@Firaxis & 2k - Good AI & Netcode is KEY to an enjoyable Beyond Earth experience!!

[rawrkitty]

I don't just mean factions or city states.
I mean worker automation, city automation, citizen management, ai-player's choices, ai-players personality, ai-players responses to events, barbarian(alien) choices and logic, and most importantly, the diversity of each of these sets of variables within themselves.

I have played THOUSANDS of hours of the original civ, and alpha centauri, and thousands of hours of civ5, and i have to say, DO NOT USE THE AI YOU USED IN CIV 5.

I dont care if it is the same engine, if it's still the same rudimentary AI and poorly coded events (city automatically chosing 2 food over 2 food + 1 production, for instance lol) i will not play. i will not purchase any dlc. and i will regret spending my money on the game.

Please take a page from GalCiv's playbook.

http://i.imgur.com/6ybM0QY.png

Galciv has such a customizable AI that you can not only customize each ai's individual "difficulty" level, and their diplomatic statuses, but you can choose each ai's intelligence level.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE.

You can also customize each ai's 'race' just like you can your own. giving them unique abilities, custom starting tech's using the same point system that you are bound by, and even customize their models!

AND THATS NOT ALL.

http://i.imgur.com/ZnDodMV.png

MOST IMPORTANTLY:
you can control their AI personality to a T.

Give them action alignment ('good' or 'evil')
Designate their handicaps, and MOST IMPORTANTLY:

DETERMINE THE HALF MOVES THEY CYCLE THROUGH.
(CPU useage)

This is profound.
I know we will never have something this amazing from you anymore, firaxis, because of 2k's oversight (no offense) But alpha centauri, a game not too distant, did.

Are we all going to forget the governor system, that you could automate your cities, automate your workers to do various tasks, such as automate to remove fungus, automate per city, automate to build only roads, automate to clear x, y, but not c - PER WORKER?

Are we going to forget how intelligent the aliens acted in alpha centauri?
Are we going to forget just how amazing it was to have cities act independently (like a puppet city) but actually do USEFUL things?

are we going to forget how AI players had few handicaps but made generally good decisions?

Now that im done with my rant and trip down nostalgia-lane, i want to make my point clear, aesthetics are great -

You guys have done a wonderful job making a beautiful landscape, with a very interesting seed of random events leading to unique and replayable gameplay -

BUT IT WILL ALL BE FOR NAUGHT if your AI can not live up to it.

Seriously, i know i am sounding like an entitled jerk, but Civ5 makes me cry inside, because i cannot handle playing it single-player.

And even in multiplayer poor AI leads to unfun play. (like this one time a friend desynced for 1 turn and by the time he reconnected the AI canceled his wonder, spent his social polciy on honor when he was playing venice tall, and dispanded several of his units..

Which brings me to my second and final point,
in this era of gamer, please remember who you're marketing to, and who your customers are.

MANY MANY of us will be playing multiplayer as often as single player, if not moreso.

Civ5 has had gamebreaking synchronization issues since it's release, and major game breaking bugs have existed since Day 1 that to this day (OVER FOUR YEARS!) have not been fixed.


Trade offer exploit, city state pillaging exploit, truncated data descyning between multiple clients (having GPT such as 1.161 IS NOT GOOD FOR MULTIPLAYER - the second one client rounds a 359.4490 up, and another client sees 359.4 and rounds down, it causes a desync and you see constant 'reloading' screens, its horrible!)

I'm ranting and giving a tall request, i know this.

But i've been waiting for this game my entire life.

Please learn from your mistakes (AND RECOGNIZE THEM) from Civ5.

Thank you, and my love will always be with you guys @ firaxis, for making my favorite games.
Sorry for this rant thread, i just really don't want to see another amazing game be damaged by leaving out simple things that are so important to me and in my opinion, "iconic" to the Civilization series, while having virtually no drawbacks.

 

[AriochIV]

What is the point of this rant? Do you think they can rewrite the netcode or the AI from scratch in a month because you told them to? Either the things you're talking about have already been fixed (which I doubt), or there's no way they can be in the short time left before release.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

It would certainly be cool if AI and MP would be improved, but I'd also agree that asking such things a month before release is a bit too late. At this point Fireaxis is probably busy fixing the bugs found by betas and balancing out the game.

 

[Gamewizard]

What are the chances the AI will be able to move and shoot with ranged units?

And if they can, why did they never bother patching it into Civ V?

 

[cazaderon]

Sadly, i'm afraid BE's AI will be just as exploitable as the one in Civ V.

