losing to the AI

[KMadCandy]

disclaimers: this isn't a poll because what i'm interested in are thoughts and opinions. i know that personalities and definitions of fun are distinctly personal and my #1 rule is that it's a game, play the way that's fun for you. i'm stating my opinion and i'm not saying that those who feel differently are wrong or stupid. i'm just curious about how people's brains work and what the fanatics here want in civ4. so please don't feel insulted if you're the complete opposite of me, i'm not trying to tell you how to feel or to say "you play the wrong way", i promise.

but i really do wonder ... am i in a really teensy minority in that i want the AI to really to try to win this game? i don't mean "all AIs gang up on the human and their collective goal is try to help any AI beat the human". i mean i want each AI to get a victory himself or herself, to try to defeat every opponent including other AIs, not just try not to lose. i know that Blake feels this way. i don't agree with him on all things, and i know that he got grief for saying that, partly for the way he said it.

i see lots of posters complain when they lose to an AI. the latest trend is about cultural victories they don't see coming ahead of time. i don't want the AI to have an "i win" button that i have no way of predicting not at all. but for the CV example i do have ways of checking that they're trying that and knowing when they're getting close. F8, espionage of their cities and tech rate are big fat clues. it's my own darn fault if i don't pay attention, and kudos to them if they pull one over on me. lately i see people wanting to change the rules to make CV for example harder so that the AI can't sneak up on you if you're not paying attention. but to me it's cool that i have to pay attention. i admit i like MMing and not everybody does (yet another way i'm an oddball).

sure, i get frustrated when i lose, my first reaction isn't "woohoo i lost, goal achieved!" but after i bang my head on the wall, remember that i'm a permanoob and swear to never play again, i think "oh spiffy, they pulled it off!" from the big picture perspective. that means it's a good game with lots of replay potential. if i know i can win every time i'll get bored.

i do like that there are varying difficulty levels, but for me "well, just play deity level" isn't the answer. that's not fun that's frustration from turn 1 because they're not smarter, they just have a completely stacked deck. i've won deity but under non-standard conditions (OCC, so that many of their advantages are worthless) so zipeedeedoodah. standard deity games are for me impossible and more importantly not fun which is the whole point, so i like that the levels lower than that are not guaranteed wins for me. it'll be fantastic when they can make the AI truly smarter as the difficulty increases but that's a pipe dream for now. note that i ain't saying that on immortal i win 50+% of my games ... i can even lose on warlord level. i am multi-talented!

am i the only one that feels this way? i know i'm an oddball and completely weird in plenty of areas but honestly i didn't think this perspective would be really really rare among fanatics. i thought some, maybe half of us would prefer a challenge. getting frustrated along the way, sure, but not to the extent of wanting to change the game rules. again, i just want to hear opinions, the entire goal is that the game is fun for you personally!!!

 

[BeyondCivilized]

In my last game, the Mali were trying to achieve a cultural victory, and their only foe was Egypt, whom they were at constant war with each other.

Lucky for them, I put them both out of their Misery, with my domination victory! Which I achieved using militaristic means.

 

[KMadCandy]

was the win worth more because mansa was trying to win? that's something i forgot to mention, i like the "i had to work for this one!" victories.

 

[TomOC]

I want tension in a game, and for me, tension is created with the risk of losing the game. When I lose, I do not get angry at the game. I try to learn from my mistakes, and not let it happen again. I never change the rules. All win options on. I just moved up to Prince because I started winning too much on noble.

I think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. Each game is a separate piece of a very large, never ending puzzle. If I lose, I say ... hmm that piece didn't fit. I don't get angry at the puzzle. If I win, I continue on to find the next piece and try again.

It is an overall satisfaction of playing, not winning or losing, that makes it fun.

T~

 

[BeyondCivilized]

Oh I get that all the time in my games, and I blame it on my noobity. Another example is when I were playing as Sumeria and were about to achieve cultural victory and those stupid Americans (No offense to real life Americans, only their Government and their foreign policies) launch ICBMs and paratroopers on my legendary cultured cities. Damn you CivIV George Washington! (No offense to the deceased George Washington, he was a great historical figure. )

 

[LlamaCat]

I agree with you KMad and I think each personality should really be trying to achieve a victory on its own in each game and programmed to pick from among 1 to 3 victory types (is it programmed that way now? I don't really know)...

