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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.
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Yeah, they kinda screwed themselves by getting the first one perfect. The ideal sequel would be "Civ 1, with new graphics and better automation". Then iterate on that every few years.
Have you tried Polytopia[0]? [0] https://polytopia.io/
I'm not sure the civ guys can come up with something to compete with it. The recent games were so bloated and everything dragged on to the to point you'd just lose interest mid game, or quit before an inevitable victory/loss in the late game.
Also I'm not sure what you could do to improve Polytopia to make it a better game, except adding multiplayer team games.
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,…
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.
In particular, humans are very good at reasoning based on limited information. We can form hypotheses about where resources or objectives might be, or if an enemy unit goes out if the visible map, estimating where it could be on a later turn, or what it’s presence indicates about its home civilisation’s disposition out of sigh. That sort of thing is extremely hard to program, so the only way to compensate for the AIs inability to intuit information is by actually giving it the information.
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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.
> The dirty secret is we think we want the AI to play more realistically, but actually don't. The dirty secret is that we don't know if we want that. So far we don't have technology to make Civ AI play remotely like a reasonable human (at least not on a consumer grade PC). So we have absolute zero data point on how players will react to that.
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Yes as much as I have found memories of the first Civilization, I'd still say Civ 2 is my favorite followed by Civ IV. Alpha Centauri is still my favourite of them all though.
I keep buying them but I only ever liked civ IV. Stealing cities with culture was so much fun. They also had Spock do the voice acting. What a phenomenal game. Literally the only turn based strategy I like
Did Civ6 end up being good? Civ games usually only beat their predecessors once the last expansion comes out. I stopped playing 6 after the climate change DLC. Was pretty underwhelmed. Has it matured now like 5 did?
I guess I just wanted a simpler game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The dirty secret is we think we want the AI to play more realistically, but actually don't. The dirty secret is that we don't know if we want that. So far we don't have technology to make Civ AI play remotely like a reasonable human (at least not on a consumer grade PC). So we have absolute zero data point on how players will react to that.
Also if this was actually true nobody would play multiplayer. And many people only play multiplayer because the AI is dumb.