Fall patch discussion thread

[DonPato]

The best way to stop barbarians from abducting you has always been to put some meat on a catapult and when they all try to get the meat set off the catapult and launch them away

You're thinking zombies, I think.

 

[topresch]

Interesting. I should really read up more on geological ages ... this stuff is fascinating.

S.

It is really. The previous interglacial lasted for some 20,000 years, so it started around 130-135 kya. It is commonly thought that Homo sapiens during this warm period became or had already become more or less the species we are today, both physiologically and cognitively. Much of this evidence come from Southern Africa. I have dug at a cave site called Blombos Cave (Google it!) on the southern coast of South Africa in which material from such populations still is being uncovered

 

[ComradeDavo]

Patch observations (playing on King):
-The AI needs to expand more. It should have less strict settle requirements.
-The need for unit upgrade paths that don't require resources is very apparent. I would suggest that the first DLC expansion add a whole range of techs with units that either don't need Iron or Niter (perhaps such as Axeman?)
- Progression through the tech tree is still too fast. As with the unit comment I think of a whole range of techs need to be added.
-I think there needs to be more AI traits designed for military conquest.

 

[Disgustipated]

Yeah I've been saying for ages about the need for units without resource requirements. Civ3 (I believe it was) had already solved this problem, and it's strange to see it a problem now. Obviously resource dependent units should be superior, but generic versions should be available. Call it a bronze swordsmen compared to an Iron Swordsmen, and have it have a lower strength.

Maybe they were trying to be too realistic in their game. I know in the real world Europeans went up against "civilizations" such as Native Americans who probably only had archery level tech, but it doesn't work well in a Civ game. I wouldn't mind one civ being backwards and behind, but not all of them. Especially if they aren't isolated and have contact with the other civs in the game. Technology and resources do spread beyond borders. Even if because people wanted to make money, especially if people wanted to make money.

I know I keep harping on this, but until they fix this I will continue to do so. I love this game, but I'd like to see more challenge in wars after the classic age.

 

[Zuizgond]

I also noticed that AI doesn't even try to optimize IZ and entertainment district placement overlapping a maximum of cities. It doesn't seem to be hard to fix (and then they could also reduce the +20% AI production bonus per difficulty above prince).

 

[Sic]

The insight into the AI code is very interesting.

I simply don't understand why this is the case, though. Surely, Firaxis must understand that AI is one of the most important things in a game like CIV, and that is has to work properly? Quite frankly, it sounds like too little resources/time was spent developing the AI, and that simply isn't good enough. I hope there is a push to completely revamp the AI within Firaxis right now. Anything else would be disappointing.

As for the problem of tech and production costs: Is there any reason why we can't simply have two sliders which modifies the cost of tech and production (or even more sliders, a separate one for wonders, while we're at it). I just don't see any reason to not let people customise their games. It seems painfully obvious that they need to work on their base values in any case (not a good idea to implement changes that builds on a broken model), but with a fully customisable system of sliders, at least people have the ability to play the way they want to in the meantime.

 

[Siesta Guru]

Out of curiosity, how did the AI work in Civ5 exactly?

It had mostly unique implementations inside the dll for all of the different decision making areas, no on-size fits all solutions. (which isn't without its flaws either)

The war-operations thing was mostly just used to get its units to the front. It formed 'formations' of units, then sent them over to the war zone. And once they got there, they would mostly lose their cooperative nature and would basically be a bunch of individual units doing their own thing (with some semi-cooperated focus damage on enemy units). It would originally just loop through all of the units once, and pick one action out of some set of possibilities. This was why they wouldn't be able to move and shoot, because that's basically two actions.
There was little in terms of 'thought' either, about what the best way of handling a situation was. But since it was rather simple, it would at least get the units into the action doing stuff, even if it was stupid stuff.

Settler escorts were coded completely seperately afaik, and it would just have a settler and another unit move towards each other and would then march to the intended destination together. That simple system worked remarkably well compared to what we have now.

Fascinating stuff. Would this mean that even if Firaxis releases the code, there is nothing much modders can do?

