Multiplayer AI really easy?

[Scubatoad]

Hi,

I just played my first multiplayer game. It actually had no bugs at all. We were able to play through an entire game from start to finish without any hiccups in the system.

We played a tiny map. We played cooperative. it was locked teams 2v2. We both put our difficulty on King.

However, the AI were super slow to expand. They barely built any units and we absolutely crushed them. King is pretty challenging and I know that those AI were not playing at King.

Did we do something wrong? Is multiplayer AI really bad? Any help/ suggestions appreciated.

[istry555]

Yeah, AI slots in MP games are broken. They will almost never contact you or any other human controlled player, rarely contact other AI's, and generally build less units & infrastructure, rarely expand, and just act really dumb especially compared to SP AI under similar circumstances. In fact City States seem to have better AI than MP AI Civs. It's been like that since launch.

It's been complained about on the forums, but--much like the rest of the MP problems--has never really been addressed or do we even know if they're looking into it. In fact, maybe in their eyes the AI's working as intended as some sort of placeholder for human players.

It's a shame more people don't bring this problem up in the bigger MP complaint threads. The problem is a deal breaker for me as I used to enjoy playing Civ IV with a mix of AI and human players.

[MikkOwl]

I played lots of multiplayer with two humans and 6 AI together. Standard map size. Continents, fractal, Terra. Immortal difficulty, normal speed.

The typical game of 10 hours has zero instances of denouncing, one declaration of friendship and no declaration of war (except if an AI is bribed to war by a human). 10-15 hours can pass of everyone expanding their empires to each others' borders, improving their cities, building a bit of military but nothing else happens. There no alliances or political blocks. On immortal difficulty, the human players are always (easily) number 1 and 2 in score. It is *very* boring.

Here are mechanic differences:

Humans cannot enter into friendship or denounce other humans.

AI cannot contact humans (at all). This has the following consequences: humans cannot be denounced, no request for defensive pact, friendship, resources, demand not settle, ask of troops near borders, demand not to buy land, demand to stay away from city state, demand to stay away from other civ, request denounce other civ, offensive pact, request peace.

Because they cannot make requests or demands, promises cannot be broken. The humans cannot get the (major) diplomatic penalties that this normally entails. You can buy land and settle next to them usually without any reaction. Don't have to hold back.

We did editing where the AI was changed to considerably raise the amount of hostility for the mechanics still in place (such as being very close with a weak military) and considerably raise the chance of going to war. This did make it denounce other AI sometimes and actually declare wars. Still a long way from the rather great single player AI behavior.