war, peace, and the AI

lord of the mark · January 5, 2001, 16:22

I am a civ2 player but have been interested in the great CTP2 AI debate, both as a potential purchaser of CTP, and as a civver.

In civ2 there is certainly a peaceful strategy - a science/AC victory. People have crafted several peaceful strategies to get there. Granted this is generally more difficult than a war strategy, thanks to the AI's poor military skills. However the AI's is willing to attack in Civ2, and this can in fact present a challenge to the peaceful player. On the one hand i want to focus on peaceful research and development, but at the same time I must have a strong enough defensive military to avoid being overrun. Thus i may particularly value an early advance like bronze working, which is important to a peaceful path (colossus, currency, and trade) but also provides a key defensive unit, the phalanx. Similary i must be careful building wonders, since I may be caught unable to build defensive units when I need them.

My impression is that the AI in CTP2 is fairly unagressive. How can this not make it easy to win a SCIENCE victory, since without the need to worry about attack, i can focus all resources on research? Or am I missing something?

The AI in Civ2, especially in MGE/TOT is known for its excessive, unrealistic aggressiveness (everyone attack the human after 1750) It sounds like CTP has swung the pendulum too far the other way.

colorme · January 5, 2001, 19:15

One reason it might be hard to win science victory is because the AI is pretty uncooperative (hard to make alliances), unless you threaten it militarily, and it cheats a lot. But then, that sounds like a military victory to me.

Simpleton · January 6, 2001, 01:16

I wonder what the CTP team was thinking when they ok'd the game to go gold. I mean wern't they suspicious about the diplomacy when their playtesters told them that the only thing the AI ever does is offer to swap maps? Is that all they wanted it to do? And how could the playtesters not have told them about the fact that the AI never, ever ,ever attacks?
I would really liked to have been a fly on the wall when they decided CTP2 was ready.
This game has so much potential but ends up a big disappointment.

Too bad.

LDiCesare · January 6, 2001, 19:06

science victory is actually quite simple to achieve (from my experience).
Diplomacy seems to be more difficult.
Science requires you to build things on 60% of the map, so you need a wide nation, but even that can be reached peaefully (FE by building underwater cities and asking other nations to give you their cities -though maybe that worked only because I had been agressive on those who had attacked me-)

The thing that puzzled me most was I had been far behind another nation in science in one game and they suddenly slowed down (you look at the curve, and their nice exponential suddenly flattens while mine goes on growing -yet they didn't lose any city by that time). I can't understand why they slowed down, but it probably helped me win.

colorme · January 6, 2001, 21:55

Yeah, the sudden slow down of AI growth has been commented on by others too. I don't think we have a satisfactory explanation of why that happens. Some commented that it may be because the AI is losing lots of cities/units to other AI. But that seems like an impossibility, given the intellect of the AI ...