acluewithout
Deity
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- Dec 1, 2017
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There’s a thread on Reddit where the FXS Devs discuss the AI and other issues. Link here. You can find some other quotes searching the Dev’s profile.
Some quotes below:
“Both of these changes would fall into a camp of feature that I've tried to avoid with all of my work on Civ 6: they would be features that do absolutely nothing when used on a human player.
This is something I avoid for two reasons: 1, the obvious multiplayer implications of the game containing features that simply don't apply in that context. 2, the fact that it gives the player more tools than the AI has.
Your comment about Civ being singleplayer, with multiplayer slapped on top, is sadly kind of true. But it's something that we're trying to shy away from: we want multiplayer Civ to be as well-supported as singleplayer Civ. This is why more concrete effects have been added to systems that in base game were only for manipulating the AI: diplomatic visibility now affecting combat, alliances now having strong in-game effects beyond locking in your diplomatic state with the AI, etc.
And, for point 2, we're very aware of the feedback that we're constantly receiving about the level of play of the AI. A lot of people look fondly back on the difficulty of the AI in games prior to Civ 5, but with 5 and 6, we made a change to have the AI actually play the same game as the human player. Previously, the game would just magically grant units and techs and such to the AI players in order to keep them competitive. Now, we may sneak the AIs extra yields or have them start on better footing, but they're not then cheating with those resources.
This does however mean that the AI is having a harder time playing the game, because it's really difficult to make an AI that plays well enough (and poorly enough) for the range of people who want to play against it. This gets worse when systems are added to the game that exist solely for the player to exploit.
This is why I settled on the system coming in with the next patch: all players get to see what other players voted on last time Congress voted on this Resolution. It's data that anyone can use (granted that data is more useful against an AI than a human player, as the AI are more likely to vote the same way again), and it doesn't require players making and keeping promises of "I'm going to vote on this next Congress".
Incidentally, that last point is part of why the oft-requested "let me barter with other players to get them to vote the way I want" isn't being implemented (and is instead covered conceptually by trading Favor).
Thanks for the feedback!”
“There's definitely an RP element to single player Civ, which is actually one of my personal most fun parts of the game. Roleplay versus competition, single player vs multiplayer... the game is played by a lot of people who play for different reasons, and it's our job to come up with new systems and effects that make the game better for everybody, whenever we possibly can. With the systems I've been developing, I've been trying to think about them from all angles of the playerbase, and land somewhere comfortably in the middle. I realize that this means that the system isn't the very best it could be for any one of those playstyles.
As for indirect clues in this case, that still 1) only works against AI (the game can't give you indirect clues as to how a human player will vote) and 2) doesn't actually add any new information to the game, instead making already-available information more obvious.
We've already discussed (1), but (2) is problematic for a few reasons, as well. Firstly, from strictly a production/codebase standpoint, getting that sort of information from the AI and making a new screen to show it off is a lot of work. Currently the AI makes choices for myriad reasons, and then throws away the reasoning and just returns what it wants to do, how much it wants to do it. It would require a lot of rewriting and new plumbing to expose that information. And, on the UI side, World Congress is already a very full UI, and I don't think that another system adding more gossip popups to the game would be well received.
Secondly, currently digging out that information, weighing it, and making a guess based off of it is an expression of skill. It's part of the strategy in World Congress. If we were to implement a system that basically tells the player "this is how people will vote", or that does that digging, weighing, and guessing for the player, then that takes out some of the skill in playing that part of the game.
Thirdly, it's really hard to make "hint" systems that don't feel like they're lying to the player. When making a hint system like this, you wouldn't want it to just give away the answer. You wouldn't want it to only say "Harald is keeping an eye on Nubia..." when Harald is in fact going to vote A against Amanitore. But players, when they see that line, are going to feel pressured by the game to make that assumption, and then when it turns out to not be true, they're going to be (a little) mad at the game for lying to them. It's much better for the player to feel like they made the wrong strategic choice (because they went out into the game map, saw that Amanitore had low loyalty, and assumed that Harald would want to use option A on her) than for them to feel like the game is misleading them (because a line popped up saying that Harald is likely to use A on Amanitore).