I see people talking about certain AIs getting cultural victories on them but personally I have NEVER had this happen to me. If I lose it's always because I was just not playing well and the game bogs down into a big wash among everyone so I resign at some point in the modern age.

In the meantime all the others will just occassionally fight among each other and some will be more advanced or bigger than the rest, but they don't get over that threshold where they seem to be going for a win - they just "exist" sitting around until I do something brilliant or stupid to end the game one way or another. If the game goes long enough, sure they might start building a space ship but that's about it.

Where are the early rush domination victories for the AI? Where are the space victories with a mad run between my ship and another's? And where are all these cultural victories I keep hearing about? I don't know why I don't see them but it's frustrating.

But having said that there are people who don't want this, they just want the game to play against the human. Which is fine but I think it would be more dynamic if each AI would really try to play for itself.

 

[6K Man]

I want the AI to try to win - as others have stated, tension (in the form of the risk of losing) makes the game interesting. Otherwise it stops being a game and starts being more like a painting - I know what it'll look like in the end, I just have to keep adding details with my mouse, turn by turn.

That said, I haven't ever LOST a game - I've won space races by a few turns, and that's the closest I've come to losing. It has been suggested that I move up a level, and perhaps I will, at some point. But for now, the tension level is sufficient - when I'm just a nose ahead of the AIs, there's always the risk (real or imagined) that one of them will show up with a SOD and the others will pile on.

(I also like the simulation aspect of this game, which is another reason why I don't play on the harder levels. It seems to me that some of the best strategies for the hardest levels - even if great strategies - aren't exactly "realistic". I'm not sure if I can define "realistic", so the position isn't easily defended, but nonetheless, I don't want to remake my entire way of playing to win on Immortal. I'm having fun as it is.)

It's hard to make AIs competitive, just because they don't have imagination and can't see the big picture. You can program an AI to choose a city rich in food tiles to be a specialist city. You can program it to hold off on founding a second city until copper shows up. You can teach it to rush (for example) non-protective/non-aggressive neighbours. You can teach it when to whip. And so on. But you can't teach it to put all those things together and to apply what it knows to every situation. And you can't teach it to be able to counter human responses, once the humans have figured out what the AI does in certain situations. IMO, anyway.

 

[Powerslave]

i see lots of posters complain when they lose to an AI. the latest trend is about cultural victories they don't see coming ahead of time. i don't want the AI to have an "i win" button that i have no way of predicting not at all. but for the CV example i do have ways of checking that they're trying that and knowing when they're getting close. F8, espionage of their cities and tech rate are big fat clues. it's my own darn fault if i don't pay attention, and kudos to them if they pull one over on me. lately i see people wanting to change the rules to make CV for example harder so that the AI can't sneak up on you if you're not paying attention. but to me it's cool that i have to pay attention.

I think what you're trying to say (demonstrated best by the highly passive-aggressive, bolded parts of the quote) is, "Stop whining. Learn to micromanage." I mean, really, what are you expecting that we discuss here? Whether we like to lose? Whether there should be any challenge to the game? What rational person could enjoy losing or want to play an effortless game?

I think it's pretty obvious that you simply wanted to write a cloaked rant about the whinier contingent of noobs on the board. That's fine, but why be all passive-aggressive about it? Just come out and say it.

I know what you're going to say -- "But I'm a permanoob!" -- and my response to that is, "Noobs don't play, much less win, on Deity."

 

[LlamaCat]

PS I would just like to express my appreciation to the fact that you correctly spelled "losing" in your thread title.

if I see it as "loosing" or "looseing" or "lossing" one more time ...ugh!

 

[KMadCandy]

What rational person could enjoy losing or want to play an effortless game?

i never claimed i was rational, and i don't assume others are of course, hello. i can't even define "rational". my whole point was that i don't think that it's up to me to define "fun" for other people by what *i* define as fun in the game. note that i don't care what "rational" is, what i wanted to hear about is what's fun for different types of people.

i've been surprised by posts on the boards, more common recently, by people who don't have the perspective that i do and i'm curious about how in the minority my perspective is. that was the reason for my "rant" (which i didn't see as one, and still don't after considering your interpretation of it).

i hope you had fun psychoanalyzing me from your convenient misreading of selective parts of my post while ignoring others.

edit: reply shortened because if you're going to misread things and make up your mind regardless of what i type then why should i bother with a long response, really.