Well, with code access, we could always rip the entire existing system up and make our own from scratch. But that kind of thing tends to be a bit too much of a lengthy and risky endeavor, so I'm not sure if anyone will. An additional option would be to heavily expand on the behaviortree system and add our own nodes and change the behaviors of current ones. That could possibly increase AI competence meaningfully, but to what extend I don't know yet. It depends a lot on how it's coded internally.

 

[rezaf]

I simply don't understand why this is the case, though. Surely, Firaxis must understand that AI is one of the most important things in a game like CIV, and that is has to work properly?

Is it?
Civ5 was the first civ to allow what amounts to casual players to beat it on Deity - thanks to 1UPT and the AIs inability to cope with that.
Yet the game got glowing reviews, endless props from many many players (who sung high praises about the very thing that the AI struggled most with) and sold like hotcakes.

And now Civ6 is out, with an AI even less capable of putting up a challenge, yet - once again - glowing reviews, endless praise and excellent sales. All this with an AI that does NOT work properly.

So, why should anyone at Firaxis care?

 

[Siesta Guru]

I simply don't understand why this is the case, though. Surely, Firaxis must understand that AI is one of the most important things in a game like CIV, and that is has to work properly? Quite frankly, it sounds like too little resources/time was spent developing the AI, and that simply isn't good enough. I hope there is a push to completely revamp the AI within Firaxis right now. Anything else would be disappointing.

Yeah I'm pretty sure you're hitting the nail on the head there. Not enough resources were spend on it. There's probably a dev out there reading about the AI comments, agreeing, but without having been granted the time to work on it. Programmer time tends to be a highly valued thing in these organizations, as they often work with small teams of programmers (theyre bloody expensive). And they probably needed to use that time to fix even more game-breaking stuff that just had to be ready before launch.
My bet is they only had enough programmer time to give it one shot at developing something appropriate and couldnt afford the time for a full do-over when it turned out to be lacking. And of course you don't want the programmer to be mulling through xml files, hand-tweaking variables untill its as close to good as possible, you're going to give him just enough to put a random nice-sounding number on paper and run with it. Most of the extremely important AI values specified in the xml are "1" or "0.5"

 

[LDiCesare]

Is it?
Civ5 was the first civ to allow what amounts to casual players to beat it on Deity - thanks to 1UPT and the AIs inability to cope with that.
Yet the game got glowing reviews, endless props from many many players (who sung high praises about the very thing that the AI struggled most with) and sold like hotcakes.

And now Civ6 is out, with an AI even less capable of putting up a challenge, yet - once again - glowing reviews, endless praise and excellent sales. All this with an AI that does NOT work properly.

So, why should anyone at Firaxis care?

Ye, I think that's the point. Graphics matter. AI does not. I'm telling everyone not to buy the game till it's patched, and since my colleague and I work onAI, it's easy to convince him, but for most players? I know I won't buy expansions or DLC if they don't fix the AI, but does that have any significant impact on Firaxis?

 

[Sic]

Not until reviewers start looking at AI critically.

There is a tendency amongst reviewers today to create little stories around strange AI behaviour, and especially after rougelikes made a comeback (RPS, I'm looking at you). People have gotten so hungry for games to be story generators that they've grown increasingly blind to actual problems in gameplay. "As long as it's fun" is an OK adage to play games by, but everyone needs to be able to see that AI that repeatedly is not able to do simple tasks is not something that can be attributed to some deep level of "story algorithms" aimed at making the computer seem human or unique.

I think in the case of CIV6 this tendency was furthered by having leaders that oozed personality, and was promised to have very distinct behaviour. There were quite a bit of "well, they probably had their reasons" arguments going around.

Now, after potentially playing a multitude of rounds of CIV6, I think it would be fair to amend reviews and ratings, given that a lot of them were made on false premises. If there is one language developers and publishers understand, it's the language of Metacritic.

 

[dexters]

The first patch of fixes are promising and even then it feels more like a glorified hot fix , as I noted upthread I've noted improvements already. But always room to improve.

