Gamasutra article on Civ6

[stiiknafuulia]

If the mayhem doesn't happen to the player, but to other AIs instead, then it could be a good mechanic. Say that there haven't been any wars on another continent before the player encounters it, so all the civs on it are fairly small and do not constitute much of a threat, individually. Suddenly the mayhem mechanic kicks in and one of the civs goes on a conquering spree; the combat stats of the opposing civs' units are cut by half in the combat calculations, so the aggressor is able to easily conquer the whole continent, while still presenting a credible enough struggle to the player. Ta-da, you now have a new dangerous opponent for the end-game, armed with a whole continent of well-developed cities!

Now some players might find this a bit too gamey; imo, there should be an option to enable or disable the mayhem mechanic. Personally I'd enjoy a guaranteed challenge in the late game; I could then play on Emperor instead of Immortal, and still get to see some competition instead of just pressing enter for the last 100 turns.

Ofc this might not be what the devs mean; imo, random bad stuff happening directly to the player is almost always the opposite of fun, so I hope they won't go this route.

 

[isau]

I honestly never understood the criticism about backstabbing in BNW. Only certain Civs really did it, and they were super predictable about it. You could tell which ones were likely to try it because they were the same ones you could easily bribe against other AIs (Dido's probably the easiest to bribe and one of the last AIs I would trust, but its still helpful to friend her because she'll DoW and eat world condemnation).

Civ V Vanilla had wildcard AI, by BNW it was super super predictable if you knew the characters and put any effort into making sure they'd be backstabbing each other and not you. On the other hand, if you just sat back and didn't interact with them, never bothering to bribe them into making mistakes, eventually they would turn on you just because you failed to make them hate someone else more than you. The AIs *do* actively seek out a couple of players to hate on, and your job was always to make sure it wasn't you, to the extent possible. If on the other hand you made an effort to be the most liked person in their list, or at least not the most disliked, they mostly left you alone. Maybe a little too much alone even.

 

[Acken]

If in the end game you just past turns waiting for victory its mostly a problem with the game being too easy.

You wouldn't feel as bored if you had to play carefully in the last portion of the game.

 

[Staler87]

I think the AI was more stupid than unpredictable. Unpredictability is a good thing, I liked how the AI in civ V handled diplomacy. Leaders could form alliances but if you got in the other guys way all bets were off. Not that I actually liked the whole diplomacy system. I think players don't want 'realistic AI' they want predictable and easy AI. The Ai in civ V was dumb but it handled diplomacy a lot like human players in that it wasn't afraid to do unpredictable things to gain an advantage.

The end game being too easy is not a problem of the game being too easy, necessarily, it may be because if you win the eraly game you auto-win the late game.

 

[AriochIV]

Unpredictability is only good if the move works; then it seems clever. Otherwise it just seems stupid.

Civ V was predictable in its randomness. Backstab in 3.... 2.... 1...

 

[Brave Sir Robin]

another thing about the article. 3 new screen shots !?
at least I haven't seen them

 

[isau]

Unpredictability is only good if the move works; then it seems clever. Otherwise it just seems stupid.

Civ V was predictable in its randomness. Backstab in 3.... 2.... 1...

The AI in Civ V seems to follow the one in Civ IV in the sense that it is always keeping track of which other players it actively dislikes and directing any negative actions toward that Civ. A lot of the AI functions basically go "I'm about to take a negative action, which player do I hate most to direct it at, even if 'hate' is a strong word?" It's coded this way in part because if AI didn't go into the game ready to start drama with other players, little would happen. They need to be a little pushy.

In that respect it never felt random to me. It's very deterministic. I think the problem is a lot of people didn't use the old Civ IV trick of creating world wars for their own advantage. When you do that in Civ V, you are able to break up alliances and make the AIs all hate each other. Create a world enemy and that civ eats all of the negativity around the globe, at least until Ideologies. You also need to make sure you Denounce that world-enemy Civ, which in Civ V is the way you indicate to other AIs you are agree with the world consensus.

It is somewhat unrealistic that the AIs would be willing to flip on an alliance so easily, perhaps. But on the other hand, if they didn't, the game wouldn't be as fun because you could never exploit their fickleness and they would just decline any bribery to war.

I also think people tended to overestimate what a "Declaration of Friendship" meant. I always saw it as (like many things in this series) a cynical term. You aren't actually "friends," you are just using each other. The whole time throughout this friendship you are looking for ways to undercut your "friend" so you can win.

 

[stealth_nsk]

The overall idea is good. The AI is designed to make game fun, not to represent some opponent. So making Ai which adopts to the level of challenge the player have is good. However, it depends on the implementation.

Parts of the system could include:
- Backstabbing if player prospect too much. A bit lame technique.
- Gradually decreasing the relations to player in this case. Again, don't look well to me.
- Making less conflicts between AI and more uniting against player. This could be really interesting as this will be less visible to player.
- Focusing on things there player is good. I.e. if player has top religion, AIs could focus on religion more, if player has a lot of city-state allies, AI could focus on allying with city-states or taking tem down. This could be quite good too.

