DaviddesJ said:It always seems that the people who say it's easy to make better AIs have never tried.
Got a vacancy?

DaviddesJ said:It always seems that the people who say it's easy to make better AIs have never tried.
griffin71 said:Got a vacancy?![]()
dh_epic said:AI is pretty darn relevent to these discussions, especially when complexity comes up. A lot of the best features and best games fall short because they cannot be used by the AI. This is clearly an example of "bad complexity".
Let me reword my original post to be more in line with the actual source I'm riffing from:griffin71 said:Agreeing that games are essentially learning activities, it is a good approach to let the game start sober, so that you have only a limited number of concepts to learn. As the game progresses, more and new concepts should be introduced. Complexity is then especially achieved by finding out how the new concepts work together in the conceptual system as it has so far developed.
Seven05 said:My most recent completed mod was a 4-year multi-player only project. For the first year the mod was only seen & played by the development team and a select number of testers. At the time of the initial public beta we all felt that it was challenging but still fun. Unfortunately, once we let the "unwashed masses" onto the server we suddenly had to deal with people who put substantial effort into exploiting any weakness in the mod and people who were serious "power gamers" who were able to easily overcome what we had felt was a good challenge....
“One of the lessons we constantly learn while developing Civilization games is that we want to put fun in the hands of the player by providing simple systems that interact to generate complex results.”
Padmewan said:I'm just returning from a game developer's conference (well, sort of), and one idea echoed by the (few) true developers in the conference was RAPID PROTOTYPING: create a small chunk, release, respond, repeat.
This is now a concept repeated throughout product development theory. As a matter of good project management, I think that the skill of being able to "chunk down" a project into discrete pieces that people can understand and respond to is critical.
One concrete idea people had for chunking included turning a long saga into episodes and releasing them individually. Besides being a new and intriguing business model for some game companies, this also allows for instant feedback and making sure "the customer is always right."
Not that we are yet practicing what we preach!
strategyonly said:How will Warlords impact the making of this thread? any at all or just a few minor tweaks?
Kael said:1.1 The Danger of More:
Perfection is not achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -- Antoine de St. Exupery
Every new object has a cost, not just in what it takes to create, test and manage, but the player has to keep track of it as well. In general we should only add items because they offer a significant improvement to some aspect of the game, and not just to have more units, more resources, etc.
It sounds good to be able to offer a long list of new objects. That was much of the appeal of the very popular Civ3 Double your Pleasure (DyP) mod. But the success of DyP wasnt because of all the new objects, but because each one had a distinct functional purpose. Adding buildings is easy, making them truly worthwhile is the hard part.
Is it needed? Would it be missed if it was taken out? Is its function unique? If the answer to these is no, it should be considered for removal.
Q: There always seems to be one more building or unit that would be perfect to have in the game, how do you decide what to include and what to keep out?
Hey should there be a chapter or two about programming faults? I don´t mean a programming guide but telling how to get over bad programming problems that you cannot solve yourself or no-one else knows what to do about it. How to act on that situation and stuff.