For some the AI will never be good enough, not that it was ever good in any of the games. The only thing 1UPT doesn't allow is for the AI's massive production advantages to kick in by overwhelming the player.

I sort of understand the 'Diety is totally possible with 1UPT' by 'casual' players arguments, but those wins tend to be kind of cheesy with baked s 'rigged' starts anyways, but even that is old, people have been beating diety or archipelago maps with hand picked civs for ages.

 

[Morgawr]

This is so interesting. I just could not fathom how Firaxis failed to get the AI to escort its settlers, given that the AI has been easily able to do this in past Civ games and that Firaxis even created a fancy new escort feature for Civ VI. But your explanation makes sense.

I got about 10 games out of Civ VI, which is a pretty fair amount. But I think the AI is so bad that I can't play it much more. There are so many cool new features and so much potential. But the combat part of the game isn't fun if the AI mills its units around and doesn't attack, and the expansion part of the game isn't fun if half the AIs can't get past three tiny cities on Deity. The fall patch didn't really change these things. So probably back to Civ IV for a while for me.

I feel the exact same way. Have been playing Civ 6 since it came out but enough is enough - AI sucks so bad especially in combat/operations that it takes the fun out of playing the game, even though Civ 6 has so much potential and there are lot of things I like about it. I am going back to Civ 5 community / VP mod where they AI is very good at fighting & everything else. I don't want to play every game knowing there's a >90% chance I can win. I also still cannot comprehend why the devs didn't leverage the Civ 5 VP AI code for at least the tactical/operations stuff and instead decided to go back to square one with this "behavior tree" system that obviously does not work yet.

 

[Sascha77]

Maybe they were trying to be too realistic in their game. I know in the real world Europeans went up against "civilizations" such as Native Americans who probably only had archery level tech, but it doesn't work well in a Civ game. I wouldn't mind one civ being backwards and behind, but not all of them. Especially if they aren't isolated and have contact with the other civs in the game. Technology and resources do spread beyond borders. Even if because people wanted to make money, especially if people wanted to make money.

Well.. like you say: Under certain circumstances (like a civ/civs developing in an isolated part of the map), this can be viewed as realistic. The Aztecs were a highly developed and pretty advanced culture - their only problem was that they were basically fighting Spanish longswordmen/Musketmen with Stone Age weaponry.

Personally, I have more of a problem with mid-/late game barbarians popping up everywhere and wielding top-of-the-line weapons/units. At least in Civ IV, these guys could run their own cities (not just "camps"), so it made sense that they'd be able to produce weapons more modern than clubs and wooden spears.

S.

 

[Emi999]

Well behavior trees are used a lot these days (which doesn't automatically mean they are the best solution for all types of games). This is a good start if you want to know more: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ChrisSimpson/20140717/221339/Behavior_trees_for_AI_How_they_work.php

But yeah, they DO have problems when it comes to reacting to events and when trying to coordinate multiple actors together. But they also allow tons of moddability (particulary if you can code new nodes).

 

[Agent327]

AI with neutral relationships should accept delegations barring exceptional circumstances.

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but this simply does not work. In my experience the AI will simply refuse delegations (yet ask for delegations to be admitted) if you don't ask immediately after meeting a civ. It will accept delegations with declared friendship, but not if this occurs after a war.

Practically this means that in any game you will have only delegations with civs that stay friendly (low chance of that happening), and permanent residencies will only be accepted by one or two civs (yet all will ask for such).

This is simply not realistic diplomacy.

 

[CivLuvah]

I saw there is this icon on tech and civic trees in my game post-patch and when I hover it it says "recommended". Is this part of the patch?

 

[Stilgar08]

I saw there is this icon on tech and civic trees in my game post-patch and when I hover it it says "recommended". Is this part of the patch?

Spoiler :

yep. To help you along pursuing your wanted vicotry type or current priority... Not too bad IMO...

 

[ThERat]

how does the game know what victory type I want? It never asked me.

 

[Sic]

how does the game know what victory type I want? It never asked me.

Yeah, I don't like this at all. I hope we can turn it off at some point.