The intention was for Gandhi to be peaceful to a fault. That the famous Indian leader would be near impossible to anger, to reflect his famous passive resistance philosophy. In Civilization, hostility was handled on a ten point scale, and to reflect Gandhi's pacifism his hostility would hover at around one or two on the scale.
The problem for Civilization players was, however, that if they caused global hostility to reduce all at once, Gandhi's hostility would drop below the lowest measure on the scale. And because the game didn't handle negative integers, Gandhi's hostility rating wrapped around to the other end of the scale - and it didn't land on back on 10. It wrapped around and made its way to 255, and Nuclear Gandhi was born.
This is obviously an extreme - and unintended - example, but when a warmongering Gandhi lands on your doorstep, you’re very much reminded that you’re playing against a computer, and something has gone comically awry. The Civilization series has always had trouble creating AI that’s comparable to playing against a human. Overseeing complex civic, technological and military concerns is tough, and adding in state relationship management into the mix complicates things further.
Civilization VI is tackling its AI head-on, refining and building on the series' systems to make for more believable opponents who can make more nuanced decisions. And to ensure the game doesn’t become impenetrable for the player, the team has a neat solution – delegation.
City states were added to Civilization V to give the diplomatic victory condition a shot in the arm. Neutral mini-civilizations, they required players to complete basic quests to earn approval, which in turn would result in the city states inevitably voting for you as the world leader. It was a good place to start, but Civilization VI has bigger plans.
The quests are still present - kill barbarians invading your land, acquire sugar as a resource - but you no longer jockey for favour with city states using an obscured measuring system. Now you compete for city state influence with other Civilizations using envoys. Envoys are earned by completing city state quests and through civic-related goals within your Civilization, and you get bonuses depending on how many you assign to each of your diminutive neighbours. Having one envoy with each city state is wise, because you get basic bonuses no matter what. Nan Madol in Micronesia, for example, might give you +2 culture in your capital just for establishing contact.
Bows, arrows and catapults... all you need, right?
The real bonuses begin when you establish at least three envoys and maintain more envoys than any other civilization. Becoming the suzerain - or feudal overlord - of a city state gives you huge bonuses, turning the city state into a vassal that you can call on for military might while still operating autonomously. And their bonuses are typically historically significant - to use Nan Madol as an example again, the famous coral city of Micronesia could give you +2 culture for every district adjacent to a coast tile, which is a huge boon if you started near a body of water.
Becoming the suzerain - or feudal overlord - of a city state gives you huge bonuses, turning the city state into a vassal that you can call on for military might while still operating autonomously.
The suzerain system is sort of genius, because it feeds into the diplomatic playstyle so heavily. In Civilization V city states were useful for small bonuses from quests, but their focus was on spreading the world leader vote. Conflict around city states typically only arose towards the end of the game. Thanks to suzerain bonuses, conflict with other Civilizations can spring up in a moment. Imagine those pesky Egyptians take away your suzerain status with Kabul, where you were earning double military XP in battles you initiated. If the bonus was critical to your ongoing strategy - say you were waging a military campaign against a reluctant enemy and you were using Unit promotions to mitigate healing downtime - taking back suzerain status from Egypt becomes a high priority objective.
The diplomatic scene in Civilization VI is much richer as a result of this delegation. While Civilizations still manage their diplomacy based on their relationships with their opponents relative to their end game goals, the bonuses involved with establishing strong ties to city states disperses the pressure. And it can also give you handy information about a civilization's goals. If they fight tooth and nail to hold onto suzerain status with the scientific city state of Geneva, they might be working towards a research-based goal (and you can disrupt their efforts by declaring war on them, which negates Geneva's suzerain bonus).
Diplomacy is more than just city state interactions, of course. As mentioned in an earlier preview hidden objectives play a massive role in driving the AI.
"We've got these big characters, these leaders with big personality types, and they're playing the game in distinct ways," Sarah Darney, Associate Producer at Firaxis, tells me. "Their historical agenda dictates how they navigate the game field. It gives them a familiarity when they play. 'That's Catherine [de Medici, French Leader], so I know I need to look out for spies.' With the hidden agendas that mixes things up. It adds another level, which means you want to be friends with everyone, or at least learn something about them through espionage."
A little light espionage.
I can confirm the secondary hidden objective hinted at by Lead Designer Ed Beach is not being implemented - Civ VI AI will have just the one hidden objective that players can reveal by building a strong relationship with them. The hidden objectives make diplomatic interactions a dynamic guessing game. In my hands-on, Cleopatra of Egypt was doing her best to make every nearby city state a thing of the past. She'd pause occasionally to remind me that my civilization, lead by Pedro II of Brazil, was weak. It seemed like her hidden objective was to make as many enemies as possible.
Meanwhile Theodore Roosevelt had a different hidden objective. If I had to guess, it would be to establish and develop the city of Baltimore and then to trade it to the glorious Civilization of Brazil for a book you can now get for free on Kindle. Because towards the end of my play session, the 26th President of the United States did exactly that, trading Sun Tzu's The Art of War for the place dubbed "The City That Reads" without a shred of irony.
It was probably a bug, to be fair. Civilization has a storied history of amusing bugs, after all, and we were playing pre-release, very much unfinished game code. It's about increasing priorities for the AI. From its humble beginnings in the first Civilization, where AI operated on a 10 point anger scale, Civilization VI has your opponents making decisions against a handful of systems for diplomacy alone.
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