Hope that helps give some insight into why I've made certain tradeoffs in the system!”
“If you take a look through my post history, you'll see something of a manifesto on my stance on displaying AI information to the player in World Congress, as well as a portion on the point you brought up in the comments section about making certain information more obvious to the player.
I did want to address a different piece of feedback here, specifically the desire to influence which Resolutions are available at each World Congress. There is no plan to move in that direction for a couple of reasons:
1) It would be a balance nightmare. Currently, the various Resolutions aren't particularly balanced to each other: is it as nice to have the option to vote on a potential Unit Strength bonus as to vote on whether or not Units can be bought with faith (again)? Well it doesn't matter currently, because the game picks what you get to vote on, and you can decide to save your Favor if you don't like what's offered. In the current system we can have that sort of disparity, but if players were voting on or proposing Resolutions, we'd see the powerful ones pop up every time.
2) It would be an AI nightmare. You've certainly seen the cases where all the AI decide that Option A targeting City Center is definitely the right option, and there's not much that you as one player can do about it. Imagine if there were a layer on top of that where they all decided, every 30 turns, that they really really cared about Urban Development. You, as one human player, would have very little say against a block of votes like that.
Yes, I realize that both of those reasons for not doing this could be maliciously boiled down to "cuz Firaxis is lazy," but trust me that when making decisions where we're putting our manhours, we're doing our best to give our players the most value we can. I believe that the time that would be spent on balancing the Resolutions relative to each other and building the AI to select them in a fun-for-the-player manner and doing all the testing to make sure we've hit both of those goals, on top of the UI flow and various other ancillary work for that, is better spent on other systems.”
[Emphasis added]
Feel free to discuss below (play nice please).
But before anyone comments on the details, can I just add that I really appreciate the Devs taking time to explain things like this. I genuinely love hearing about the process of the game’s design and it makes the game experience much better knowing why things work in a particular way.
[edit: corrected quotes.]
Some quotes below:
***
“Both of these changes would fall into a camp of feature that I've tried to avoid with all of my work on Civ 6: they would be features that do absolutely nothing when used on a human player.
This is something I avoid for two reasons: 1, the obvious multiplayer implications of the game containing features that simply don't apply in that context. 2, the fact that it gives the player more tools than the AI has.
Your comment about Civ being singleplayer, with multiplayer slapped on top, is sadly kind of true. But it's something that we're trying to shy away from: we want multiplayer Civ to be as well-supported as singleplayer Civ. This is why more concrete effects have been added to systems that in base game were only for manipulating the AI: diplomatic visibility now affecting combat, alliances now having strong in-game effects beyond locking in your diplomatic state with the AI, etc.
And, for point 2, we're very aware of the feedback that we're constantly receiving about the level of play of the AI. A lot of people look fondly back on the difficulty of the AI in games prior to Civ 5, but with 5 and 6, we made a change to have the AI actually play the same game as the human player. Previously, the game would just magically grant units and techs and such to the AI players in order to keep them competitive. Now, we may sneak the AIs extra yields or have them start on better footing, but they're not then cheating with those resources.
This does however mean that the AI is having a harder time playing the game, because it's really difficult to make an AI that plays well enough (and poorly enough) for the range of people who want to play against it. This gets worse when systems are added to the game that exist solely for the player to exploit.
This is why I settled on the system coming in with the next patch: all players get to see what other players voted on last time Congress voted on this Resolution. It's data that anyone can use (granted that data is more useful against an AI than a human player, as the AI are more likely to vote the same way again), and it doesn't require players making and keeping promises of "I'm going to vote on this next Congress".
Incidentally, that last point is part of why the oft-requested "let me barter with other players to get them to vote the way I want" isn't being implemented (and is instead covered conceptually by trading Favor).
Thanks for the feedback!”
