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ducki
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Also, in my first attempt at a Monarch game, the AI actually sent out a pair of spearmen to pillage my roads and improvements during a war. Completely ignoring the forces that were 2 tiles away and approaching a town.
That's new for me, at least the pairing of two spearmen by the AI. I lost 4 swordsmen to those two. And they were regulars against my vets! Damnable RNG.
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Soren Johnson Firaxis
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Hunt Valley, MD
May 2001
time: 00:23
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quote:
Originally posted by Dominae
I have to mention that Jeff wasn't "entirely sure" what changes were made (not his responsibility), he just knew no major changes were on the agenda. Perhaps Soren did some nice tweaking for his own amusement (and ours!).
Dominae |
well, no major changes, but plenty of little ones, which make 1.04 Ptw AI somewhat different from 1.29 AI. Probably the biggest change actually came with the 1.04 patch. I finally solved the problem of city governors always over-emphasizing food, which means they will switch to super production mode once they hit pre-acqueduct size 6.
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Soren Johnson Firaxis
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Hunt Valley, MD
May 2001
time: 00:23
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quote:
Originally posted by alexman
Glad to hear Soren is still around! 
However, I think the AI needs to go into super-production mode, building happiness improvements, when it starts using entertainers, not when it can't grow any more. See here for more info.
Actually, this AI problem comes from its refusal to use the luxury slider. |
the situation you outlined in that thread is something of an outlier. The AI's priority is to build riflemen to help defend the city because it is a capital. Otherwise, I would expect to see it build a temple pretty soon. Under normal game circumstances, the city would probably have a luxury or two, could use its defense for military police, etc, etc... I guess what I am saying is that if the AI is in that position so late in the game, it has already lost.
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Soren Johnson Firaxis
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Hunt Valley, MD
May 2001
time: 00:23
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quote:
Originally posted by alexman
Glad to hear Soren is still around!
However, I think the AI needs to go into super-production mode, building happiness improvements, when it starts using entertainers, not when it can't grow any more. See here for more info.
Actually, this AI problem comes from its refusal to use the luxury slider. |
hmmm... after looking at it again, the only thing that worries me is that the AI chose wealth. I almost never see it do that in my test games, so I'm not sure what is going on, to be honest. The AI is very different when it only has a few cities, so I am not surprised that starting it on a one city island caused it to fly off the rails.
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Soren Johnson Firaxis
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Hunt Valley, MD
May 2001
time: 00:23
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quote:
Originally posted by alexman
Thanks for the reply. That makes sense.
Do you agree that the AI would benefit from using the luxury slider (like human players do) instead of entertainers? It would make it irrigate less and have more productive cities until it can build those happiness improvements. |
the luxury slider is very, very tricky. the AI basically only uses it to balance out war weariness, and there is a maximum level it will never go over. the danger was that the AI could get used to the luxury slider and deemphasize acquiring luxury goods and building happiness improvements, allowing a good portion of the treasury to disappear.
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Dominae
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Thanks for your input Soren. A couple of quick questions: what do you mean by "super-production mode"? Will the AI start mining everything once a city reaches size 6, and will it destroy existing improvements in doing this? Will it revert back to "super-food mode" after Construction (or, once the city builds an Aqueduct)?
Dominae
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ducki
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quote:
Originally posted by nbarclay
Here's a new one: in my first PtW game, the first overseas AI to find me (or one of the first) seems to have actually sold OTHER AIs (with one exception) contact with ME! In the past, I've always been denied contact until I was the one to pay for it. Assuming what I think I saw represents a pattern, this is a giant leap toward the AIs not treating the human differently from each other in their negotiations!
Nathan |
I've noticed this also.
I've also noticed the AIs being a lot more proactive about contacting me for trades during their turn than before PtW. Of course, I rarely trade during the AI turn, but it's nice to see them being more apt to initiate trades as well as to trade Contact With XXXX amongst themselves and me.
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nbarclay
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Huntsville, Alabama
Dec 1999
time: 23:23
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I just finished my first PTW game (Emperor level), and it was a real doozie. My luck in the set-up and early game was mixed. The worst was being on the wrong side of a 5/3 continent split, which meant it was impossible to have more than three luxuries until Navigation. The best was that although my starting position was only middle-of-the-road (a river, a few shielded grasslands, and a game tile), I got a very early settler out of a hut in a much nicer area (no river, but a cattle and two wheat nearby), letting me expand enough that early warfare was unnecessary.
Rome was to my southeast, but I was fortunate in that they never had iron available. India was farther south. As for me, I was Sultan Osman of the Ottomans.
With the boost of the free settler and my usual early-game tricks, I was able to more or less keep up with the other civs on my continent in tech even in the ancient era. Toward the end of the ancient era, I pulled ahead, although trading tech for luxuries kept me from really pulling away. But the civs on the other continent grabbed most of the good wonders out from under me; I got the Colossus, Leonardo's, and Newton's, and that was it through the medieval era. Something tells me warmongering for great leaders if you want to build wonders may be more important in PtW.
I caught up with the other continent in tech buying Education a couple turns away from researching it myself, and soon got on a 4-turn tech pace. That dictated the timing for my first attacks: I would no longer be able to hold my research pace without a GA when the industrial era opened, so I had a small but presumably adequate force of Sipahi (several upgraded from chariots) ready to go. Rome was my intended target.