 

[Callonia]

Somehow I feel volcanoes will erupt and there'll be alien invasion of Earth late game and civs need to race to learn how to mass produce a certain type of soldier..

And the aliens is out to purge everyone!

 

[Thormodr]

Somehow I feel volcanoes will erupt and there'll be alien invasion of Earth late game and civs need to race to learn how to mass produce a certain type of soldier..

And the aliens is out to purge everyone!

I do hope there will not be more X-Com crossovers with the Civ series, to be totally honest.

Well, perhaps as a scenario that might work.

 

[qwerty25]

I do hope there will not be more X-Com crossovers with the Civ series, to be totally honest.



Well, perhaps as a scenario that might work.

Nawwww instead the Great Mistake will occur forcing civs to escape to another planet.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[AriochIV]

another thing about the article. 3 new screen shots !?
at least I haven't seen them

Not new, sorry.

 

[Thormodr]

Nawwww instead the Great Mistake will occur forcing civs to escape to another planet.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Definitely no tie ins with the horrendous Beyond Earth, please.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Functionally, this just means that stirring the diplomacy pot will continue to be essential. We'll probably be able to back out a decent approximation of the function with data, and come up with a heuristic to address the issue. (Something along the lines of - if no new wars happened in the last X turns, buy one.)

 

[King Jason]

I think the problem in diplomacy in civ games is that you need to make the decision;

Do you want the other civs to be players? or characters?

Civ4 took more the character approach, and I more or less enjoyed it despite obvious exploitable techniques (the removal of tech trading was a smart call for the future of the series). Civ5, hell, I specifically remember articles where the developers were talking about how the A.I. was actually trying to win the game and would make decisions based on specific win conditions and/or how close the player was to winning. It wasn't until later additions that the A.I. started caring about flavor-related things, like differing ideologies.

It sounds awesome, because you want a competent A.I. - but it feels terrible, because when you're 30 turns from a culture victory about to overwhelm the last two civs with your blue jeans and pop music - Everyone and their mom is going to declare war on you, even your ally since the dawn of time; because you're about to win the game.

Lesson learned - the game is more fun playing against characters that can compete against you and provide obstacles and challenges... The game isn't fun playing against A.I. that tries to mimmick players because the randomness of it confuses and frustrates people.

But yea.. the A.I. actions virtually never confused me in civ5 because I always got the impression that I was playing against something programmed like a player, not some RP character... in an MP game, I don't care how nice you've been to me as a neighbor. I will attack you and take your stuff as soon as I think that I have the upper hand because I want to win.

 

[Thormodr]

Soren Johnson did a talk called, "Playing to Lose: AI and "Civilization"
Essentially, you are the prime actor in the game and the AI is there to make sure you have fun.
Well worth the hour watching if you can spare it.

Stupid Crapple iPad is not allowing the link to work. Grrr...

Just do a search for, "Playing to Lose:AI and Civilization by Soren Johnson.

 

[King Jason]

Soren Johnson did a talk called, "Playing to Lose: AI and "Civilization"
Essentially, you are the prime actor in the game and the AI is there to make sure you have fun.
Well worth the hour watching if you can spare it.

http://https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcuQQ1eWWI

Link broken, but I actually remember this - I think he even made mention of something similar in the manual of civ4 itself too. I truly think this is the key difference between civs in 4 vs 5, and ultimately what I think turned 5 into a mess at first. It's a fine idea, treating the opponents like actual opponents that want to win the game. But, oddly enough, I don't think it works. The game is more fun when treated, in a way, like a D&D campaign; Yes, everything is trying to kill you and/or is looking out for themselves - but they're still bound by their own personalities and parameters.

 

[Thormodr]

Link broken, but I actually remember this - I think he even made mention of something similar in the manual of civ4 itself too. I truly think this is the key difference between civs in 4 vs 5, and ultimately what I think turned 5 into a mess at first. It's a fine idea, treating the opponents like actual opponents that want to win the game. But, oddly enough, I don't think it works. The game is more fun when treated, in a way, like a D&D campaign; Yes, everything is trying to kill you and/or is looking out for themselves - but they're still bound by their own personalities and parameters.

D&D is a very good analogy. Never thought of it that way before.

Yeah, I hated the AI in Civilization 5. I still remember early on when the "Playing to win" AI would routinely rage quit and give you all its cities and gold when things weren't going well. Trying to create a multiplayer experience with single player was a disaster. Hopefully we'll never see something like that in a Civ game again.

 

[crawf0rd]

This mayhem mechanic is going to have to avoid breaking the golden rule of game design: Don't punish the player for no reason. Otherwise, I can see it being a major issue upon the game's release.

 

[CivCube]

I think the unstacked cities will help take care of a lot of the static nature of Civ 5's endgame. With limited space, you're going to end up with units and cities running into each other much more often.