forum.freeciv.org

qeqeqre wrote:Found out that 2.6 is out, so installed it and ran an AI-only match. Created 10 players: 5 normal AI and 5 hard AI. Predictably, all "hard" AI quickly set their taxrate to 100%, fell behind and eventually lost (got eliminated once "normal" players built technological advantage). So, normal is stronger than "hard". However, it too is lame. A few things I noticed:

That 100% tax thing is super annoying!

Found out that 2.6 is out, so installed it and ran an AI-only match. Created 10 players: 5 normal AI and 5 hard AI. Predictably, all "hard" AI quickly set their taxrate to 100%, fell behind and eventually lost (got eliminated once "normal" players built technological advantage). So, normal is stronger than "hard". However, it too is lame. A few things I noticed:

* In the beginning, AI doesn't go after grabbing territory. Sometimes it's as bad as playing the whole game with 5+ unused tiles just next to your border (more than enough for a city, not to mention the neighboring ocean tiles).

* AI never takes upkeep into account, often building its cities into a stall. This is likely also the reason for 100% taxrate.

* AI doesn't know how to defend its workers. They work in the open and are quickly shot down by enemies' military. Obviously, a human would put a fortified phalanx/pikemen on that tile.

* AI doesn't know how to disband unneeded units, even when facing heavy upkeep. E.g. a worker on an island is never disbanded or taken away after upgrading all tiles.

* AI doesn't know how to use settlers if there is no more free land available. Worst case is if they caught on non-allied land (e.g. if they lose a race and a city is built "underneath" them), then they usually just sit there doing nothing.

* AI would gladly build triremes by dozens even if he has cities next to each other on the same continent and he already explored the world and found that all the land is taken.

And so on, could probably name 20 other things. In other words, AI even in the stable version is so lame it is not intereting to play against it.

qeqeqe wrote:All in all, I'd say all of AI problems stem from it being too fond of war. Endless war with no way to stop it. Basically, the best way to defeat AI is to let it have its war and waste resources for no gain, and meanwhile developing your cities behind walls and solid defenses.

qeqeqe wrote:Found out that 2.6 is out, so installed it and ran an AI-only match. Created 10 players: 5 normal AI and 5 hard AI. Predictably, all "hard" AI quickly set their taxrate to 100%, fell behind and eventually lost (got eliminated once "normal" players built technological advantage). So, normal is stronger than "hard". However, it too is lame.

I haven't looked at Freeciv for a little while but, inspired by your experiment, I thought I'd try something similar. Unfortunately I come to the same conclusion as you. I've mentioned elsewhere on the forums that fundamentally the AI's extreme aggression and total focus on war makes them very ineffective once you learn how to get ahead in technology.

I ran an AI only game with 5 normal, 5 hard and 5 cheating AIs. If you didn't know already, you wouldn't be able to tell which was which, since they all suffer the same problems. Tax was not always on 100% (in fact I thought this had been disabled for all except cheating?) but because all they build is military buildings and units, their science was incredibly slow. By the year 2000, two AIs had been wiped out (one was cheating level), and the AIs with the highest scores were only just researching conscription and tactics. No one had anything like planes or tanks, so a space race was out of the question.

I also had a quick look at some recent commits, and found that the civ2civ3 ruleset modification that allowed AIs to gain "love" with each other, thereby being less aggressive, has for some reason been removed in this bug:
http://www.hostedredmine.com/issues/681976

In my experiments, the only way to have the AI develop their civilizations properly is to reduce their aggression, either towards each other, the player or both. When I've done that with a custom ruleset, they actually get to the end of the tech tree and compete against each other to build a spaceship. Whether that reduced aggression translates into a different kind of advantage for the player I'm not sure, not being an expert player.

Tax was not always on 100%

It might depend on the ruleset and world size. I ran the game with civ2civ3 ruleset and in a fairly small world, with enough space for just 3-5 cities per player (AI didn't even use that space though).

qeqeqe wrote:It might depend on the ruleset and world size.

AI performs worse under civ2civ3 ruleset than under classic. So much, in fact, that we're not sure if we can release freeciv-3.0 with civ2civ3 as the default ruleset, or should we revert back to classic.
It would help if people reported AI regressions when playing civ2civ3 compared to classic to http://www.hostedredmine.com/issues/694778

qeqeqe wrote:It might depend on the ruleset and world size. I ran the game with civ2civ3 ruleset and in a fairly small world, with enough space for just 3-5 cities per player (AI didn't even use that space though).

I was using the default ruleset, citymindist 3, size 10 (so fairly small for 15 civs), fractal generator. The AI seems to have no problem settling available land in the default ruleset at least.

cazfi wrote:AI performs worse under civ2civ3 ruleset than under classic.

It may be more pronounced under civ2civ3, but the problem of the AI's research stalling due to their aggression and wars definitely exists under the default ruleset so improvements in this area should hopefully be the seen in both rulesets.

In general I prefer the classic to the civ2civ3 ruleset, but there's 2 things that I like about the civ2civ3 ruleset - the variable city radius and the Big Land units. I have made my own custom ruleset based on classic with those 2 things added (and some more of my own tweaks).

> They also likely have more cities than you. I know that's why they always keep ahead of me.

True; but all their cities are at 1 or 2 in pop.

djconklin wrote:> They also likely have more cities than you. I know that's why they always keep ahead of me.

True;; but all their cities are at 1 or 2 in pop.

Lol. That is hilarious.

I have been playing with standard ruleset and the AI's have a really high density of cities. They kind of overlap all over the place (which is not a good strategy later in the game). Is that what you are seeing?