Red card on the play

After weeks of holiday celebrations and Farmageddon I am finally back to working on Civ 6.  My latest project is figuring out how to make Military policy cards less of a disaster for the AI.  Military cards by and large have the issue that they are appropriately powerful for a player but woefully underpowered for an AI.  For example, many of them provide a 50% production increase towards a specific kind of unit, like cavalry.  When a player researches Knights they will quite sensibly put that card into play for 10 turns, have a bunch of their cities produce Knights during that 10 turns, and then swap the card out again, probably forever.  The card was good at what it did, but that goodness required the player to build around it.

The AI, unfortunately, will put that card on and get barely anything out of it.  It will have that card on and not be building much in the way of military units, or just building the wrong kinds so the card does nothing.  It definitely never capitalizes by swapping its whole empire around to use the card most effectively.  The average case for the cavalry boosting card is pathetic when it is used randomly.

This isn't true for all the cards.  Many economic cards do things like boosting the science output of all science buildings, and you can put that on pretty much any time you like and it will be useful.  You may still want to optimize it of course, but the AI can't go too wrong with that type of bonus.  Military cards are a particular problem because they fall into one of two categories - either they are only useful when you are actively fighting, or they are niche bonuses to certain types of production.  Neither of those are universally applicable so they end up being wasted.

My first thought on this was to change the nature of the Military cards.  Instead of '+50% to cavalry production' I could make it '+25% to cavalry production and +1 production on stables.'  It is still a fine card for a player to use, and at least the AI will get something out of it if it gets equipped randomly.  I need to be careful of what exactly I attach those bonuses to though, because the AI builds districts and buildings kind of randomly.

The other problem with attaching generic bonuses to cards like this is that there are a lot of these cards and it would feel kind of odd to have all of them get flat bonuses.  I do like the idea of cards having really different feels to them, but this runs up against the problem that the AI has no idea how to use wildly varying card bonuses so things have to be generically useful if we want the AI to present a challenge.  It might be balanced to have all the Military cards have weak unique bonuses and all say '+1 production in all cities' but it doesn't *feel* great, and that matters too.

I think I need to do some research on what sorts of things the AI builds so I can get a grasp on just how big the bonuses would need to be on specific buildings to help the AI out.  I don't want to make Military cards all overpowered for the player so it is a tricky line to walk.  With some time spent examining AI empires at various stages of the game though I can build some basic estimates for what they have available and try to hack something together.