Civ VI: Bring The Soup, confirmed.
[GS] Future Update?
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Civ VI: Bring The Soup, confirmed.
tedhebert
Emperor
they're definitely toying with us ;-)
I do think diplo VP should maybe be 25 pts now, 20 is a tad too low.
Abaxial
Emperor
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Not going to happen.
(a) Much too difficult.
(b) Marketing favours "We added new stuff!" over "We fixed things that were no good".
AntSou
Deity
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Although I want Firaxis to fix some of the most obvious AI issues, only them have the resources to produce high quality Civs, with orchestra and animations, whereas much of what I want improved in regards to the AI can be handled by competent modders.
You should not underestimate market, opinions and pols.
* caugh* League of Justice *cough*
All that it takes nowadays is a couple of tweets, and somebody high up in the chain making a decision. And a 200 million dollar project can suffer changes.
Is not like AAA industries don't shut down nearly finished projects or change them in the last minute to shift them around the last trend in the market. They do, all the time.
Luckily enough, what they don't do is totally ignore what players want, and turn a videogame beloved by millions into a pay to wait franchise just for and extra profit ... Oh wait. They also do that.
What Im saying, is that all this "Big game companies don't do this", or " it does not make sense for a company like FXS to do that" points do not make sense. We will never know what a company will do, cause they have an schedule that has nothing to do with the client needs or reasons. Actually, game companies showed us time and time again that acting rationally or ethically is a rarity and not the rule.
FXS has done well lately. But they are a company. Saying big companies do not reschedule for small ones does not make sense. Big companies have the power and resources to act against small competitors. And they do it all the time.
Have you ever heard of a big corporation wanting to control the market and getting out of its way to crash a small businesses that do not represent a thread?
PS:
This entire mail is a subconscious call for a 3rd expansion with corporations, monopolies and commercial wars
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a) Is not too difficult at all. Too difficult gets done all the time. It is just not in their priority list.
b) A bit of that, yes. But a big company shapes its own market and a correct planning could have given us a good AI years ago.
At this point, we can either accept that FXS manages AI poorly in their civ games, and demand better. Or be the ones that get stuck in a cycle of self deception till a newcomer gets to do for Civ what Outer Worlds did for Fallout.
Zdarg
Prince
Are you a programmer?
No Im not a programmer, Im an Computer Science Engineer with a PhD in Computer Vision and AI. And teach Videogame development in college (also other weird things)
But my credentials dont matter in this discussion.
Im not saying is not difficult from a technical level. I'm saying, from the perspective of a multimillion project with a development cycle of around 5 years, and hundrerds of people involved. A competent AI is not out of the scope at all. I even think, It should not be an extra, it should be expected as a basic feature of the game.
And yes, I think in the context of FXS, it is not difficult at all to plan and manage for the developping and QA testing of a decent AI.
We are talking here of assigning an extra 1% of the game resources to the AI, or increassing the budget in an simmilar ammount, if planned right maybe an extra hundred grand or two. (Very rough stimation of course, but I'm probably overestimating the impact of the cost).
If that is worth it or not, is FXS call. But is definetely not an impossible (or unreasonable) task.
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Zdarg
Prince
If so, you are probably able to make (smd show us) a sort of design specification for the task and to make an educational guess how many lines of code decent AI would require. Then we all we be able to judge if several hundreds of developers and 5 years is enough for the task. Till that it's your word against mine.
I really doubt that there are several hundred developers working on any game at Firaxis. At best, there might be several tens of developers. Of that group, only some would have expertise in AI of any sort. Besides that, we have to consider a few things.
1. Civ VI barely runs on my PC. Would it still run decently well with "good" AI? How long would I have to wait for each turn?
2. What exactly is "good" AI, anyway? Is the AI supposed to win, or is it just supposed to provide a challenge so that the player's wins feel like accomplishments? An AI really playing to win would create a very tedious and annoying end game, if nothing else. Is that really what we want?
3. If Firaxis spends more resources on a "good" AI, what are they taking those resources from? Do we get fewer game features? Fewer leaders and civs? Or does the cost of the game increase? Is it worth it?
Let's be honest, though. The AI has improved drastically since release. It's not very good, but it's certainly passable and it certainly presents enough of a challenge for the vast majority of players. That's not bad.
1. Civ VI barely runs on my PC. Would it still run decently well with "good" AI? How long would I have to wait for each turn?
2. What exactly is "good" AI, anyway? Is the AI supposed to win, or is it just supposed to provide a challenge so that the player's wins feel like accomplishments? An AI really playing to win would create a very tedious and annoying end game, if nothing else. Is that really what we want?
3. If Firaxis spends more resources on a "good" AI, what are they taking those resources from? Do we get fewer game features? Fewer leaders and civs? Or does the cost of the game increase? Is it worth it?
Let's be honest, though. The AI has improved drastically since release. It's not very good, but it's certainly passable and it certainly presents enough of a challenge for the vast majority of players. That's not bad.
AntSou
Deity
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I'm a bit confused. I checked the previous pages and you haven't posted anything. What is this word against mine thing? All you did was ask if he is a programmer.
How are we even supposed to have the expertise to judge that? You were the one to ask if he is a programmer, implying he must have the expertise behind his claims, but then proceed to argue just anybody could read and interpret a design specification and something about the amount of lines of code.
I don't even know what a design specification is let alone judge one.
Oh I disagree. 20 can be difficult to achieve, but not TOO. It feels just right. 10 was too few. 25 would result in block votes that would never end, I feel like, and make DV impossible.
Zdarg
Prince
As for my knowledge, people (not myself, but a lot of people) play multiplayer. So I guess a lot of people would gladly play against AI as competent as average human. If it was possible.
If it wasn't obvious: my point is that it either impossible or at least highly hard and expensive to make a decent (war) AI for such a game.
You stepped on a terrible landmine: When you play an unmodded game of Civ6, you ARE playing against an average human player level AI.
Remember that 90% of of Civ6 players will never beat the AI at any difficulty higher than default. Ever. Only 4% will ever beat it at Deity.
Why on EARTH would FXS make an AI that would compete with only 1 out of every 25 players when 96% will never know the difference?
Zdarg
Prince
Because winning a game is mostly not about a war. It's about researching staff, building staff and and doing projects. Which is much easier to program (especially if you can cheat with science, culture and production level) than to program adequate behavior of a single war unit. You can't cheat with the latter, you just can cheat into AI producing more units - and it doesn't help in a war, especially with 1upt.
Hmm, I don't intend to assume how you normally play, but I think civ count has an impact on DV, since more active opponents means more potential votes that need to be overcome. I usually play standard settings, which is 6 total civs and 9 total city states, and over the course of the session I'm likely to eliminate one other civ. One (or two) fewer civs means less contenders for suzerainty, and fewer opposing votes to deal with. Maybe a better fix is to give -1 DV point for eliminating a civ lol.
At the very least, on my first forays into Emperor, my gut feeling so far is that one can achieve Diplo Victory faster than other victory types.
Edit: Oh yeah, and if one's basically annexed an entire other civ, it makes the DV competitions much easier.
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