Trip said:
If the player gets to a point where he's so strong that all of the other civs have to ally to bring him back down, then that's not 7:1 odds. It should be the goal of the game to keep the odds 1:1 (in an interesting way) in order to make things interesting.
What the game should be doing in that instance is declaring the player the winner, then on to the next game.
It's called "class". In chess, you exhibit it by resigning when you are certain you have reached a losing position. Civ has always lacked the ability to do this, because the victory conditions have been tailored to reaching the modern age in every game, rather than evaluating when the outcome has become certain.
So yes, you and I agree on the "simulation is broken" assessment. And yes, fixing that cannot be done via the AI alone. However, we part company on the thought that it is somehow "interesting" if the AI fights and claws via any available means until the bitter end. That is an absurdity.
Should there be some ganging up on stronger opponents? Perhaps. But if done poorly, then it won't be worth playing. It won't be FUN, and it won't be HARDER, it will merely be LONGER. Dragging it out like that is not the right direction to go, in my view. Anybody who played a significant amount of Civ2 has probably already had their fill of that dynamic.
There should be ample difficulty levels and options for players to dial up the AI with bonuses to whatever level is necessary for it to give a particular player a run for his money. Then let him at them, and when he wins, forget dragging it out. Call the game and start another. Let the player regulate how much challenge he wants. If he sandbags and always wins, that's his choice. If he plays over his head and loses most of the time, likewise. Give them lots of options and let THAT cover any shortfall in the AI's performance.
Meanwhile, make the AI behave like a civ, not like a gamer. Gamers who are only interested in winning by any means can seek like-minded competition in the MP arena and be much more satisfied than with playing an AI. Single player gamers who like SP will be seeking adventure, not merely victory. They want to explore different maps, different civs, different situations, different strategies. If the AI does the same thing in every case, that's not good.
If the AIs always team up on a strong player, why, that's Civ1 and Civ2 Strategic Predestiny all over again. Did you know that the AI from Civ1 is DESTINED to declare mass war on the player at certain dates on the calendar. The whole world declares war on the player. Same date every game, over and over and over. How many times can you play that before you've been there and done that and never want to see it again? For me, it was about one year.
The funnest part of Civ for me is the early game, the land grab and building phase when there are lots of choices on the table. Later, the game becomes mop up, the "cashing in" of one's efforts in an attempt to reach closure. In many games, the game is over WELL before the end. Only in close contests is it worthwhile to play to the end of the tech tree.
The AI should make the JOURNEY fun, not do its level best to play the toughest. It should be tough, yes, but make it tougher with more bonuses, rather than by having it do things only a Hitler or Napoleon would do as its MAIN strategy seen over and over and over, ad nauseum.
Frankly, that "ganging up" thing is a crutch. It's what you do when you can't write a better AI. Maybe when Civ1 was inventing this genre, that was the limit of imagination. The game itself had to be played for human beings to experience its potential, and thus open the way to better AI. An AI, after all, cannot do anything it isn't programmed to do. Thus the programmer must first be able to do it, and then find a way for the code to implement this knowledge.
Civ3's victory conditions are ALL GAMEY. They suck. Domination needs 67% of land and population? Give me a break. 40% is probably too high, for the player. And it SHOULD be too high for an AI, assuming a standard or larger map. (Domination percentage should perhaps scale with the number of civs in the game. More civs means less land needed to win, as the rest is divided between more factions.) Cultural victory was a cool concept that needs more work. It doesn't scale to map size (or didn't at first -- though they did listen to me when I suggested it for C3C) and civ-wide culture is best obtained via ICS. Then the diplo victory... build a wonder and wipe out anybody who doesn't like you, or keep at least half the AIs on your good side.
Only conquest and space, the same two victory conditions available in Civ1, are well executed. And eveny they are gamey!
