GAME INFORMATION
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Build: 37906
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Platform: Steam
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Operating System: Windows 10
ISSUE
Enemy AI declared us friends mid-way through a game, even though we had “Lock Teams” enabled. Fortunately, it was just words. He was still an enemy according to the game itself; not an ally.
The main concern I have about this is the confusion it generates. I had to double-check that our game settings were set to “Lock Teams”, and also go to the Chat or Diplomacy menu pop-up to make sure we were still enemies rather than allies. That takes time away from the game if you don’t pause it.
REPRODUCTION STEPS
- Play 2 human vs. 2 AI game. Lock teams. Hard AI setting. AI type for both was, “AI” (i.e., not CD-ROM type or other). “Arabia” map. Giant. Koreans and Slavs as enemy AI. Koreans and Spanish civs as humans (I was Spanish).
- Let the AI attack you first with his wave of units at your base and let him do some damage, but repel him enough that he questions whether or not he should have attacked you. (I think he started retreating.) This is around mid- or late-Castle Age; possibly Imperial Age.
- Receive, if you’re lucky, a declaration of friendship from the kindhearted AI. In my case, it said: "Wenceslaus I: Thou hast proven thyself most worthy. I declare us friends."
IMAGE & ATTACHMENTS
Keywords: AI taunts, declared friendship, team settings, professed friendship
Oh, that is not a diplomacy bug! Sometimes the AI will have fun replies to messages you send to them. For example the one you mentioned here " Thou hast proven thyself most worthy. I declare us friends." is a message that has a chance of being sent as a reply by AI players (Definitive Edition AI) when you type and send ‘gg’ in the voice chat. There are more message combinations that may be sent by AI players and text strings triggering them that I may not aware of as well.
If you were still mid-game, I am positive it meant the AI was just replying to you and did not in fact want to become friends with you in-game (as in, declare an alliance). It might still be a bug that it sent you this message, though, but that depends on what you and your teammate have been messaging to each other in the minutes preceding Wenceslaus I’s message. Still, diplomacy-wise that message has no meaning whatsoever!
1 Like
I didnt chat with the AI, though… and by default on my games, chats are only seen by teammates; enemy chats blocked. For your scenario, I would have had to manually go into the dialogue menu and enabled enemy chats, which I didnt
I’d appreciate random fun quips by the AI on occasion, but this one was misleading, imo… since you can actually become friends if teams aren’t locked :-/ sigh…
Understood, then it is most probably a bug in the AI programming, since it sent you a chat message when it shouldn’t have for some reason Or perhaps there are more instances where these messages are sent that I am not aware of. Or AI are able to detect chat messages regardless, unlike human players. To be honest, I’m not really sure.
In any case, what I wanted to say is that it was still a response intended as a fun easter egg more than an actual gameplay-revelant feature. AI have very clear messages that send to you when they want to ally with you or change diplomacy stance to neutral, something similar to ‘change your stance towards me!’ or ‘gimme these resource amounts and we’ll be allies’, so you can at least keep that in mind for future games. What matters is that the AI in your game, while it mistakenly sent you that message, was not actually trying to ally with you, which it couldn’t to begin with in a Lock teams game of course.