In my latest game of Civ 6 I was intending on pursuing an all war strategy. I picked the Ottomans as my civ of choice, and their special abilities are entirely about killing people and taking their stuff. Of course I started up on a small continent entirely by myself, and because of the new weird barbarian spawn bug there were no barbarians at all on my continent either, so early combat pretty much wasn't a thing. I normally play on Immortal difficulty with my mod that substantially buffs the AI and nerfs the most powerful human strategies so it is harder than normal in the late game but the early game is a little easier than Diety difficulty I think.
In any case I figured this would be a good test of the AI's ability to build when I am not killing them in the face, which is my usual strategy. I sat on my continent, built nine cities, and just went all out on infrastructure. I ended up needing a military at points to defend my allied city states against those violent Germans, but mostly I was content to build up. By the end of the game I was a solid 10 techs and 12 civics ahead of the nearest AIs, and I won a cultural victory simply because it was faster than a diplomatic, military, or scientific one.
The early game is a challenge, but the late game is so easy that you can just sit back and let the AI have enormous bonuses and still crush it without trying.
So why is this so? The AI had a significant starting bonus, production bonuses, and more territory than me. I set out to examine their empires to see what they were doing wrong. Some things I already knew about - AIs build navies on small lakes, for example, and I can't do anything about that foolishness. But some things I hadn't really thought about, like the fact that they build full sets of walls in every city. There is no point in building more than the cheap, basic set of walls for a skilled human, but the AI is bad at predicting where attacks will come from so it builds all the walls everywhere. Better than building no walls and getting run over, I guess, but it is a devastating disadvantage to have to devote 530 production in every city to those higher levels of walls.
The idea I have to deal with this is to add +1 Amenity to the 2nd and 3rd level of walls. Humans probably won't build those walls still, but if they do choose to do so it won't be such a total waste. AIs will get a ton of passive Amenities, which is good because they aren't skilled at managing their Amenities and often end up with massively unhappy empires that have constant revolts. This won't affect the early game at all, but will give the AIs a substantial boost throughout the mid and late game, which is exactly the thing they need. I have already pulled out the free Amenity every city gets so the overall effect will be to have more Amenities in the game for those who build walls to protect their citizens, and reduces Amenities for those who leave their cities vulnerable. Feels reasonable from an immersion standpoint, and should help balance too.
They also have a huge problem with faith generation because they like faith way too much. The AIs try to win religious victories but this seems to involve them building holy sites in every city and then staffing those holy sites full of specialists. They spend all of that faith pointlessly smashing missionaries into other people's empires (who defend effortlessly with Inquisitors) and lacking food and production because of that faith generation leaves their infrastructure otherwise terribly lacking. Every AI who has a religion is locked into this mutual annihilation pact where they all throw themselves at faith generation as hard as possible and because all of them do this nobody gets anywhere. All the civs who ignore religion get to build up powerful empires.
I think I just have to accept that AIs will build a lot of Holy Sites for faith generation. However, I can fix the specialist problem. It is as simple as making Holy Site specialists generate a combination of food and faith instead of straight faith. This will mean that at least those AIs that are dead set on faith will be able to grow their cities, even if their production overall will be low. I don't know what to say from a immersion standpoint - maybe those prayers are generating manna from heaven....? But if the theme seems odd, at least the numbers should work out.
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