Worrying review: Tom Chick says AI and Diplomacy are dumb. Has "Serious Problems"

Thormodr said:
Of course. No one expects human level AI.

However, Firaxis and JS had been trumpeting how great the AI was and how it didn't need to cheat at all. Sounds like they were full of hot air.
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It sounds like they were.

And that's the key. Sounds like.

We'll be finding out in less than 20 hours. While I think it's possible for us to say, based on reviews and current information, a great deal about the game thusfar... judging the quality of the AI is something that we pretty much have to wait to play to really do, don't you think?
 
I just hope that AI wil be tweaked and that Jon Shafer takes it high priority to get it better with little patches up to, say, Christmas :) and further on :)
 
Thormodr said:
Of course. No one expects human level AI.
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After all even the more advanced AI in a strategy game is only moderately competent at best. Even with today hardware and programming it's impossibile to have an AI capable to manage well every situation in a game so complex.

That said, many of the declaration about the AI in CIV V are simply marketing.
While i expect a relatively good handling of the AI civs i am fully prepared to see a lot of massive strategical and tactical errors, like the reviewers have probably already seen.

I don't think that it will detract anything from the game and, to be fair, CIV was never the pinnacle of the genre regarding this aspect.
 
PACrivellaro said:
It sounds like they were.

And that's the key. Sounds like.

We'll be finding out in less than 20 hours. While I think it's possible for us to say, based on reviews and current information, a great deal about the game thusfar... judging the quality of the AI is something that we pretty much have to wait to play to really do, don't you think?
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Naturally we'll find out soon enough. Very likely the AI will be substandard though. Hopefully they put a lot of effort into improving it.
 
Thormodr said:
Naturally we'll find out soon enough. Very likely the AI will be substandard though. Hopefully they put a lot of effort into improving it.
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I'm not getting my hopes up either. But a few reviews of what is -not- the release model (Greg talked in the live gameplay video that they're tweaking things all the way up to release) isn't really affecting that. If the devs say they put a lot of work into the AI...

... well, I don't see any reason why they would lie. I'm guessing it's going to be quite a bit better than Civ IV (though that's not saying too much :lol:).
 
I have very little expectations for the AI, as with all Civ games. But there is certainly enough other things in the game that are good to great that it should be fun.

It's been humorous over the past few months to read about how cool combat and diplomacy will be. It probably will be from our point of view but don't expect the AI to do either of those things effectively.
 
hadberz said:
PC Gamer review basically says the same thing. The AI has issues with warfare. I'm certainly not going to cancel my preorder. They did give the game a 93%, so must not be that big of a deal.
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PC Gamer gave Spore and Empire Total War good [90%+] ratings.

Total War has a thousand bugs and fatal crashes on release.

Spore was... indescribably bad.
 
Buccaneer said:
I have very little expectations for the AI, as with all Civ games. But there is certainly enough other things in the game that are good to great that it should be fun.

It's been humorous over the past few months to read about how cool combat and diplomacy will be. It probably will be from our point of view but don't expect the AI to do either of those things effectively.
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On Deity it won't matter how effectively they do it.

Not when their GDR just blew your musketmen up with its LASERZOMG.
 
Civ 4 (Even after beyond the sword), had terrible AI (I mean, Immortal is easy to beat with practice, and the bonuses the AI gets are incredible at that level), especially in warfare (Where it didn't know how to do anything really). Oh, and Civ 4's diplomacy system was dumb too. Religion made autofriends and autoenemies with no way to get around it.
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Specifically... "Immortal is easy to beat with practice"

What the heck? Are you sure you are playing Civ 4? I'd be happy to lend you my copy. I think the best game I ever had was an Emperor or (more likely) a Monarch level game where I dominated from the beginning, and won an "early" victory sometime in the early-mid 1900's. But only after I had conquered most of the other civilizations. I forget if it was a domination victory or something else.

And that happened once.


My guess is that the AI will not be anywhere near the abilities for most of us seasoned gamers. HOWEVER, it will be good enough for most players. MOST players do not visit Civ Fanatics.
 
The_Reckoning said:
PC Gamer gave Spore and Empire Total War good [90%+] ratings.

Total War has a thousand bugs and fatal crashes on release.