 

[jmb777]

i do like that there are varying difficulty levels, but for me "well, just play deity level" isn't the answer. that's not fun that's frustration from turn 1 because they're not smarter, they just have a completely stacked deck. i've won deity but under non-standard conditions (OCC, so that many of their advantages are worthless) so zipeedeedoodah. standard deity games are for me impossible and more importantly not fun which is the whole point, so i like that the levels lower than that are not guaranteed wins for me. it'll be fantastic when they can make the AI truly smarter as the difficulty increases but that's a pipe dream for now.

No, I don't think you're irrational in your desire for better and more challenging AI. Bottom line is ... screenshots sell games, not AI. Yeah, I know, the developers state their grandiose plans for a human-like AI during production, but when you get the final result, it is lacking to say the least. That's been my experience.

Take NHL96, called the greatest hockey game ever (up till that time). Well, after several games, it was obvious the computer would sandbag if you were losing, but if you were winning, it would score however many goals (miraculous ones) it took to win in the last minute. Pathetic.

I got Rome: Total War earlier this year. I had fun with that game, but soon figured out the AI's tactics, which weren't all that stellar. After that, I could predict what they were going to do, and never came close to losing. I lost interest at that point. Their idea of difficulty levels was to increase the point damage done by enemy units. That is not AI.

I'm on my 3rd game with Civ 4, increasing from Settler to Warlord level. I haven't really been challenged yet. Reading about the difficulty levels doesn't really inspire confidence in me that the higher levels will be fun. Giving the computer a bunch of stuff sooner than you, and other advantages, is not AI.

I also do not buy into the crap that a computer can't beat a human at war games. A computer can beat a human at chess, so why not? The answer is they just don't put the effort into building the AI. A human designed the game, so you're telling me a human can't program a great player with the rules and know-how to win? Sorry, I don't believe that.

Oh, well. I guess if you want a human-like opponent, you should play a human.

 

[Carabodes]

i'm just curious about how people's brains work and what the fanatics here want in civ4.

I play for fun, which to me means being able to relax completely without a single thought in my head, or – being coldly controlling the game, lots of thoughts in my head, really challenged.
The first involves settler level, few AIs, no aggression, lots of wonders, happily cruising along; the second involves trying out different maps, speeds, levels and strategies, not so happily cruising, but still fun.
The second can also mean being up against my friend in MP, as he’s more intelligent than me, and has several years of Civ-experience. Those plays are both challenging and educational as well as fun (even when I’m loosing most of the time), and it irritates me no end when I see him load 2 catapults + 2 cavalries into 1 transport accompanied by 1 destroyer and 1 carrier with 3 fighters – and then go and beat the enemy, conquering city after city, claiming: “You never need more units than that”! Occasionally he throws in a submarine “just for fun”.

but i really do wonder ... am i in a really teensy minority in that i want the AI to really to try to win this game? … … … … i mean i want each AI to get a victory himself or herself, to try to defeat every opponent including other AIs … … …

I often miss the “I” in the AI, if you know what I mean.
To me the AIs are too predictable. One go for war all the time (e.g. Shaka) relying heavily on military numbers, not seeing the benefit of research, the other research all the time, not really see the benefit of military, always going for one, or sometimes two goals. The moment you meet them, you know what type of game this is going to be. Then there’s the unpredictable ones, the problem with them is that you know who they are, so you expect the backstabber to slash out.
And to all of them it seems the human player is their main target, not their own victory in relation to all the players, AIs as well as humans.
I would have loved it if some sunny day an AI would surprise me by having a teeny weenie “thought”, a resemblance of intelligence. And if they then won, well, good on them!

i see lots of posters complain when they lose to an AI. the latest trend is about cultural victories they don't see coming ahead of time. i don't want the AI to have an "i win" button that i have no way of predicting not at all. but for the CV example i do have ways of checking that they're trying that and knowing when they're getting close. F8, espionage of their cities and tech rate are big fat clues. it's my own darn fault if i don't pay attention, and kudos to them if they pull one over on me. lately i see people wanting to change the rules to make CV for example harder so that the AI can't sneak up on you if you're not paying attention. but to me it's cool that i have to pay attention. i admit i like MMing and not everybody does (yet another way i'm an oddball).