***
“There's definitely an RP element to single player Civ, which is actually one of my personal most fun parts of the game. Roleplay versus competition, single player vs multiplayer... the game is played by a lot of people who play for different reasons, and it's our job to come up with new systems and effects that make the game better for everybody, whenever we possibly can. With the systems I've been developing, I've been trying to think about them from all angles of the playerbase, and land somewhere comfortably in the middle. I realize that this means that the system isn't the very best it could be for any one of those playstyles.
As for indirect clues in this case, that still 1) only works against AI (the game can't give you indirect clues as to how a human player will vote) and 2) doesn't actually add any new information to the game, instead making already-available information more obvious.
We've already discussed (1), but (2) is problematic for a few reasons, as well. Firstly, from strictly a production/codebase standpoint, getting that sort of information from the AI and making a new screen to show it off is a lot of work. Currently the AI makes choices for myriad reasons, and then throws away the reasoning and just returns what it wants to do, how much it wants to do it. It would require a lot of rewriting and new plumbing to expose that information. And, on the UI side, World Congress is already a very full UI, and I don't think that another system adding more gossip popups to the game would be well received.
Secondly, currently digging out that information, weighing it, and making a guess based off of it is an expression of skill. It's part of the strategy in World Congress. If we were to implement a system that basically tells the player "this is how people will vote", or that does that digging, weighing, and guessing for the player, then that takes out some of the skill in playing that part of the game.
Thirdly, it's really hard to make "hint" systems that don't feel like they're lying to the player. When making a hint system like this, you wouldn't want it to just give away the answer. You wouldn't want it to only say "Harald is keeping an eye on Nubia..." when Harald is in fact going to vote A against Amanitore. But players, when they see that line, are going to feel pressured by the game to make that assumption, and then when it turns out to not be true, they're going to be (a little) mad at the game for lying to them. It's much better for the player to feel like they made the wrong strategic choice (because they went out into the game map, saw that Amanitore had low loyalty, and assumed that Harald would want to use option A on her) than for them to feel like the game is misleading them (because a line popped up saying that Harald is likely to use A on Amanitore).
Hope that helps give some insight into why I've made certain tradeoffs in the system!”
***
“If you take a look through my post history, you'll see something of a manifesto on my stance on displaying AI information to the player in World Congress, as well as a portion on the point you brought up in the comments section about making certain information more obvious to the player.
I did want to address a different piece of feedback here, specifically the desire to influence which Resolutions are available at each World Congress. There is no plan to move in that direction for a couple of reasons:
1) It would be a balance nightmare. Currently, the various Resolutions aren't particularly balanced to each other: is it as nice to have the option to vote on a potential Unit Strength bonus as to vote on whether or not Units can be bought with faith (again)? Well it doesn't matter currently, because the game picks what you get to vote on, and you can decide to save your Favor if you don't like what's offered. In the current system we can have that sort of disparity, but if players were voting on or proposing Resolutions, we'd see the powerful ones pop up every time.
2) It would be an AI nightmare. You've certainly seen the cases where all the AI decide that Option A targeting City Center is definitely the right option, and there's not much that you as one player can do about it. Imagine if there were a layer on top of that where they all decided, every 30 turns, that they really really cared about Urban Development. You, as one human player, would have very little say against a block of votes like that.
Yes, I realize that both of those reasons for not doing this could be maliciously boiled down to "cuz Firaxis is lazy," but trust me that when making decisions where we're putting our manhours, we're doing our best to give our players the most value we can. I believe that the time that would be spent on balancing the Resolutions relative to each other and building the AI to select them in a fun-for-the-player manner and doing all the testing to make sure we've hit both of those goals, on top of the UI flow and various other ancillary work for that, is better spent on other systems.”
[Emphasis added]
Feel free to discuss below (play nice please).
But before anyone comments on the details, can I just add that I really appreciate the Devs taking time to explain things like this. I genuinely love hearing about the process of the game’s design and it makes the game experience much better knowing why things work in a particular way.
[edit: corrected quotes.]
Last edited:
