Great, another thread full of AI misconceptions!
I know the AI is...artificial. It doesn't feel anything, but I finished my latest game last night. In a loss....
It just seemed that the AI didn't care if it won, that it only cared if I did. Let me explain...
Yeah, your situation would lead me to believe that the AI's keep/raze/liberate decision could use some improvement, as this is particularly silly.
In general however, this game's AI has been pretty much designed to be NOT good on a strategic level. If it would actually
search for optimal strategy, that would (1) take ages to compute and (2) leave humans in the dust. Instead it just operates on simple if/then rules, which has given rise to the common misunderstanding that AI is nothing more, can never be more, than inflexible, eternal, written in stone rules of behaviour.
Actually it's a balancing problem of game performance, programming difficulty and challenge for the player. While a more thoughtful, strategic AI would be promising, I think the current paradigm with just some revisions/expansions would do a pretty well job.
AI doesn't care one bit about anything. It throws a pseudo-dice then does something based on the result. Strategic planning like "gift this back and I lose" is not considered or known. The AI is very limited in terms of knowledge on anything outside current turn information.
Indeed, in a way. But you might ask yourself what it actually means to 'care' about something. In this context, isn't it just prioritizing a goal?
computers don't care about anything. Civ AI is all just numbers and probability dressed up to look human.
Wonderful. And we are all just nerves, veins, muscles and organs and bones dressed up to look human.
A list of constituents is not a proof of incapacity. So, your point?
To me it has always been a case of Civilization being a very indepth game which an a.i can't really handle. Firaxis solution to this has been to dish out huge bonuses to the a.i so that even though it is inefficient it can simply brute force its way to success and for the most part, it works.
It is in-depth. Humans can't really handle it either, unless they take like an hour per turn to finetune everything. Even then their planning often breaks down after a few dozen turns.
Again, bear in mind that the ideal computer opponent (for most people) in a game like Civ behaves quite differently from a skilled human player. If the AI would manage to pull off Hall of Fame worthy victories, would you be content about it? Of course the first few times it'd be amazing to see them managing to do that, but I think most people would probably want their placid dummies back.
The most sophisticated artificial intelligence ever invented has the intelligence of a dragonfly, and runs on a supercomputer.
Oh seriously. Where did you ever get this utter nonsense? How do you even quantify the intelligence of a dragonfly? How would you go on comparing it with a computer's? Why would an algorithm (Turing-complete, just calculations that can be done anywhere) that runs on a supercomputer not run on an ordinary desktop? Memory size? There's not
that much data going on in a Civ game.
This statement deserves an award, really. Asking for a source is not even necessary.
Technologically, we're a long way from a Civ AI that can play as well as the human player, and if it existed you wouldn't be able to afford it and the machine to run it on.
Technologically you just made this all up.
^that being said... lots of game developers could still do a better job on the AI with more work.
looking at Civ, there are a many ways they could improve the AI (especially during war) that are completely doable and would drastically improve the game, or at least make it much more challenging..
the AI is rather stupid during war, in obvious ways that I think we all know are possible for Firaxis to improve.
Yes, but developing proper AI takes time that game publishers (devs aren't the problem, Sören Johnson seems to be quite knowledgeable about AI) would rather not spend on too unconventional features.