The “I have to pay attention” bit should absolutely be kept as it is. If I’m not paying attention and the AI wins, it’s not the games fault, it’s not AIs fault, it’s my own fault, and I should take it as a reminder to pay more attention in the next game. And to me micromanaging is strategy; i.e. having an understanding of the whole picture, working towards the bigger goal by paying attention to all the details that helps you achieve that goal.
Maybe I’m an oddball too? (And by the way, I don’t consider you such an oddball, I’ve seen your comments around the different subjects, and you usually make very good points, and with an acute eye for detail and a much better understanding of the game than I can ever hope to achieve, at least not for a very long time.)

i thought some, maybe half of us would prefer a challenge. getting frustrated along the way, sure, but not to the extent of wanting to change the game rules. again, i just want to hear opinions, the entire goal is that the game is fun for you personally!!!

I think most of us prefer a challenge, but maybe some of us like the challenges to be only in certain areas? Some want this game totally; others want this game, but then again wish it really was a different game?

It’s a game, it’s supposed to be fun, if no fun, try another game. I like the game, but sometimes I get enough and play another game, or go out, or read a newspaper, or something.

But I really do wish the scoring was a bit different, more like: You have this kind of map, those resources, your neighbours are these people that do these things – here’s your score under these special conditions, as compared to your neighbours. If the map was extremely hard, with few resources and very aggressive neighbours, you should get more scores for simply surviving till the end. (I’ve had too many “no iron, no copper, no horses, no elephants, hardly any food” lately. - So yes, I too complain, even if it’s my own fault being too stubborn to regenerate.)

There, KMad, you have my opinion, for what it’s worth. Hope I have understood your request right, good luck in “picking our brains”!

 

[Bradlius]

I bought a computer chess game years ago. Not that I'm very good at chess, but I thought I would use the game to sharpen my skills. After getting royally clobbered at the highest levels, I went down to a more modest level. The AI played the same way, except that about every ten moves, it would make a completely bone-head stupid move. At first, I thought, wow, that is really some weird strategy, but then I realized, that's just the handicap. The programmers must have programmed for a really hard level of difficulty, and then just accomodated lower levels of difficulty by adding in stupid moves at a certain interval. It made me so mad I just threw the game away.
The AI in CivIV isn't quite like that. It's more like they programmed for bare survival mode, then added cheats to simulate a harder difficulty. It's not like the AI plays smarter, it's just that they have more to work with. It's still kind of lame.
On the other hand, you wouldn't want the sole purpose of the AI be to beat the Human Opponent always. That would be un-fun, in my opinion, and a little unrealistic. (Of course, the very idea of victory conditions in real life is a little unrealistic. I mean, we're the US of A, didn't we win yet?)

 

[aragami_frog]

The AI most times don't seem to be operating on a full deck. They'll declare war on each other and suddenly shoot down the list on the points till they are on the bottom.

Some nations will declare war and quickly find themselves on the defensive afterwards.

On one game I was playing I was way beyond everyone else culturally. I had a neighbor country I was real friendly with that was being decimated by another civ that declared war on them and they lost 2 cities. I then made plenty of machine gunners (wanted them to survive, not to supply an attacking army for them) and place 2-4 of them in each of their remaining cities and give them to them as gifts.

The nation they are at war with will still send wave after wave of Warriors, Archers and elephant troops against them and get mowed down and loose huge stacks and what do they do??? Build even more troops and keep loosing them while not making a dent on the machine gunners I donated to the friendly AI.

One would think an intelligent AI would try diplomacy or decide to end the war if all that's ever gonna happen in the future is they are just gonna make and loose each turn a large number of troops.

 

[keshik22]

I dunno, I think the Civ IV AI is pretty smart for an AI. Maybe I think that because I've only started playing Civ IV quite recently, before that I was playing Civ II. The less said about Civ II AI, the better.
Still, in a recent game I've played (SS win with Mansa Musa) AI did some pretty sensible things. For example, Willem, who I was quite friendly with, asked to be my vassal. He wasn't too advanced scientifically, because he had few cities, but was doing well culturally. When I agreed, once he was under the protection of the strongest military in the game, he just poured all his money into culture. I could see his research, and it suddenly went something like from 15 to 300 turns.
In the same game, Gandhi was clearly going for a cultural win. He also built the UN and called the Diplo Victory elections straight away.
Sometimes AI does stuff that is not very sensible (*cough* Monty *cough*) but that may be a part of that particular AI's 'personality' rather than general stupidity.

