Is the AI in 1.6.0 too peaceful?

[Xilmi]

I'd like to start a poll on this issue.

Simple question: Is the AI too peaceful in 1.6.0
I personally think it is but I'd rather have some more feedback on that.

From what I've gotten as feedback on 1.6.0 I heared: "Yeah the AI is good at beating me... with science-victory. Wars are extremely rare, though."

Things that I could play around with to accomplish the desired behaviour are:

Distance - They could consider distance as less of an issue.
Aggression - Their aggression-level could play less of a role.
Fear of being backstabbed - They could be more brave about their neighbours attacking them.
Willingness of joining an ongoing war - they could be more willing to partake in a war of others.
Relationship - The relationship could be less of an issue.

[dmantione]

It is too early for me to form an opinion about this, I started a new game last weekend and have to see what wars I will have to fight during the game. Would it be possible to let this poll run for a while?

[Xilmi]

Sure. Btw. this forum has a very cool feature for poll-creators:
You can allow users to change their opinion.
This is what I did.

Also: While waiting for results I can conduct experiments anyways. ^^

[zoll]

Having just bought Pandora, I'm nearing the end of my second game; both games were using 1.6 + your 27-May patch. No wars in my first game (Easy, Medium, 9 AI's, med-aggression), and only one in the second game (Hard, Large, 12 AI's, High-aggression), and that war --so far-- doesn't involve my faction. I'd say on Hard the AI isn't sufficiently fond of politics by other means, and agree it should be increased. This is with Tech victory disabled, yet it appears everyone is still racing for a tech victory anyway.

Also worth noting: the tech costs from the latter half of the second era onward are, IMO, way too low. I'm blitzing through the tech tree at such a pace that there isn't much value to building everything I could, since the next version is just around the corner... This is detrimental to the enjoyment of the "era" due to the pace at which it is speeding by. I'm very temped to try the "epic" or "marathon" options, but I hate the idea of it being a universal slow-down, e.g., build-times, pop-growth, etc..

My last feedback on the AI, based on my ongoing 2nd/hard game, is that with world settings of Large Pangaea, 12 AI's, High-aggression --something seems to prevent the AI's from expanding rapidly. Perhaps because of the high alien aggression? Or perhaps because the AI undervalues number of cities a bit too much? I would have preferred more AI slots, say 15 or 16, to make "lebensraum" more valuable a resource and another avenue of conflict. Since that's apparently not an option, I would suggest making the AI value for number of cities it builds scale upwards as the word size increases. Since there is still a bit of uncolonized land separating me from the other AI's, perhaps distance explains why the AI's haven't been aggressive to me, although with only one war it seems they're not aggressive with each other.

[Xilmi]

Thank you for your feedback!

"using 1.6 + your 27-May patch"
=> Currently the version from steam is newer than my May-27-patch. It's from june 1st. But unless you installed after that, steam should have overwritten the older version automatically. However, I hope I can make a new custom patch today fixing issues with aggression or the lack thereof for that matter. (was still fighting bugs in my new approach yesterday)

"Tech victory disabled, yet it appears everyone is still racing for a tech victory anyway"
=> Well, disabling the tech-victory does not change the AI's urge to research technologies. Getting ahead in tech not only helps for research-victory. It also gives you stuff to better enable you to kill others off. So a change here is not to be expected.

I'll experiment with tech pace at a later date. The original Devs told me that they don't want it altered before the release of the official patch.

"something seems to prevent the AI's from expanding rapidly. Perhaps because of the high alien aggression? Or perhaps because the AI undervalues number of cities a bit too much?"
=> Alien aggression plays a role in that. AI shall refrain from making colonizers when there's still aliens lurking around their city. But they'll usually still get at least a second city from "Colonization Fervor" and with two cities they are usually set for while. I'd rather suppose that you overvalue number of cities a bit too much. Due to the way population growth works in pandora there's not too much pressure to expanding more than once or twice early on.
Each new city takes away from the pop-growth of your existing ones but they need a lot of resources to be put into before they become as efficient as cities that already have all the buildings.
So as long as you can keep overpopulation in check with buildings and suburb-tile-improvements and as long as you have the resources you need in your cities-radius there is little incentive to expand.
In the later stages of the game the AI also should start spamming quite a lot of cities. If you still think they have too little, please upload your savegame so I can check if it is out of the ordinary.

"I would have preferred more AI slots, say 15 or 16, to make "lebensraum" more valuable a resource and another avenue of conflict. Since that's apparently not an option, I would suggest making the AI value for number of cities it builds scale upwards as the word size increases."
=> Well, the reason why it's not an option might sound hard to believe... It's mostly an UI-issue. I tried to use add a scroll-bar to the advanced-game-setup-faction-selection but it wouldn't scroll. Proxy-Studio apparently have programmed their own UI-engine and it doesn't behave like any of the standardized ones. So eventually I gave up and used the maximum that would fit into the window. ^^ Maybe I can ask them for help or ask them to do it themselves. They should know better how it works.
Other than that: There is no map-size-specific modifier or anything like that. The AI will expand when it feels the need to do so unless the map is "full".

"perhaps distance explains why the AI's haven't been aggressive to me, although with only one war it seems they're not aggressive with each other."
Yes, distance plays a big role. I will change how it is valued for aggression-modification.
I will take the Square-root from whatever distance-modifier I measure. This shall still ensure the AI to prefer closer targets but a bigger distance won't make them as reluctant from declaring war as it does now.
For example: Now if the distance is: 7 and their average unit-speed is 2, this means they will want an army 3.5 times as big as yours before declaring war. Way too high!
When I change it too Square-root, it would drop to only 1.87 times. Much more reasonable.

So, as I said I'll try getting this among some other things all done today. So hopefully you'll be able to test if it feels better.

[zoll]

Hi Xil,

Lot's of good info here and on the steam forums thread. I will start a new game using your new patch dated 4-June. Thanks!!

Also, the ability to add more AI players would be fantastic!

As for slowing the progression through the latter half of the tech-tree:
I would pitch the thought to the dev's to simply make the existing "epic" and "marathon" settings apply to just tech, which would accomplish their intentions to slow the game pace.

[Xilmi]

Also, the ability to add more AI players would be fantastic!

I'll probably revisit the game-setup-dialogue again.
What I also could do in the meantime is make an ugly-version as inofficial-patch on Civforum, where you simply can add all the factions. I guess most players would consider that more important than aesthetics.
I've tried this myself before. But I have to warn that the game can become pretty slow when you really play with 21 factions. By clearing up some things in the diplomacy yesterday it might be quicker now. There were some redundant calls of processing-intense-functions. (that i introduced before, not fault of the original devs ^^)

As for slowing the progression through the latter half of the tech-tree:
I would pitch the thought to the dev's to simply make the existing "epic" and "marathon" settings apply to just tech, which would accomplish their intentions to slow the game pace.

References to game-speed are all over the place. So this would actually be harder to accomplish than simply adding another option that alters the tech-progression-formula.
At some point I had made one, that I think could be fine, I'll either have to search it or make a new one.

@others:
Zoll spoke about this:
http://www.civforum.de/showthread.php?9 ... ost6730975
Please consider testing it and leaving your feedback. It should feel quite different to the cuddly behavior the AI has in 1.6.0-launch-patch. Feedback could be useful for finetuning these rather radical changes.

[Xilmi]

You can also test 1.6.1 as beta on the beta-branch.
It has the aggression-improvements aswell.

So it should be suiteable for a comparison.