Civ II game a decade old

The problem with Civ4 is that the AI is so hyper-aggressive that long-term stability is all but impossible, unless I become a dominant superpower and take on the role of "world police," intervening in every war of aggression on the side of the underdog. But after awhile, there's really no fun in that. So I have tried to cultivate a game in which a few superpowers are at least my equals, if not my superiors. Since I'm always going to war to defend whoever's about to get wiped out, unfortunately, I'm switching sides constantly, and diplomacy is basically out of the question. (None of the AI players will even return my calls, so to speak. We've all nuked each other so many times over that we won't even speak to each other now).

The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict. No, when it declares war, it won't cease until either it's beaten or it totally annihilates its enemy. It's like a Terminator. It becomes quickly apparent that the Nash Equilibrium in a game of Civ4 is one nation standing, while all others have ceased to exist. The game drives ineluctably toward this conclusion, unless the human player puts aside his own nation's interests in pursuit of global stability and game longevity. (And, ironically, being the sole force for stability renders him a political pariah among all the other nations). It's sort of like trying to play one sport, when all the other players in the game have been programmed to play another.

Sometimes I wish the AI were more sophisticated, and/or that it could be incentivized to prefer economic growth and interests over nonstop warmaking. Or that one possible victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind (i.e., "Global Victory," instead of just one nation's domination of all others by X or Y measure, or else its complete extirpation of all other peoples on the planet). I realize that's not the game that 99.99% of Civ players want to play, but it's refreshing to hear that I'm not the only one.

This is why I don't play civ. Total war AIs are a bizarre choice in a strategy game. I dislike it when games are setup in a way where I'm the only one thinking strategy and the AI opponents are there to give me a sense of action. Total war in the real world is rare.

>Or that one possibly victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind

When I was a kid I played a strategy game on the original Mac. I think it was called Balance of Power. The game punished you when war broke out. It didn't encourage it. The game ended if you and the Soviets got into a nuclear conflict. Why can't more games have rational goals instead of just being a more advanced form of Pacman?

Agreed 100%. To me, it seems silly -- not to mention cynical and fatalistic -- that the sole purpose of diplomacy in Civilization games is to add a strategic dimension to warmaking. That's what it is. The game is basically in a constant state of war, and peace only exists if something is going wrong: i.e., the powers are (momentarily) too evenly balanced to attack one another, or someone's just biding time to sneak-attack someone else, or everyone's spending a few years recovering from World War XXIV before gearing up for World War XXV.

That said, Civlization can still be an immensely fun and rewarding game. It's not the game I want it to be, but I enjoy trying to squeeze every last ounce of emergent gameplay from it.

"Why can't more games have rational goals instead of just being a more advanced form of Pacman?"

I suspect because there just isn't a big enough market for games of that nature. Maybe there is a handful of us out there. Maybe a relatively small handful, but one that's willing to pay a fair amount for a really great, truly strategic global power game. I dunno. Maybe it's worth organizing, or Kickstarting, or what have you. If any game devs out there are reading this and are interested, know that there's a niche crossing its fingers for you.

http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/09harvest.html