ciV AI discussion

Abremms

Prince
Joined
Mar 5, 2010
Messages
436
so the latest IGN preview had some very interesting information about ciV's AI system:

Spoiler :
IGN said:
As fun as they are, battles are just the basic components of victory and without a clear direction you can win every fight and still lose the game. A lot of effort is being made to ensure that the AI in Civilization V behaves in a way that makes sense. As we watched a test game play out in front of us, AI programmer Ed Beach explained the way the AI uses subsystems to create and execute its strategies. At the lowest level, the tactical AI uses the forces at hand to win a battle on a local scale. One step up from that, the operational AI picks which battles to fight and makes sure that the necessary forces are available. Moving even higher, the strategic AI manages the empire as a whole, focusing on where to build cities and what to do with them.

At the top of the ladder is the grand strategic AI, which decides how to win the game. If the grand strategic AI decides to go for a conquest victory, the strategic AI will build the infrastructure needed to wage war and the operational and tactical AIs will choose and fight the battles. That way the tactical AI won't be fighting battles merely for the sake of fighting battles, but because those battles are relevant in the grand strategic AI's big picture. In the case of the conquest victory, the AI will be aiming to capture the other civ's capitals, which is all that's needed for a military victory this time.

It sounds kind of insane, but Firaxis is constantly running AI games in a test environment to get a better sense of the relationships between all these systems. The one we saw playing out had the Songhai starting out very close to the city-state of Rio de Janeiro. Askia, leader of the Songhai, is very conquest-oriented, so it's no surprise that he tends towards military action. His civilization immediately went into warrior-rush mode and he soon had six warriors heading off to capture Rio.

Unfortunately, along the way a few of the warriors were lost in an unexpected fight with barbarians. So now the AI has to decide whether the tactical AI can even win the fight against Rio and, if not, what other adjustments need to be made at the other levels. Each of those four levels also has a unique opportunity to set or be influenced by the AI's research and diplomacy goals, which requires even more flexibility and cooperation among the various subsystems.

having four different AI sub-systems per each AI player seems a brilliant solution to me. it has potential for many varying levels of difficulty, and more unpredictability than previous civ games.

i wonder if you will be able to adjust the difficulty on each AI individually, even if just through a mod. it could be very interesting to have an AI with a brilliant strategic AI that is great at building a solid stable empire that is an economic and technological powerhouse, but the tactical AI is dumb as a box of rocks . i think people interested in peaceful games would be interested in that.

you could also make one with an incompetent operational AI that always picks the wrong battles to fight, and rarely gives the tactical AI the forces it needs, but the tactical AI is a genius and manages to pull victory from the jaws of defeat.

i dunno, could be an interesting element to modding.
 
I hope there i a random button so Bismark might be the peace-maker of the world.
 
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