where I’ve lost four combats in a row with combat odds of 98% or higher. We’re talking struck-by-lightning or winning-the-lottery odds popping up every single game, sometimes several times a game.[/list]
Strange, but such incredibly long strings of bad luck have never happened to me. And I’ve played a lot of Civ 4. (Assuming the Praetorians all attacked in the same turn: did they? If not, then the odds, while still long, are the sort of thing that could happen a few times in a CIV career.) I tend to think you’re greatly exaggerating, out of exasperation at much lesser and to-be-expected strings of bad results.
The only thing that might actually be perceived as deceptive is that, IIRC, the first versions of Civ 4 didn’t handle the odds for drill promotions correctly. But that’s long since been fixed.
Sorry. You’re fooling yourself that the odds are worse for you than they are.
I’m sorry, but come on. You’re ascribing motivations to a freaking computer program! And even considering it was programmed by human beings – what exactly do you think would be the point of such a thing? “Oh, whenever the human player builds up more military than the top AI, throw six bad events at him! That’ll get the players drooling for more!” It’s nonsensical. Anyway, if you don’t like events, you can turn them off. But I suspect you do enjoy the good ones.
There are a few mechanisms by which players (AI or human) in the lead are penalized, to provide a small brake on runaway civs. But they are all visible in the public code (and moddable, should you find them simply unbearable), and commonly known by the online community. For example, trailing civs get a small research bonus for techs already known by others. There is a tiny diplomatic bonus applied to any civ that is in the lower half of the standings. And many AI civs (not all) apply a small diplomatic penalty to those who are ahead of them in the standings.
I’m not sure exactly what you expect to have the AIs do in such a situation. Not whip units, and therefore let you walk all over them? That’s not being concerned with winning, either. In fact, as you move up in levels, the main thing you learn about war (both on offense and on defense, provided there’s no huge tech advantage involved) is that you go all out and don’t try to do much else at the same time, or you lose and/or cripple yourself. The AIs are playing properly for the situation. You just need better strategy to cope with the unit spam without damaging your own economy too much.
And as for the AIs damaging themselves economically by this – yes, it happens. But again, the only other option is getting conquered without a fight, which is hardly preferable. And in any case, on higher levels the AIs can generally cope OK with the strain, and recovers well if they manage to fight you off.
I’m sorry, but war is not useless, that’s just wrong.
Go to forums.civfanatics.com and learn more about how to play the game. If you still don’t like it after that, I’m sure there are plenty of mods to remove the things you see as cheating.
I really can’t take seriously someone who thinks that production bonuses are cheats, though – it’s a computer program. It’s not supposed to be able to compete with a thinking human being on a level playing field.
I play Beyond the Sword far too often and have had every version of Civilization since 1. I don’t know that AI cheats, but it certainly is smarter than it once was. That being said, sometimes the combat results are ridiculous- an archer defeating a tank or such. Even allowing for a combat or defensive bonus.
And I can’t understand why aircraft can’t sink ships.
I think it was similar in earlier versions of Civ. The only reasons I can see for subs is to launch rockets or smuggle spies. They are woefully under strength.
The AI definitely cheats. Do this simple test and you’ll see…
Start a game on Noble difficulty (the difficulty where the AI allegedly plays by the same rules). Found your first city and start production on something. End your turn so all the AI civs can do the same. Then open the world builder and look at their cities. Every single one of them will have their production bar half full already, no matter what they are building, whereas yours will be nearly empty. So the AI obviously gets a big production bonus at the beginning of the game allowing it to get units or buildings built before you do.