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Civilization 7 Is in Development

polygon.com

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Re: Civilization 7 Is in Development

#151

Post by Delk »

jasonkester wrote: post #39

I bought the original when it came out and, together with Master of Orion, it ate so much of my life that it added a year to my time at university. Since then I've bought every new Civ as it came out and maybe played through two or three games before abandoning it. None of them capture the original, but rather just add more and different crap to micromanage. They're just not fun. The big exception is Alpha Centauri,…

I think Civ V in particular reduced micromanagement in certain respects to a degree where I now often find SMAC becoming tedious towards the end game. The main reason is the massive reduction in the number of cities and units in Civ V due to their high maintenance costs, and making individual cities matter more.

Since owning lots of cities essentially comes at relatively little cost in the older Civ games, towards the end the AI will have spammed cities in just about every nook and cranny. (The addition of sea bases in SMAC seems like an interesting addition at first but accentuates this problem.) In SMAC the relationships with some of the AI leaders also tend towards more or less perpetual war which, with the high number of cities, I find frustrating since striking down or conquering a chronically belligerent neighbour requires capturing (or razing) a ridiculous number of individually insignificant cities.

Shifting the maintenance costs of units from individual cities to gold paid from the treasury also reduces micromanagement of those unit costs. Having cities defend themselves at some level without having units stationed also reduces the need to micromanage their defences in some cases.

I haven't played the first Civ that much but I played a lot of Civ II, and I think it suffered from some of those issues as well.

It's true that some of the changes in later Civs do also add further micromanagement. The archaeologists added in Civilization V: Brave New World require going all over the world (and generally hand-holding them), and the entire mechanic seems like a bit of an odd but more or less compulsory detour in the game. And optimizing the great works stuff in general quickly turns into micromanagement. Dealing with e.g. city-states and their quests also introduces some of it, although they also add another (potentially interesting) strategical conduit to the game.

With that said, I still find SMAC to be one of the best games in the series, and there will always be a place in my heart for Civ II.

Re: Civilization 7 Is in Development

#152

Post by treeman79 »

dgant wrote: post #24
janalsncm wrote: post #6

It would be really interesting if some of the advances in AI could make their way into the game. Make the gameplay more human by incorporating recent advances in ML-based gameplay e.g. Diplomacy and Poker. Create more variety of dialogue using transformer models. Make in-game diplomacy more nuanced. There’s a lot that could be done.

The dirty secret is we think we want the AI to play more realistically, but actually don't. This is true in many games but especially Civilization, where we rely on the AI behaving predictably to feel mastery over the environment, and for diplomacy to feel "fair". If the AI were playing to win, diplomacy would mostly evaporate as a game system. It'd break the fiction of the game.

Current civ6. Harder modes just give massive starter advantages and statistical bonuses.

3 starter cities compared to your 1. That can be brutal to overcome. Top players like potato mcwhisky basically have to know every little thing possible to win.

Re: Civilization 7 Is in Development

#153

Post by 1123581321 »

JeffL wrote: post #136
1123581321 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sid had achieved competent but un-fun AI early on in the series and backed off. Players hate it because of how good it is at sacking poorly defended cities, especially early on when the AI knew too much about the global map.

The main thing I'd want in a Civ AI is to be barely competant at combat. Right now, if you can get a couple archers up in time, you can beat an AI army that's 2-5x your size depending on the terrain. Yeah, it feels bad as a beginner when you haven't bothered to build any military and an AI comes and kills you, but a beginner should be playing a beginner mode. I'd love God mode AI to put up any sort of half decent fig…

I’d suggest playing Old World if you want a challenging tactical opponent. It’s one unit per tile like Civ 5 onward.

Re: Civilization 7 Is in Development

#154

Post by 1123581321 »

int_19h wrote: post #61
1123581321 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sid had achieved competent but un-fun AI early on in the series and backed off. Players hate it because of how good it is at sacking poorly defended cities, especially early on when the AI knew too much about the global map.

A good AI shouldn't need to know any more about the global map than a human player would in the same situation. If they made it see the whole map, it's basically cheating.

Yes, but the problem persists since a truly competent AI will have good guesses about where and when to strike into your hidden territory based on what’s revealed to it, using the same advances that give computational room to respect fog of war.

