AI goes all out to win

[Hoiles]

Just played my first game on warlord level, after having successfully mastered chieftain level. (I usually played prince, sometimes king on Civ II). I was comfortably in second place in land area, population, etc., but thanks to city improvements and not spending a whole lot of time on military units, I was about to win the space race in 4 turns or so.

Then, unexpectedly, every other civ declares war on me, even though there was peace for at least 500 years. This, despite the fact that I had three nukes. I used them after war was declared on me, and the AI still didn't want to receive my envoy. I eventually won launched the space ship, after 3 or 4 of my huge (>20) cities were overrun (despite having 2-3 mechanized infantry within each of those cities).

Not particularly realistic; I don't know of any leader who'd have his country nuked just to avoid another country launching a space-ship, but I guess it's challenging. For one thing, it was annoying, as it extended the end of the game from maybe 5 minutes to more than an hour just waiting for all the tanks and cavalry to move into my cities. On harder levels, I guess the AI is even more ruthless.

[cassembler]

IMHO, that's what good AI is.

"Holy poop balls, Batman! He's just about to launch a spaceship and win the game!!!"

As far as the realism thang goes, I didn't buy Civ3 for it's amazingly detailed realistic portraial of history.

[taco]

I don't see where the problem is, your about to win the game. The ai wants to win so they attack you hoping to give themselves more time to catchup.

In fact when i won the spaceship race i was EXPECTING the other civs to declare war on me and was surprised when they didnt. Course i had 11 tactical nukes, all in position to hit a capital of each civ, 6 icbm's and a massive navy =).

[HugoHillbilly]

LOL whats your problem? Thats exactly what I do! Actually if any other Civs start building the spaceship I goto war with them. It will force them to concentrate on building troops rather than the spaceship. Then you raze their capital, bye bye spaceship.

Whats your problem? You want an easy game where you build your spaceship while the AI leaves you alone and you are guaranteed a win? This is the best ascpect of Civ3 in my opinion, the AI is a crafty bastard allways trying to take you down. You gotta stay on your toes!

[Jaybe]

To avoid war, be militarily prepared -- do not have a weak military. Then the AI will seem 'stupid' and not attack.

[War4ever]

Originally posted by Jaybe
To avoid war, be militarily prepared -- do not have a weak military. Then the AI will seem 'stupid' and not attack.

the ai respects your military too much IMO

[Hoiles]

Alright, good points, but I didn't remember this happening in Civ II. Perhaps, that was because when I won via the space race, I dominated, and nobody wanted to start a war with me. In addition, the United Nations was more useful in preventing war in that game ("If you didn't have that accursed United Nations..."). Guess next time I won't be disbanding those extra military units for extra shields.

[Pyrodrew]

Originally posted by Hoiles
Not particularly realistic; I don't know of any leader who'd have his country nuked just to avoid another country launching a space-ship, but I guess it's challenging.

Realistically, the world is NOT ending in 2050 or by a spaceship launch... unlike the game. Thus, you cannot try to compare that part of the game & call it "not realistic".

The AI should go all out to win... unless maybe you're on Chieftain.

[Ralf]

Originally posted by HugoHillbilly
LOL whats your problem? Thats exactly what I do! Actually if any other Civs start building the spaceship I goto war with them.

Well, in my last game (Regent level) I was sharing borders right between the germans on my left side, and the russians & english on the right side. All of them, including me, had access to mech.infantrys and tanks. Then I started my space-race program. What happened?

Well, both german and england where already at war against the russians. And without asking me, the germans simply tumbled through my empire with their mighty panzers, and although I had mech.infantrys, my ordinary offensive tanks was too weak and too few to intercept effectivelly - especially since I was really more interested in concentrating on my spaceship.
So I quickly gave the germans a "free passage" deal - and on my railroads, that gave them almost instant access to the russian border. While the germans transported buckloads of panzers right under my nose - I gambled everything on one card. I concentrated almost solely on building that spaceship instead, and ignored any military build-up.

And it worked. I really manage to win the game through launcing that spaceship. If the AI-empires instead had worked out peace-treaties and alliancies among themselves, and perhaps turned on me, I would be forced to abandon any space-race ideas. My culture was the highest, but my military-force was only on-pair, or weaker - especially in numbers.

[Hoiles]

I can see why the Persians (the civ that was at the time the largest and slightly behind me in the space race) would declare war on me, but also some other civs were attacking my mechanized infantry and battleships with galleys and archers, which seemed strange. It was probably because Persia had a mutual protection agreement with all the other nations, and I didn't, and I attacked some naval unit within Persia's borders (as specified in another thread, that was a no-no). I guess I was fortunate because all my space-ship production cities on the coast, closer to the weaker countries, so they weren't really affected.

[Zanzin]

This is a good thing!! It's exactly what a human player/s would do, IMO, if the game was about to end.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Hoiles
Alright, good points, but I didn't remember this happening in Civ II. ...

Now, Stop That!
This is NOT Civ II. Get that through your head right now!

If this was Civ II I assure you I would NOT have spent $1300-1400 on a Windows PC and this game!!!