Civ II game a decade old
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Civ II game a decade old
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Re: Civ II game a decade old
#2Is it possible to run a completely automated Civ game (all players computer players)? Should be a quicker way to simulate the future. Perhaps the AI could learn "War Games" style that nuclear war is not the way to go...
Or maybe it would be a depressing result if the AIs would not nuke around without a human in the mix?
Re: Civ II game a decade old
#3To be clear, this is a guy that has been playing a single game of Civ II for 10 years. When I first saw this I thought, isn't Civ II older than 10 years? (came out in 1996)
I love Civ and still go back and play Civ II at times. I spent a lot of time with Civ III and IV as well (and a little with V), but it's nice to go back to my first experience with the genre (Civ 1 was before my time, sadly).
Re: Civ II game a decade old
#4To be clear, this is a guy that has been playing a single game of Civ II for 10 years. When I first saw this I thought, isn't Civ II older than 10 years? (came out in 1996) I love Civ and still go back and play Civ II at times. I spent a lot of time with Civ III and IV as well (and a little with V), but it's nice to go back to my first experience with the genre (Civ 1 was before my time, sadly).
Thanks, I sometimes only read the comments on HN. My first thought was: Civ III is over 10 years old.
Re: Civ II game a decade old
#5The 3-way division of the world into "super-continents" and the constant war keeping the populace in a perpetual state of starvation and poverty, with the entire world in disrepair is so incredibly reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 it's scary.
If you haven't read 1984, it's a startlingly bleak view of a potential future (from a historical perspective, but still applicable today, I think) particularly through technology and a loss of privacy. It's the origin of terms like "big brother" and "doublethink" -- worth a read.
One of the most interesting excerpts from this piece IMO: "I wanted to stay a democracy, but the Senate would always over-rule me when I wanted to declare war... ...Anyway, I was forced to do away with democracy roughly a thousand years ago because it was endangering my empire."
Although I don't necessarily think it will be because of war, I can see a potential future where people/persons decide democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process -- democratic process being (more or less) committee-based decision making, which proxies votes through individuals based on what is essentially a popularity contest. That's particularly true here in Australia at the moment (amidst a minority government with a lot of political sniping on both sides and seemingly very little real progress) despite the fact that we have a comparatively strong economy, low inflation, low unemployment and generally nothing really significant (again, comparatively) to complain about.
Re: Civ II game a decade old
#6Is it possible to run a completely automated Civ game (all players computer players)? Should be a quicker way to simulate the future. Perhaps the AI could learn "War Games" style that nuclear war is not the way to go... Or maybe it would be a depressing result if the AIs would not nuke around without a human in the mix?
I remember trying this when I was younger (with the Cheat menu). The primary issue is that while it is quicker, it is difficult to figure out the details of what is happening in the game when there is no pause at the beginning of your turn. Since the AI "personalities" of the different computer players cause some of them to be more aggressive than others, all of the games I tried to simulate in this way ended up with one military aggressive AI player dominating enough of the world that they did not need nuclear weapons.
There was a significant amount of variance among AI personalities and winning strategies in the various versions of Civilization I played, so I suspect that your success would vary depending on which version you were using. For example, if you were using CivNet, the multiplayer version of the original game, the anemic AI in that game might very well lock into some sort of peaceful stalemate, but the contentious resource model in Civilization III would probably produce different results.
Re: Civ II game a decade old
#7Is it possible to run a completely automated Civ game (all players computer players)? Should be a quicker way to simulate the future. Perhaps the AI could learn "War Games" style that nuclear war is not the way to go... Or maybe it would be a depressing result if the AIs would not nuke around without a human in the mix?
You can do this easily with Freeciv (Civ2-ish clone), unfortunately the AI is not as interesting (what I've seen).
Re: Civ II game a decade old
#8[deleted]
Re: Civ II game a decade old
#9If you disable the space race as a winning condition the chance of a nuclear holocaust over time approaches 1.
I'm not saying there are any lessons to be had from it. It's only a game.
Re: Civ II game a decade old
#10Is it possible to run a completely automated Civ game (all players computer players)? Should be a quicker way to simulate the future. Perhaps the AI could learn "War Games" style that nuclear war is not the way to go... Or maybe it would be a depressing result if the AIs would not nuke around without a human in the mix?
You could do it with Alpha Centauri - I seem to remember an article by Firaxis where they explained putting in this feature so they could tweak a parameter, set the AI off and see what effect it had.