All i hope is that it is one of the main area the plan on working on for a potential Civ VI

 

[GAGA Extrem]

And if they can, why did they never bother patching it into Civ V?

Patches cost money, so even if they improved the BE AI during development, they probably can't add it to CIV5 for business reasons. Investors don't want good products, they want money.

 

[Alkyon]

I just hope the AI is at least able to bumble its way through naval invasions, even if it is by sheer mass of boats. Since there's no melee boats in BE (just the carrier and Battleship analogue) human and AI players will need to use their embarked soldiers to actually take cities.

 

[Acken]

I think I've seen this post on Steam too.

 

[The Naug]

One does not simply rewrite a game's netcode in one month. Especially when you're busy polishing and bug squashing. Any studio's manhours / week is limited and they must be spent wisely.

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

GalCiv 2's AI is terrible. SMAC's AI is terrible.

 

[joncnunn]

One does not simply rewrite a game's netcode in one month. Especially when you're busy polishing and bug squashing. Any studio's manhours / week is limited and they must be spent wisely.

Indeed, this whole post would still have been too late if it had been done a few months ago when BE was first announced.
(They either started work for BE one to three years prior to the announcement and spent the time ripping out the Civ V AI logic and replacing with a better model or they didn't.)

The general advice to Firaxis from the OP might still be timely for Civ VI, but even that is unknown.

 

[rawrkitty]

I know this post is too late.

i know the rant is kinda pointless, doesnt mean everything is.

Being able to automate cities is a feature that can be added any time, build queues is a feature that can be added any time, improving the worker and citizen logic is something that can actually be done at any time...

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Sadly, i'm afraid BE's AI will be just as exploitable as the one in Civ V.

And Civ IV.

And Civ III.

And SMAC.

And Civ 2.

 

[cazaderon]

And Civ IV.

And Civ III.

And SMAC.

And Civ 2.

fair enough !

 

[MadDjinn]

And Civ IV.

And Civ III.

And SMAC.

And Civ 2.

But not Civ!

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

I know this post is too late.

i know the rant is kinda pointless, doesnt mean everything is.

Being able to automate cities is a feature that can be added any time, build queues is a feature that can be added any time, improving the worker and citizen logic is something that can actually be done at any time...

All those things exist already and I hate them and they are stupid. If you want a game that plays itself, play any xbox kinect game.

 

[rawrkitty]

All those things exist already and I hate them and they are stupid. If you want a game that plays itself, play any xbox kinect game.

Sigh. clearly these features are just things that no one else wants.

I can accept that, i guess.

I just have to say i guess it annoys me when im playing games with my friends and we each have to spend 5-10 minutes managing our cities to do the same exact task 10+ times over again, when in older civs we could set up predefined build queues to auto build to our specifications.

it's equally as frustrating when due to poor netcode one of us dc's for a single turn and by the time we're back the ai has magically managed to undo 50 turns of progress in a single turn.

and yeah i guess this is more of a rant than anything, but im just as frustrated to see major bugs that have simple fixes exist for 4+ years with out any fix, i just feel like recent games haven't had the love that previous games had, or the thought put into them.

and im not looking for "dumbing down" the game.. theres a difference between playing the game for you and overseeing automation.
It's not a game that plays itself, it's intuitive automation to make life easier, and to make multiplayer a more fluid and fun experience.

i'm more than a little disappointed to see the kind of hostility towards these things, i guess i'll just have to suffer through them and live with it.

 

[Acken]

I'm also against better automated stuff for the player.

However you have a valid point about the AI civs and since they use the automated stuffs, I guess a better AI civ would imply a better algorithm for say worker auto AI.

Build queues are already in game.

 

[rawrkitty]

I'm also against better automated stuff for the player.

However you have a valid point about the AI civs and since they use the automated stuffs, I guess a better AI civ would imply a better algorithm for say worker auto AI.

Build queues are already in game.

Yes, but not saveable and loadable one's like in the older civs.

In the older civs you can set a work flow that you can load on each city.

So the city would check the current buildings, and say "hey, they'res no library here, lets build one before we get our marketplace!"

But in the current civ you need to set a build que each time, over and over.

Now this doesn't seem unreasonable, but when you have a 50 city empire and you're in the modern age and you have to create a 30 building que each time you found a new city, when 99% of the time you're using the SAME PRIORITY ANYWAY, there's no reason for the feature that USED to exist to not exist anymore.

 

[GrayingGamer]

Hopefully there was some compromise in building the game to better suit the existing AI, and fiddling with the existing AI so that it is better suited to 1UPT gameplay.

Unfortunately, I think the people who really crave a better AI are the minority. Regardless, the game will be fun for at least a while.