Improving Game Advisors

George79

Chieftain
Joined
Aug 13, 2011
Messages
4
Location
Mexico City
So as the title says i think the advisors need a more important role in the game because there isnt really much to say about them. Most of the information they give is obvious( scientific guy saying you need a library to boost science), useless(mainly the foreign advisor) or sometimes relevant information dug under all of the others.
I think they should give you more detailed information of whats going on in the game, here are some of my suggestions.

Scientific Advisor, a very important use this guy could have is tell when another player has enough money for a research agreement or maybe you could ask him for short advices of the techs available(this would be somewhat usefull for new players)

Foreign Advisor, she should keep track of the multiple dof,dow and denounciations that happen in every game. Other use i think she could have would be to give you her advice when a leader offers you a dof ,a joint war or maybe inform you of how other leaders think about you( especially how your warmonger tag is going)

Military Advisor, he is fairly usefull sometimes when he gives you an image of how a war is going or the state of your military but i think he could need a couple of more information to give( something like "they have more numbers but we have nukes" :lol:)

Economic Advisor, im a little blank on this one.

Also maybe the advisors could be used for a light espionage system, were you gather espionage points on a leader and when you reach a certain level of points the advisors would tell you more detailed information, something like alexander is planning to backstab ceaser or the iroquios are planning to rush you with their mohawks.

Those are some ideas i have but i would like to hear what you guys think.

G79
 
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Scientific Advisor, a very important use this guy could have is tell when another player has enough money for a research agreement or maybe you could ask him for short advices of the techs available(this would be somewhat usefull for new players)

Good suggestion. He only ever tells me how efficient I am.

Foreign Advisor, she should keep track of the multiple dof,dow and denounciations that happen in every game. Other use i think she could have would be to give you her advice when a leader offers you a dof ,a joint war or maybe inform you of how other leaders think about you( especially how your warmonger tag is going)

Another good suggestion. One of the frustrating aspects of the game is that when I get such an offer I usually can't remember who is friends with whom, who's at war with whom, who I have an RA with etc and end up making a very half-baked decision.

Military Advisor, he is fairly usefull sometimes when he gives you an image of how a war is going or the state of your military but i think he could need a couple of more information to give( something like "they have more numbers but we have nukes" :lol:)

My impression is that his advice is just a reflection of relative military numbers (which is generally hidden information). He often tells me to sue for peace when I'm in no danger at all. Maybe he could keep score in each war you're involved in and give a report on how many units you've lost and destroyed. He could also keep track of what units the enemy has been using and suggest what you should be building (such telling you to build pikes if they're using phants -- helpful for newbies).

Economic Advisor, im a little blank on this one.

The EA could give advice on how to boost gold via buildings, technologies, or refocussing cities as well as by selling stuff. Also, instead of just telling you that your people are unhappy (duh), it could suggest the cheapest/fastest buildings where to boost happiness.

Also maybe the advisors could be used for a light espionage system, were you gather espionage points on a leader and when you reach a certain level of points the advisors would tell you more detailed information, something like alexander is planning to backstab ceaser or the iroquios are planning to rush you with their mohawks.

That's a little too radical for me to think about this early in the morning.
 
A lot of this info is available if you're willing to use a couple mods. I especially recommend InfoAddict (historical graphs, world rankings by any stats you could want) and CivWillard (a bit intimidating but very flexible at-one-glance summary view of other players/Civs or CS's).
 
I think advisors need more attention. They might not be useful for hardcore gamers but casual gamers would certainly enjoy some useful info from advisors. I agree with the points made by OP. I would like to expand it further :-
Military Advisor would tell u the composition of enemy army based on what u have seen (could work really well if spies are introduced). So for example Greeks are spamming CC, he would advise u to build spears to counter.
Economic advisor would give u the best possible deals for luxuries, efficent ways to increase gold income etc. Instead of saying that u lack market in X,Y,Z cities, it should advise u to build markets in the higher gold producing cities.
Foreign advisor can give a better overview of the situation like we have researched astronomy so now we should find new continents & settle them, X civ is trying to compete us for Y CS etc.
Other things I would like to see are :-
UU,UB & UA specific advises.
An option to hide a certain tip permanently or temporarily.
Assign priorities to Advisor messages.
More explanation for advises & actions that can be taken to solve the problem.
Better recommendations for city placement.
 
The problem with the advisers is the murkiness of the info they give. Actually the only one I've ever looked at was the military adviser, before I got info addict, to check what he says about the size of potential enemies army relative to mine. If there are 2 civs and one has an army double the strength of yours and another has ten times the strength, you get the same 'advice' "they threaten our very existence" with no differentiation between two vastly different size armies. In infoaddict you can see nice graphs at a glance to take in that data quickly.
 
In infoaddict you can see nice graphs at a glance to take in that data quickly.

Sounds a little suspect. If it discloses information not diclosed through the standard interface (or calculable from same) then it is a cheat, "trainer" or whatever other euphemism you prefer.
 
Call it suspect if you will, but it improves the game substantially especially diplomacy. Being able to see the general diplomatic situation, like who's at war with who, who's DoF'ed who and such before making diplomacy decisions makes a huge difference to actually being able to use the system in an intelligent way.

I grant that there's no denying that you get data from infoaddict that you don't get from the advisers or other info sources, like how many techs civs have researched, who is trading with who and who likes/dislikes who etc.

When civ 5 was released I was majorly disappointed at the lack of graphs, charts and detailed technical information that to me has always been one of the joys of civ. This was one of the areas that I think truly was 'dumbed down' to use an overused phrase. Infoaddict remedies that to a large extent. I have only positive things to say about it.

Let's face it, the casual gamer market doesn't exactly bar up over sifting through arcane charts and graphs that provide accurate and detailed information that can have subtle to significant influences on your best decisions.
 