Re: Civilization 7 Is in Development

#155

Post by becked »

Thorentis wrote: post #121

Civ 4 was peak Civilisation in my opinion. Everything about it felt polished, fun, and intentional. Great music and voice acting, wonderful expansion packs, great multiplayer that didn't require any other service, great scenario and custom maps.

The Civ 4 game designer recently created Old World, which is great; it has that same sense of intention, fun, and polish. Definitely recommend it.

Re: Civilization 7 Is in Development

#156

Post by flohofwoe »

dgant wrote: post #24
janalsncm wrote: post #6

It would be really interesting if some of the advances in AI could make their way into the game. Make the gameplay more human by incorporating recent advances in ML-based gameplay e.g. Diplomacy and Poker. Create more variety of dialogue using transformer models. Make in-game diplomacy more nuanced. There’s a lot that could be done.

The dirty secret is we think we want the AI to play more realistically, but actually don't. This is true in many games but especially Civilization, where we rely on the AI behaving predictably to feel mastery over the environment, and for diplomacy to feel "fair". If the AI were playing to win, diplomacy would mostly evaporate as a game system. It'd break the fiction of the game.

One area where current advances in (chatbot-style) AI would make a lot of sense to apply in games is to make non-critical (for gameplay) interactions with NPCs more interesting, just as "background noise" to make the game world feel more alive.

E.g. you could start an "interesting" conversation with a random NPC in GTA or Hitman instead of getting the same pre-canned reactions over and over.

The downside then however is that the scripted characters which are important for driving the story forward will feel like pre-programmed robots compared to any 'unpredictable' random NPC ;)

Re: Civilization 7 Is in Development

#157

Post by charcircuit »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #129
rvnx wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could chat to the AI, and the AI responses can be parsed to trigger in-game actions (e.g. declare war or offer a trade).

While I can't prove it wouldn't work, it seems doubtful. How would the LLM be made aware of the game state?

Meta made an AI to play Diplomacy which is able to talk to other players and play the game. It doesn't use a LLM, but it was able to win a tournament against human players.

https://ai.facebook.com/blog/cicero-ai-negotiates-persuades-...

Re: Civilization 7 Is in Development

#158

Post by acdha »

1123581321 wrote: post #57
JeffL wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the developers say, but I think it's part true and part a cop out. The AI in Civ 5 & 6 is just so so bad, that it's only challenging when you play on the really hard modes that gives them all sorts of cheats. And then it's a bit less fun because you're walking the line between impossible because of the cheating and having to essentially exploit the AI because of the cheating. I don't necessarily want an A…

Sid had achieved competent but un-fun AI early on in the series and backed off. Players hate it because of how good it is at sacking poorly defended cities, especially early on when the AI knew too much about the global map.

> when the AI knew too much about the global map.

Is it that players hate good AI or that flagrant cheating breaks immersion? I think the latter would be an interesting AI target: can you make something which plays well but doesn’t do things which are obviously impossible for the player to do in-game - e.g. helping the AI with some extra resources isn’t glaring but having attacks perfectly target things the AI shouldn’t be able to see, or instantly repair damaged units, etc. is something you could never duplicate even if you were the best player in the world.

Re: Civilization 7 Is in Development

#159

Post by istinetz »

simonh wrote: post #115
JeffL wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the developers say, but I think it's part true and part a cop out. The AI in Civ 5 & 6 is just so so bad, that it's only challenging when you play on the really hard modes that gives them all sorts of cheats. And then it's a bit less fun because you're walking the line between impossible because of the cheating and having to essentially exploit the AI because of the cheating. I don't necessarily want an A…

This comes up often in discussions about Axis & Allies Online. It has an AI, but it’s pretty basic and really only there as an aid to learn the rules before playing humans. The main way the game is played is ranked play on the built in ladder against humans, or custom games. There’s a discord that runs regular tournaments as well. The problem is AI for complex games like that is absurdly hard to develop. The combinat…

You can definitely give AI agents 'personality' - preference towards certain tactics, different play style, built in weaknesses.

In the context of Civ, you could have each civ leader have unique personality, and that would add a lot of color to the game.

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