The AI is laughably bad, the combat AI is terrible but the diplomatic AI is far worse. Countries will get mad at you if you liberated their city because hey, "your troops are too close", lol. If you ally with them in war they will hate you for being a "warmonger". If you attack them they will readily give away all but one of their cities in exchange for peace. They are at war with a city-state one turn and declare they're now pledged to protect it the next. They tell you your conquest of France has pissed them off, when you're playing as France. They attack you at random no matter how much you've invested to be "friends". Sometimes they "attack" you with a Settler. One city state even declared war on itself and started shelling its own units.
I haven't seen
any of this after playing several games. I've not seen one instance of a friendly (or even neutral) country or city-state attacking at random, and I don't know if you even *can* attack with a Settler. Haven't seen one instance of a city attacking itself. Haven't seen even one example of a country giving away cities - in fact they're pretty adamant about NOT giving them away even if you're on the verge of overrunning them completely. Both times I've liberated a nation they immediately became allies and didn't gripe at all about my troops being close. Now, if you leave those troops there forever then eventually they'll get miffed about it, but that's to be expected.
Countries attacking themselves sounds like a bug - are you sure your sources weren't playing a beta? Or that there wasn't an enemy (or barbarian) unit there that they just didn't notice? One thing that I have seen is where barbarians will capture a citizen (worker) and when you kill the barbarian unit, the worker unit will be left there in the same hex.
Really, the only kind of silly thing I've seen in regards to diplomacy is the other night, I started taking over city-states to the point where all of them united and put out a global call to nations for help, and I noticed that I had the option to offer them troops to defend themselves against me.
The combat AI is much improved over that of the previous versions of the game. The diplomatic AI is pretty much the same, if a bit more simplified. The strategic AI is much improved - if you play at higher difficulties the AI countries plan far ahead.
Yeah, um, not getting this game until after quite a number of big patches, if ever. And I was so psyched. Good thing I didn't pre-order.
Ah, so you've never actually
played the game that you're bashing?
I'm not saying the game is perfect - there are plenty of things that I'd like to have seen done better - but I haven't seen any of what you've posted above after several games. And I've played through to the domination victory, the science victory, and the UN victory; so I've played a variety of different ways. You'd think that if these problems were so prevalent I'd have seen at least some of them.