Sounds a little suspect. If it [InfoAddict] discloses information not diclosed through the standard interface (or calculable from same) then it is a cheat, "trainer" or whatever other euphemism you prefer.
I thought that at first too. But I soon realized that for me, it just wasn't fun having no idea where I stood relative to other players in terms of techs discovered, number of cities, etc. except for when those silly pop-ups gave me rankings like who the mostest literate civs were. Diplomatic decision-making actually became meaningful, requiring thought instead of guesswork (e.g., "Askia won't like this DoF, but Napoleon is about to make him irrelevant anyhow" or "Sure, Monty, let's wage war against Washington. Nobody else likes him anyway."). And being able to see graphs of military manpower, population, etc. over time and knowing how the world came to be how it is makes the game more immersive, less confusing, and more fun for me.

By all means, play however you want to, but I suspect that many players, like me, would have a "Gee, this makes way more sense than knowing nothing about how other players are doing..." moment as I did upon trying InfoAddict. I know it's made Civ an immensely more enjoyable and less frustrating experience for me.
 
The information you get through Info Addict is, as far as I know, essentially available to the player anyway. It's just barely accessible. You can find out how strong an opponent is as it is, it's just that it's only really accessible when you get a random notification occasionally. Making information accessible should be a goal of design, so improving the advisors to fill that role would make sense.
 
Call it suspect if you will, but it improves the game substantially especially diplomacy. Being able to see the general diplomatic situation, like who's at war with who, who's DoF'ed who and such before making diplomacy decisions makes a huge difference to actually being able to use the system in an intelligent way.

I grant that there's no denying that you get data from infoaddict that you don't get from the advisers or other info sources, like how many techs civs have researched, who is trading with who and who likes/dislikes who etc.

That bothers me. You generally wouldn't have access to that information about rival civs, at least not on a consistent basis. It would be good if certain techs progressively unlocked "intelligence" functions that provided that information. Probably too hardcore for the mass market though.

I tried downloading it and it didn't seem to make a difference. Probably I didn't do it right. I'll continue toiling away with stone age tools trying to craft my first immortal win, with only my feeling of moral superiority to keep me warm.
 
I'd be happy if an espionage system was incorporated that you had to invest into to get some of the type of information, or even some even more detailed like exact army composition and so forth, that infoaddict gets you. As it stands however, you can't even check the diplomacy situation when deciding to accept a DoF request which is unacceptable, you could always take notes but man who wants to do that?

The choice of display for the information in the vanilla game is very poor too imo, looking at the diplomacy overview screen just makes me laugh compared to the simplicity of the line graph in infoaddict.

Regarding info about the strength of the other civs, the AI presumably has access to this type of information when deciding to DoW as they know the relative sizes of the armies in play.

Overall though, I'd be happy to axe Infoaddict in favour of a comprehensive espionage system and an improvement of the in game info display.
 
I'd be happy if an espionage system was incorporated that you had to invest into to get some of the type of information, or even some even more detailed like exact army composition and so forth, that infoaddict gets you. As it stands however, you can't even check the diplomacy situation when deciding to accept a DoF request which is unacceptable,

Yes, that is hopeless. I'm thinking about switching to the IA game.
 
I'd be happy if an espionage system was incorporated that you had to invest into to get some of the type of information, or even some even more detailed like exact army composition and so forth, that infoaddict gets you. As it stands however, you can't even check the diplomacy situation when deciding to accept a DoF request which is unacceptable, you could always take notes but man who wants to do that?

The choice of display for the information in the vanilla game is very poor too imo, looking at the diplomacy overview screen just makes me laugh compared to the simplicity of the line graph in infoaddict.

Regarding info about the strength of the other civs, the AI presumably has access to this type of information when deciding to DoW as they know the relative sizes of the armies in play.

Overall though, I'd be happy to axe Infoaddict in favour of a comprehensive espionage system and an improvement of the in game info display.

Use InfoAddict (Mod)

Info Addict is amazing. It's a mod you can find from the mods section.

It tells you who is the top civ for almost every stat you want, and most importantly has historical charts of military strength. This is just a data mining app. The data is technically available to the user, just not displayed. Because it only shows the data for the 'top' civs in the game on the demographics menu.
 

Somehow I think he's heard of it.

Do you read posts before you respond to them?

The data is technically available to the user, just not displayed. Because it only shows the data for the 'top' civs in the game on the demographics menu.

If it's not displayed then it is not available, "technically" or otherwise. You can't rate a win using IA the same as one using only the information provided by the unmodified game. I would always disclose if I was playing CiV-IA instead of CiV.
 
Somehow I think he's heard of it.

Do you read posts before you respond to them?

The quote was meant for the OP who was asking for better advisors.



If it's not displayed then it is not available, "technically" or otherwise. You can't rate a win using IA the same as one using only the information provided by the unmodified game. I would always disclose if I was playing CiV-IA instead of CiV.

I'm not sure if that makes any sense. I've won just fine without, actually I just started using InfoAddict very recently, and the data is largely available and are things you could guess but not presented in a way that's easy to access.

ie: You can plot the Miliary advisor's data on who is stronger than you and cross reference it to the top military civ on the demographics section on a turn by turn basis, but that's a lot of busy work. And keep a text file open to keep track of Research Agreements.

Civ3 has a similar information tool, CivAssist, and I don't believe the serious player 'disclose' it, it's used widely. Ironically, as with any Civ games, it's not the information tools that needs disclosing when bragging/complaining about an issue, it's the modified/special rules with which a game is played, map types, and other issues that can affect the game but all we get is something that's distilled down into a single line of complaint or braggioso about vaguely doing something.
 
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