 

[6K Man]

I also do not buy into the crap that a computer can't beat a human at war games. A computer can beat a human at chess, so why not? The answer is they just don't put the effort into building the AI. A human designed the game, so you're telling me a human can't program a great player with the rules and know-how to win? Sorry, I don't believe that.

I have to disagree here. Yes, computers can beat humans at chess, but it took a team of experts years to devise a program (and a computer with the processing power) that could beat a grandmaster. And chess has a lot fewer variables than a Civ game does (a chessboard is always the same size, the pieces are always the same and always behave the same, only one piece can move at a time, most chess games last less than 40 moves, etc).

(I had a chess computer many years ago - an old one - that would take literally hours to move at the harder levels. It never made elementary mistakes - it would "look ahead" at all the possible responses and responses to those responses, and ensure that it wasn't doing something that would lead to a loss of material or checkmate in (depending on the level) 4, 5, 6, or 7 moves later. And even those calculations took hours. The way to win was not to hope for a clever combination, but to play positionally, to make exchanges and play for a strategic advantage.)

As I said, you can program an AI to use certain tactics, but a really good human player will be able to see the big, long-term picture better than an AI will, and will be able to pick the right tactics for the situation, and adapt to what his or her opponent is doing. That's imagination, and that's something a computer doesn't seem to be capable of.

 

[Diamondeye]

I agree with KMadCandy - I think it's nice to see that some AIs shoot for a cultural victory, but I find that the AI treats me and the other AIs deifferently; if I go for cultural or space, they swarm me and try to beat me up; if Willem does the same they don't care. It is as if the AIs are glad aslong as I don't win, not aslong as they win - I feel this is the wrong approach for the AI to have... Comments?

 

[jmb777]

I have to disagree here. Yes, computers can beat humans at chess, but it took a team of experts years to devise a program (and a computer with the processing power) that could beat a grandmaster. And chess has a lot fewer variables than a Civ game does (a chessboard is always the same size, the pieces are always the same and always behave the same, only one piece can move at a time, most chess games last less than 40 moves, etc).

You make an interesting point, but I'm not dissuaded. The gameboard of chess is always the same size, yes, but the pieces have different rules of movement, which Civ 4's pieces do not.

I really don't find Civ 4 that complex. I use the same strategy in every game. Find lucrative resources and dominate them. Defend cities appropriately. Expand outward. That doesn't take much imagination. Hmm, should I have said that?

Anyway, in my opinion, it shouldn't be THAT difficult to program AI along similar lines with no regard to whether your neighbor is the "human" or not, thereby making it fair and not tilted against the player. I just expect much more from developers.

 

[aragami_frog]

one thing I've noticed about the AI is it doesn't really plan it's cities around resources. I usually play on Noble and I usually do pretty good easily cause I place my cities around visable resources.

 

[Smidlee]

I also do not buy into the crap that a computer can't beat a human at war games. A computer can beat a human at chess, so why not? The answer is they just don't put the effort into building the AI.

Not true since a chess AI is nothing more than a search engine which wouldn't work for civ4. Chess program got better because processors got a lot faster.

For example; Let's say the average possible moves in the middle of a chess game is around 30 for each turn. For the chess program to see 4 ply/moves ahead (your move, it's move, yours, it's reply) it would be 30^4= 810,000 positions it need to search which today processors would be in a second. 8 ply= around 600 billion thus the farther the Chess AI looks ahead to longer it take to search each ply. (of course a good Chess program is able to lower this number some so not to keep searching the most stupid of moves)
If you have a search engine for Civ4 the AI would have to search:
[every possible options for each city]^[the numbers of cities] X[every possible move for each unit]^[the number of units] X [tech options] X [Diplomacy] for each ply.
Just take the units for example, if you had 20 units and each on average had 8 possible moves (some are workers as well as roads, moving 2 squares would greatly increase this number) the a chess engine would have to search over 1,000,000 trillion different combinations and that's just the units and only 1 ply.
So as you can see a chess program would be useless for a game like Civilization.