a second expansion, or improved ai?

[Karpius]

I thoroughly enjoy strategy games and have since the Avalon Hill games of my youth [before there was such a thing as a personal computer].

I remember those days fondly! All those little cardboard counters with the unit information printed on them, and the results tables determined by simple dice throws. It required a certain manual dexterity to move units across the hex map without upsetting everything.

Can you imagine kids today having to deal with such a thing? Let alone the time it took to complete even a simple game as "Battle of the Bulge".

 

[King Rad]

I got my wife to play War in the Pacific with me one time. We played for an hour or two every day at lunchtime. And she refused to ever play it again! Of course, I usually spend 2-3 weeks on a civ game; but yeah, in War in the Pacific there was a marker for every unit that took part in WWII of cruiser strength and above!

 

[katanaD]

I would love to see an AI cloud service. Where you could tie a games AI processing to the vast reserves of a datacenter, instead of my little CPu, how ever great it might be.

then i think we could start to see some real good AI.

AI processing is CPU intensive. crank it up on your local machine and then turn times go out the window. A cloud solution could harvest the resources of 1000's of computers to process the turns. It would be a value added service i would actually pay for.

 

[DJ_Tanner]

I remember those days fondly! All those little cardboard counters with the unit information printed on them, and the results tables determined by simple dice throws. It required a certain manual dexterity to move units across the hex map without upsetting everything.

Can you imagine kids today having to deal with such a thing? Let alone the time it took to complete even a simple game as "Battle of the Bulge".

Remember? Those games never gave up, you did.

GMT has never stopped cranking those out. And they continue to grow in popularity by the year after their original playerbase abandoned them. You don't do that relying only on old players, there must be youngblood to see the level of growth they do. So maybe don't take shots at the "kids" when, its the older players, like yourself, that lost the patience for that style.

 

[Siesta Guru]

As far as moving units around, the AI is never going to get better at it. There are simply too many branches to calculate and the AI has to move hundreds of units as the game goes on. Even if you gave the AI one second per unit, we're talking 4-5 minute turns and the results probably wouldn't be much better because a "good" overall move relies on several individual moves.

Iterating through branches of possible turns isn't the only way to do moves and probably isn't the right choice here. You can implement pretty good heuristic systems on moves which don't rely on having to see 10 turns into the future, yet which still respect macro goals such as the ability to take cities. Humans players in civ don't really look far into the future in the same way people play chess either, civ is all very feeling based.
The branching factor in this game also isn't even that bad to begin with, it's a discrete map for starters. People have also been able to write pretty solid starcraft (2) bots, which is far more demanding in terms of branch factor due to continuous space and time as well as because of more unique unit types and abilities (most of civs units are similar enough to be treated like identical units). I've coded bots myself for games with similar complexity to civ in the tactical game as well, and doing really well in the tactical game for games like these is actually much easier than doing really well in macro.

Computers are also really fast. Giving a second per unit is completely unnecessary, you can do millions of calculations in a millisecond as long as you don't need harddrive access all the time. In discrete worlds you can make really effective movement systems which require as little as 0.01-0.1 ms per unit.

 

[isau]

I just want them to release the full DLLs so players can fix the AI and a few other small issues. Sadly that likely wont happen until after the final expansion.

 

[Karpius]

GMT has never stopped cranking those out. And they continue to grow in popularity by the year after their original playerbase abandoned them. You don't do that relying only on old players, there must be youngblood to see the level of growth they do. So maybe don't take shots at the "kids" when, its the older players, like yourself, that lost the patience for that style.

I never said I lost patience with them. I still have a few of those games that I played with a friend until he moved away. Now, without a ready player who can meet for several hours a week, playing against even a less than perfect AI is the next best thing.

 

[Bechhold]

Both.

 

[Karpius]

I got my wife to play War in the Pacific with me one time. We played for an hour or two every day at lunchtime. And she refused to ever play it again! Of course, I usually spend 2-3 weeks on a civ game; but yeah, in War in the Pacific there was a marker for every unit that took part in WWII of cruiser strength and above!

There was one game (I don't recall the name) which essentially represented several scenarios between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The map was in four sections and was perhaps 4' x 6' in total size. It encompassed the entire Eurasian continent and North Africa. My friend and I only played through one scenario of a Warsaw Pact invasion. Problem was, the map was so big, we had to play on the floor of the spare room of my house. It was there for months and then.....my wife got pregnant with our first child. No more play room!

 

[Southern_Hunter]

I will always take (and pay for) improved AI. So important for enjoying the game in the long run

 

[ashendashin]

So I am sure Firaxis would LOVE to put out a version of Civilization that can think and learn more like a human, and I am sure they would LOVE to be able to adjust all that coding as they pleased based on difficulty level and do all of that in an architecture that can run smoothly on the average home PC and still be affordable to the average gamer. Can you imagine the money they would make???

Yeah that's great. They should talk to Gazebo, Lord of the Community Patch, so they can get some groundwork started.