Can you explain why you think those things would help the AI? It's not clear to me that it would, except perhaps by coincidence.
How fixable is the AI?
- Thread starter The_Reckoning
- Start date
It's because the very worst mistakes are easily picked up on by the human player. The AI can move a 20 strength unit into open terrain, the human player almost can wipe it out in a turn with a general and a much lower strength unit.
The human player on the other hand knows better than to walk units over open terrain without either scouting ahead or having a backup plan. More often they will keep to rough terrain as much as possible, and keep a general nearby that can be moved from place to place if required. I've never even seen an AI general.
The end result is, the human player has 1-2 techs worth of advantage over the AI, just on combat results. Removing the open terrain penalty and reducing the Great General bonus wouldn't so much improve the AI, but it would at least give it a chance to not be wiped out in a few turns.
Marshall Thomas
King
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- Dec 11, 2005
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I think that a possible solution might be modding the player a -25% combat penalty; so you'd need a great general just to have default odds.
Beat´s me as odd that no one has mentionened the "Better AI" Mod for Civ4, that jdog has done. It was included basically into every big mod for Civ4 and the list of fixes it did for Civ4´s AI is huge and very impressive.
As a matter of fact, if you read through it, you become aware of how dumb even the holy Civ4´s AI was - so the Civ5´s AI is not really a surprise.
It also shows what can be done by a brilliant modder, so there is some hope - I hope
Here is the link, should anyone be not aware of BetterAI:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=245
Jan
As a matter of fact, if you read through it, you become aware of how dumb even the holy Civ4´s AI was - so the Civ5´s AI is not really a surprise.
It also shows what can be done by a brilliant modder, so there is some hope - I hope
Here is the link, should anyone be not aware of BetterAI:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=245
Jan
WuphonsReach
Prince
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- Nov 6, 2005
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- 426
Yes, there's a few approaches that he (and Blake) used, and in a game like Civ, you have to blend the top-down approach (we're going for a cultural victory or we need more happiness or we need more gold) with bottom-up approach (what tile does the worker improve next).
For example, at the city level:
The city governor AI knows what tiles it has available. What tiles have been improved, and what tiles are within its 3-tile range, but not yet claimed or improved. From that, the city could easily say "I'm a production city" or "I'm a science city" or etc. Which is not a bad first pass. But the city's governor also needs to take hints from a global governor that says "we need more military units". And you have to handle disputes between cities where they have overlapping coverage. Then you need to generate work orders for the workers and get them to make the improvements.
It gets real complicated, real fast. But keeping the individual parts simple does get you a fair ways down the road towards something that is at least not as dumb as a bag of rocks.
For example, at the city level:
The city governor AI knows what tiles it has available. What tiles have been improved, and what tiles are within its 3-tile range, but not yet claimed or improved. From that, the city could easily say "I'm a production city" or "I'm a science city" or etc. Which is not a bad first pass. But the city's governor also needs to take hints from a global governor that says "we need more military units". And you have to handle disputes between cities where they have overlapping coverage. Then you need to generate work orders for the workers and get them to make the improvements.
It gets real complicated, real fast. But keeping the individual parts simple does get you a fair ways down the road towards something that is at least not as dumb as a bag of rocks.
Beat´s me as odd that no one has mentionened the "Better AI" Mod for Civ4, that jdog has done. It was included basically into every big mod for Civ4 and the list of fixes it did for Civ4´s AI is huge and very impressive.
As a matter of fact, if you read through it, you become aware of how dumb even the holy Civ4´s AI was - so the Civ5´s AI is not really a surprise.
It also shows what can be done by a brilliant modder, so there is some hope - I hope
Modders can't do much to the AI unless Firaxis releases the source code of "CvGameCoreDLLFinal Release.dll" like they did for Civ4. The SDK is released but it's not there.
They have already announced that they are going to release the gameplay dll. They are still working few a through issues with that idea, though.
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