A few comments

Smallpox vs. largepox, gen2 vs gen5, early war vs. peaceful alliances. Which is your favourite gaming style?
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Ceres
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Joined: Tue Apr 23, 2013 1:40 am

A few comments

Post by Ceres »

Alright, so as someone who's been playing Freeciv on and off for a while now, here's a bunch of things that bother me, mostly about the AI:

1) The AI really doesn't like Harbors. I have never seen an AI player build one before the endgame. It's extremely frustrating to watch them limit their cities' size and hamper their trade output like that, especially when they're perfectly willing to build a Port Facility and Barracks in every single damn city, needed or not.

2) Most of the time, 75% of an AI player's ground force is moving in circles. They'll mass-produce Musketeers, Alpine Troops and Riflemen til every city is down to 0 shields/turn, but there rarely are concentrated assaults. They just kinda move here and there between their cities in stacks of like 20 units until they get killed. It's especially frustrating to see them not take cities I cleared out for them, or those still only defended by Warriors by turn 300.
To add on to this, it can't keep its planes still when they have nothing to attack. It'll just move them back and forth between two cities. Every plane, every missile, every turn. It really drags things out between turns.

3) The AI in general seems far too focused on ground units and ships. I've never seen them build planes against me and no missiles ever. Even when I gave an AI a bunch of Nuclears, they just moved them back and forth between cities. This makes the endgame a lot less interesting, because the only way you get attacked are ship harassment and transports dropping single units.

4) If you're turning land into sea within your borders, why don't the borders change? It just irks me to see borders still mimic the shape of a coastline that's long gone.

5) The AI often keeps going with a high science rate despite having completed the tech tree. I've seen them at Future Tech 40.

6) Why does coastal flooding from global warming not affect city scquares :( really crushed my eco-terrorism plans there. Similarly, why are hills completely immune to flooding?

7) Pirates and Barbarians seem very one-dimensional the way they just build a single unit type (often Cannons) and blindly send them towards the enemy after conquering a city. I mean I guess they shouldn't be too strong since they get free units every now and then, but it's so painful to watch.
Also, why is their trade mainly converted to science? That doesn't seem very pirate-y.

Are there settings or something that I missed to change some of these behaviors? If not, is it intended behavior?
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