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[GS] Devs discuss AI, World Congress and other things

My experience with Civ4 is that didn't 'cheat' outside of the handicap bonuses provided by the Difficulty Level. So yeah, it could have better production/tech/lower upkeep etc. And yes, it could start with additional units/techs on higher Difficulty Levels but all of that was 'above board' and easily visible in the settings file.

It did not just 'create units out of thin air' or award itself techs at various times. With high enough espionage you could easily verify all of what an AI was doing (what it was producing, what it was researching etc). You could keep tabs on what they were doing and how quickly quite easily.

Now if you're going back to Civ1 (and maybe 2), then yes, definitely the AI was not playing the same game the player was (however good the illusion). But Civ4 was a step up from that and it still played a very credible game by the end with BTS AI. Did it make mistakes and do dumb things? Of course. But it kept you on edge and many many times you would get very interesting wars with Civs who were technologically equivalent and competent enough to be a threat.

Civ5 did this a bit in the first expansion but the 2nd expansion made it much more passive IME. I never played with the full 'Community Patch' AI so I don't know what the final result was. But Civ4, to me, was the pinnacle of the AI in the Civ series. It played by the same rules (other than the known handicaps) and still played well enough to keep the game interesting.
 
To address Firaxis’ defense re: AI deficiencies that AI before Civ V would get free units etc—is it true as such that the Civ IV AI cheated? Because I don’t recall seeing or noticing that at all. Meanwhile in a Civ VI game the AI do get extra settlers on higher difficulties...
I think they meant in IV and lower the AI receiving extra units for free as the game progresses. I do recall having seen suspiciously large stacks materialize out of nowhere in IV periodically, but really I don't think it was cheating that bad in IV. But of course, I have also seen battles that have had a couple hundred units on each side including my own, and with FOW obscuring things, that doesn't help.

III and earlier though...
 
I think they meant in IV and lower the AI receiving extra units for free as the game progresses. I do recall having seen suspiciously large stacks materialize out of nowhere in IV periodically, but really I don't think it was cheating that bad in IV. But of course, I have also seen battles that have had a couple hundred units on each side including my own, and with FOW obscuring things, that doesn't help.

III and earlier though...

Yes, the general consensus seems to be that this was what the dev meant. However, to the best of my knowledge, the AI didn't actually receive extra units for free as the game progressed in any prior version of Civ.

I may be wrong about this, but Gedemon seemed to sum up the known situation rather well here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...-and-other-things.647591/page-2#post-15508283
 
i really started to love civ 6 gs is /was fantastic i found this dev team the best ever, but since the last chances the game just anoyes me all the time every time
 
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.
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"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."
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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.”
This, how they have been developing the game, still bothers me - not that much when it comes to the finalizing of Civ6 (there I kind of just hope they really have the ambition to make the best of it), but do they know how and what systems to fix first when developing Civ7?
If they will keep letting "the AI actually play the same game as the human player", perhaps they would better add automation functions "everywhere" from start - that way they could please both haters & lovers of micromanaging and make sure the AI is behaving as it should.
 
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