A typo in ‘Civilization VI’ game code can ‘yeild’ some strange A.I. behavior

By Mark Austin Published March 19, 2018

Civilization VI review — Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you’ve noticed that the priorities of your A.I. opponents in Civilization VI seem to be a little off, you’re not alone. Straight White Shark, a modder on the Something Awful forums, seems to have been the first to discover a typographical error in the game file that governs the default behaviors of the game’s various leaders.

via @Hentzau, it appears that Civilisation VI's AI was completely broken on release because of… a typo. pic.twitter.com/RufPrcjzQX

— mike cook (@mtrc) March 14, 2018

This appears to be the only place where “YIELD” is misspelled, meaning that these priorities are not used by the A.I. As you can see, the programmers meant for the A.I. leaders to emphasize production, followed by gold, science, and culture, with faith as the lowest priority.

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The typo means these priorities are never implemented, so faith gets treated with the same importance as production.

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How something like this could have survived thousands of hours of testing and evaluation is a mystery, especially for such a high-profile title as Civilization VI. It’s not clear if these errors were in the original release version of the game, or if they’re the result of a recent update.

Shark and others have verified that correcting the code does make a difference in A.I. behavior. PC Gamer used multiple tests to evaluate the differences. When running identical Autoplay games, for example, Pedro II of Brazil produced far less faith over a 100-turn span when using the corrected code.

Firaxis has responded with a statement to PC Gamer, confirming that the errors were not intentional, and they would be corrected:

“We’re aware of a community-reported bug that has a minor impact on AI behavior. We’ve also made sure that everyone knows that I goes before E except after C … or other weird exceptions,” the developer said. “Thanks to all who helped bring this to our attention and there will be a fix included in our next update.”

If you don’t want to wait for the update, there’s also a mod on the Steam Workshop that corrects the priorities.

Spelling errors aside, we found Civilization VI to be one of the best games of 2016. Expanding on the best features of Civ V, it adds new features and systems that integrate flawlessly with the Civ experience you’ve grown to love. If you’re just getting started, we’ve got some hints and tips for you here, and if you grabbed the recent Rise & Fall expansion you won’t want to miss our strategy summary.

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Mark’s first encounter with high-tech was a TRS-80. He spent 20 years working for Nintendo and Xbox as a writer and…

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