Spore was... indescribably bad.
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Spore is just fun but quite poor replay value for me

Empire: TW made me want to smash the wall to dead though.(even patch!!!!)
 
Abraxis said:
Seriously, are some of you actually trying to discredit him because he said something bad about Civ5?
Smarten up.

As a programmer, I have not once believed their claims, or expected a great AI after only two and a half years of development, and the complexity of Civ.

Even in 2KGreg's play through, Napoleon came from head-on, obviously going for that 1hex crossing. Not once did he try to maneuver around Greg's forces to out flank them, or try anything seeming even remotely intelligent.

It built units, and sent them in a B line right into his defenses.

Don't get me wrong, I still think it will be a fun game on the harder difficulties, but if you're expecting good AI, you're in for a huge disappointment.
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Greg said that Napoleon did try coming from the water earlier in the game prior to where the save started. Greg destroyed all his ships, and Napoleon smartened up and stop trying.

Also this is not a review, in the slightest. Its a paragraph that says if your worried that your going to become addicted to Civ V, then you better be worried, because its probably going to happen. He names two things that still need work, but thats expected. How many times was civ iv patched? Its gonna happen with V too, ya know? Also the whole "story" is about games to spend your money on, so isnt that a good thing Civ V is mentioned?
 
Remember reviewers are using pre-release code. Let us all not forget that one bug in one line of code can have dramatic consequences to the AI.

E.g. the 'closeness' bug on BTS that was fixed in Better BTS AI? Where the AI presumed that every other civ was 0 distance away from them since they were checking the distance to their own capital, not the other civ's? Such a simple thing can have massive consequences, and since the effect is rather gradual and fuzzy these can easily slip through the net for a while.

Face it, if a massive focus of this game has been to make the AI good, then this will either be fixed on release or patched. Also what difficulty level was this guy playing on? I've heard (I think from the podcasts) that lower difficulty levels are actually made to make silly mistakes.

Not worth getting all worried about.
 
Consider also that the reviewer most likely used an older preview build to make this assessment about the AI. We never know... the AI might just suprise us. I remember reading about the 4 levels of AI in this version of CIV - Strategic (city management), Tactical (military maneuvers), Global (interactions with the world) and Victory (strategy to win) - I remember being fairly impressed!
 
Keep in mind that the developers are also designing their AI to run at consumer levels of processing power. Deep Blue needed to be able to handle a trillion operations per second to be able to beat Kasparov at chess -- a game that has one winning condition, six different units, and a 64 tile map that is the same for every game. Designing an AI that can beat the best humans at civ might require years of additional development time and hardware requirements that exceed what most customers would be willing to pay for.
 
Kruelgor said:
Poor AI is what gave Napoleon Total War (81 meta on steam) such a low rating when compared to Empire Total War (90 meta on steam).

I hope that poor AI wont be a big problem with CiV V.
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Actually thats wrong. Napoleon was a much better game. It got a lower score for 4 reasons, 1. Reviewers were mad they were made to look stupid when empire was so unstable after sega said bugs would be fixed 2. It was so simillar to empire but priced like a full new game. 3. It is popular to slag off total war after empire even though napoleons probably one of the best games theyve released. And 4 the most important reason empire scored well above what it should have 80 is what i rank empire and 90 napoleon.

Just like civ they have good and bad releases, like i hated civ 3, which most people love. (im a big tw fan if you didnt guess)
 
I'm not worried about a mediocre AI (at release). It'll only improve with patches and expansions, and as modders get to tinker with the code. I think it's more important that the fundamentals of the game are solid at release, which it seems like they are. Bugs, AI issues, etc can all be improved, and certainly will be over time.
 
wapamingo said:
On the AI: we can only wait to see. AI is not easy to program as it will always have limits and will not be comparable to human - so join CIV5 MP community for the real thrill.
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That's good idea. Now, we'll have really interesting MP. I never wanted to play civ 4 MP, it looked boring, but with 1UPT now, we, superior humans, are going to have an interesting battlefield. And, btw, because this is my first civ game that I'm starting to play since it's release, I hope so that I'll become pro:mischief: and probably I'll try MP. Maybe steam isn't so bad for strategy games on MP. Who knows;)?
 
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