Conquest is NOT an objective many civs have ever had a shot at. Who? Greece? Alexander was the greatest conqueror of all time, relative to his era, and even The Great Himself conquered but a miniscule slice of the earth's surface. Rome? China? France? Germany? Japan? USSR? USA? Only the madmen of the earth, the megalomaniacs, even bother to try. Despots only need apply. Free peoples do not behave that way. Thus it is ABSURD in the extreme to have the Civ AIs gunning for domination/conquest while they are lining up in Democracy because it's the "best" government.
They don't even do it in a coherent fashion, but merely throw it together out of simple urges to obtain more land, to attack SOMEBODY, to buy alliances and sell their military services to any asking bidder. It's NOT BAD. Better than anything else ever put forward in the genre. But surely something better can be done.
Even the space race victory has NOTHING to do with reality. Build a spaceship to take colonists to another star and your civ "wins"? Wins what? Life doesn't work like that.
That said, Civ is -not- intended to be a sim game. It's a strategy game. And yet most folks who stick with SP want an experience, an immersion. They want to build a civ, not just build an army. One of the complaints voiced by many about Civ across all its iterations has been that the game is bent to war. It's all about supporting the army, and who can get to conquest first, to the winning SoD and the commanding lead on military/production. The game tips and then it's over, whether or not the software forces mop-up to obtain closure. The other victory conditions occur only in the absence of an emerging military victor. Conquest trumps all, therefore conquest is the mega victory. Thus from a gaming standpoint, it's the only type of victory to aim for. Even if you fail, you'll be in the position to swap to something else.
Can that be improved upon? Likely. Do they have good people working on it? Let's hope. How much will they be able to do? Only time will tell.
Diplomacy is where Civ is lacking most. Civ3 took HUGE strides in that direction (in the right direction) by having the AIs behave indepdently instead of as a team. Now you want to undo that for the sake of making it "harder" and "more interesting"? We'll have to disagree on that point.
The Civ3 AI is "market based". It's primary urge on the diplomatic front is cash. Hard cold cash, one gold piece as good as any other. If the AI can sell a tech to ANY buyer (if the buyer can pay the market rate) it will. An AI will sell a military alliance vs anybody they don't have an MPP with. Dirt cheap, too. Map info, techs that enable wonders to be built, resources vital to the gameplay... the AI sells everything to anybody. That's a good place to start improving the AI. Stop making cash its god. Instead have "my people's best interests" be the guiding principle, and define that in ways that make at least a shred of historical sense, in addition to gameplay in pursuing victory.
Trip said:
If teaming up to take down #1 is the best way to win, why not do it?
Because it's ridiculous. In real life, everyone can win. "Winning" in life is not a zero sum game. Person A does not "win" by stepping on, ruining, and destroying Person B. In fact, it is probably to Person A's advantage to win by HELPING Person B, who may return in kind if Person A needs help. Together they may achieve things neither could alone. Simple, fundamental metaphysics in play here.
A game where "winning" is defined by making everyone else the loser is a poor simulation of history. Galactic Civilizations at least got this one right. The "Allied Victory" in GalCiv allows a "side" to win the game by eliminating all its enemies and making allies of everybody else. One could potentially make allies of everybody, and not have to eliminate anybody, though that is rarely how it plays out. (I think the best I ever did was allied victory with one civ eliminated, leaving five intact, including me.) That's LIGHT YEARS ahead of Civ or anything Civ has ever done on the diplomatic victory front. Too bad the GalCiv AI isn't stronger. (It's considerably weaker than the Civ3 AI, for sure.)
This is the direction I would take the AI. Not a purely military one, but one that has real choices to make. Military as one option, sure, and a strong one at that, but also diplomacy as a real option, alliances as something more than an elimination tournament. LET'S NOT PLAY HIGHLANDER HERE. "There can be only one," is a machismo fantasy, not a realistic behavior model.
In the real world, nations have thrived more by being creators than being destroyers, with only a few notable exceptions, all of whom have been discarded to the dustbin of history's eventual losers.
- Sirian
I'm sure I'm not alone on that score. 
. Nowadays we wage war by political means (well usually). Since the rise of corporatism we wage war by having international trae organisations in our pockets, serving only the interest of the western countries. Nations invade other nations with culture (coca cola, mcdonald and other crap like that 
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