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Forums: Index > Playing Freeciv > Crazy AI?



I recently downloaded version 2.2 after playing 2.1 for a long time, as well as playing civIII and IV for years. I know this makes me seem like I don't know what I'm doing, but version 2.2 is literally impossible to play. The AI, even set to easy or novice, are crazy! They will not accept peace treaties. At all. On top of that, all of a sudden you will meet all other nations at once even though they do not have units anywhere near you. WTF? very confusing! Once your first ceasefire runs out, you are at war with everyone. Then, they crush you! this is on easy! An if that wasn't bad enough, the AI start getting tech that they could not possibly have had enough time to get. They'l be centuries ahead in tech, completing wonders you never knew they were building, and all the while crushing you in a war that should never have even started, if the game bore any resemblance to previous versions. WHAT GIVES????? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.127.19.56 (talkcontribs) 05:51, May 18, 2010


- Hey, I'm having similar problems. The big issue is the fact that you can never make peace with anyone. Once the original ceasefire ends, the AI will not make peace with you no matter what you give them. This makes things very difficult. In addition, the AI seems to always know where your workers/engineers are. Their destroyers/battleships are constantly killing workers who work on the coast - even when my workers are way behind lines they seem to know exactly where to go. Since I can't make peace with them, my coastline is filled with pollution. I do try to block off coastline with my own ships but this gets tedious. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Syduck (talkcontribs) 18:29, July 21, 2010


The Freeciv AI has always been omniscient: it knows the exact location of all your cities and units, and it sees who defends each city and who rides each boat. The game (both 2.1 and 2.2) calculates AI actions with this knowledge. For diplomacy, the AI (both 2.1 and 2.2) likes to invade players who have many cities but few military units (see ai_war_desire() in ai/advdiplomacy.c). The AI measures units by attack power, so if you want to have peace, then you build many Catapults or Cannons, so the AI decides to invade someone else. The difference between 2.1 and 2.2 is that AI 2.2 plays better, so you have greater chance to be the player that every AI wants to invade. --Kernigh 21:37, July 21, 2010 (UTC)


The best strategy I use starts with a big map. Your best bet is getting your own island and just focus on defending it and improving your cities. The AI can better micromanage techs early on, but their desire to expand and start wars will distract them. Over time, your techs will be far better, your cities larger, and you can get better cash reserves. Avoid exploring just because of meeting new AI's. Odds are your present threat isn't great enough and they'll want war. If you wait until you have more attack units it's ok. When it comes to defense, the AI is poor at having a coordinated attack plan so keep that in mind. Get some catapults/cannons/howitzers or other high attack units before actively going to explore. When invading an area, use battleships and bombers to weaken and empty cities/regions of units. They can't conquer which helps, but the difficulty of the AI to attack in return is great. Use some helicopters, or a transport with a marine to make a beachhead and flood that city with howitzers. Moving other units onto land wipes out movement so you'll want that beachhead easy with a marine or helicopter. Then you can take the howitzers on the weakened cities and potentially wipe out an AI in a few turns. The AI will try to put units into threatened areas so once you start seeing cities empty even after a couple turns, you know the island is easy prey. With this strategy, you can get the stealth while some other AI's are waiting to build riflemen. I've also had times where I gave away the railroad tech just in hopes the AI will give me railroads to invade with. One thing I've noticed, and thought to work on, is that the AI isn't motivated to build workers or build up their cities. To me, the AI is really hard in the early game, but the end game can be too easy. Some wonders to focus on are A Smith's Trading and United Nations, and Magellan's Expedition helps too. Jrisom 22:19, September 26, 2010 (UTC)


I come to the support to report incredibly hard AI... but I see this seems to be well known issue. In my case, the AI just does not work. I have evidence it does not work by the rules on my PC. I could somehow understand city/unit management, but the tech tree is screwed. After I conquered them completely by cheating, I got combustion. I still needed bridge construction so I clicked on it. It would take me 30 turns to research. Considering I now have their reseach capability added to mine (minus war losses) this seems waaay broken.

I am now going to the bug tracker system because the more I watch this, the more I get confident this is unintended behaviour.

MaxDZ8, 22th July 2011

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