But just as I was getting ready to pull the trigger, war elephants showed up in my far southwest. I asked them to leave and repositioned most of my forces to back up my request, but that horrible warmonger Ghandi  insisted on pressing the attack. A war elephant failed in its assault on a sipahi, and my golden age began half a turn early.
So instead of attacking Rome, I bribed Rome into allying with me against India. Building factories interrupted my war production a few turns into the war, leading to some uncomfortably closely fought contests. That was complicated by India's having entered its own golden age and upgraded its war elephants to cavalry. And by the time the war ended, India had riflemen, although not in huge numbers.
But sipahi carried the day, and by the time the peaceniks pushed my democracy into ending the war, India was down to three cities on a peninsula protected by mountains. The peace treaty left them with one.
Two turns later, I pulled my old plans for dealing with Rome out of mothballs and updated them. Rome was much smaller than India and lacked such modern forces, and twenty sipahi were able to deal with them in a single turn. I definitely love that UU!
In the meantime, the Ottoman Empire (as we now called ourselves) had built up fabulous wealth (over 10,000 gold) in part through trades for luxuries and gold with the overseas nations. That while maintaining a four-turn tech pace! Once peace was established, I did a lot of rush buying in conquered areas to help build them up, eventually depleting my gold surplus.
Once my golden age ended, I was at a point where research took five turns more often than four (especially since I headed straight up the corporate branch of the tech tree after detouring for replaceable parts and let the AIs do the rest of the research for me). I wasn't worried about Theory of Evolution because I had a leader from the Roman conquest on standby. But the AIs stayed fairly close in research in spite of all the gold I was raking in from various deals. I decided to sit back and wait for the late industrial or modern era before attempting any overseas adventures.
My game plan hit a bit of a snag when the dastardly Arabs decided to attack. The attack itself was a joke - a single Ansar Warrior unit too stupid to listen to a polite request to leave from the infantry that quickly surrounded it - but the resulting conflict cut off the world's only source of silks and one of my revenue streams. I rode out the technical state of war, with a few occasional naval battles, for a few turns, and then Babylon decided to attack too (with two knights and two warriors, easily dispatched by my sipahi). I decided that I had had enough.
That started the World War. I engaged Persia and Germany as allies against both my foes, with Spain only willing to fight Babylon because they had a MPP with the Arabs. That MPP quickly led to an interesting state of affairs, with one of my allies in the war against Babylon at war with the other two! But in any case, it was a good distraction for my foes.
A few turns later, I got motorized transportation and started building up an invasion force. A mixed 40-unit force containing tanks, infantry, and sipahi landed on two beachheads on the Babylonian coast, and Hammurabi started to regret his dishonest and aggressive ways. The sipahi did better when they were called into action against infantry than I was afraid they would, and I even used sipahi exclusively to take some towns of size six or less that would have taken longer had I used tanks. Shortly after the invasion started, I got Computers and started upgrading infantry to mech infs, and Babylon's fate was sealed. (The land masses were close enough that I never built a single airport; no powerful naval force showed up, so my transports could run a shuttle service that was neither faster nor slower than airlifting would have been.) I finished Babylon off just as war weariness was starting to reach highly problematical levels.
Shortly after that, I got Synthetic Fibers and upgraded all but the elites from my tank force to MAs. Persia fell in two turns, Germany in three, Spain's mainland holdings in one, and all but two Arab cities in the first turn of that war. The AIs were on the verge of getting motorized Transportation, Flight, and Radio themselves, but never quite made it.  Domination victory, 1430 AD. By the way, I broke a ROP agreement in my attack on the Arabs, but I did so at least more or less honorably, declaring war with none of my troops in their territory. (That's better than they'd done to me earlier, promising to withdraw and then attacking instead, so I figured they deserved it.)
This proved to be one of the types of games I enjoy most: the AIs stayed close enough to keep things interesting, but I still got my MA romp in the end. Sipahi have definitely joined the ranks of my favorite UUs: it's fun being able to throw leftover cavalry-class units against wounded infantry or use them to take small outlying towns (although casualty rates aren't exactly low).
The AIs had truly amazing amounts of gold to buy my techs with, and I was favorably impressed with how quickly they researched. Had I not used my GA to get a big jump on them building stock exchanges, the tech race could have been a lot closer. As it was, I considered myself fortunate that the AIs never got a chance to bolster their defenses with the new goodies that come with Radio!
And keep in mind that I did what I did with a free settler early. Without that advantage, I would probably have been forced to take on Rome early for more territory, which would have put me a lot farther behind the other continent in research (since I couldn't have driven the tech pace on my own continent to keep us up). All in all, at least in my first impression, I regard my PtW bucks as well spent.
One last thing: I had feared that with PtW, the AIs might be more aggressive in taking advantage of a human opponent who focuses so much on REXing early that he largely ignores his military. But it looks like size still counts a great deal in persuading AIs that an early war would probably cost more than it's worth. (Just keep in mind that a sample size of one is not exactly the stuff that pleases statistics professors. )
Nathan
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