Military Automation

[those_words]

What I wish most when I play Civ 4 is that when I have a unit stack I could automate their activities - for example attacking enemies and cities or their pillaging. By the end game, I find controlling many units arduous and tedious. Moreover, there doesn't really seem much point to pillaging without an automated activity, because the animation is so long and it nets you (per action) very little.

I think you should be able to click 'automate', like workers, so that you don't have to micromanage heaps and heaps of unit stacks about the map. I know that AI won't be perfect but I'm happy if they were, for example, just controlled by an aggressive computer AI. Maybe there could be options like automate (agressive), automate (protect territory), automate (capture and hold), and automate (pillage).

At the end game when I have so many units, moving and controlling them all is quite cumbersome and time-consuming. My question is, are there any current substitutes? (like gifting them to AI allies, or an allied AI barbarian controller) that would mean they can still be as aggressive, but not have them (a) disbanded (b) eventually used to attack me and (c) not have them attack me? Hmm, maybe a hot-seat game or something so you can gift captured cities back to the original player.

- Tom

 

[Skallagrimson]

Automating workers is bad strategy, and it would probably be even worse strategy to automate units. But I agree the option should be there in case a human player simply wants to get owned.

 

[mechaerik]

automating workers is terrible!
I automated a few workers once and i never saw them again.
Besides, have you seen the AI for enemy troops? Terrible.
Sure its a ;little tedious, but just make big stacks and move them together.

 

[those_words]

lol, worker automation isn't THAT bad, it gets things done I rkn, especially when you have a lot of workers. Plus, I'd prefer some sort of crappy AI for troops than, by end game, having to move stacks and stacks of units around... gets a bit tedious I rkn. Good to hear your opinions though!

 

[Levgre]

You can set rally points for cities, at least. That does away with a bit of the drudgery. I agree more automation would be nice, but may be hard to program without a very different system.

 

[Tholish]

NOT AUTOMATING EVERYTHING IS AN EXPLOIT

What would be interesting would be to have a simple AI editor utility or scripting system that is part of a variant of the game in which you don't actually play directly but only by creating general rules that your civ executes. This could be something you could change during a game, sort of like world builder.

I mean, this is pretty much what we do anyway, we all have patterns that we follow and pretty much play like self programmed AIs. We only actually think up new strategies or make non programmed decisions occasionally.

You might have an in game system in which you have various buttons and flags you can set. Sort of like the editor that came with Civ 3 (eventually). This would be easily moddable with XML, so you could change the look and options in your "AI Builder." And maybe use C or something to allow the writing of new procedural functions that you could easily install as new tag options.

 

[Skallagrimson]

We only actually think up new strategies or make non programmed decisions occasionally.

A major reason why Civ has become less and less fun for me lately. Too cookie-cut, too repetitive, too predictable.

Ding, AI nearby.
Ding, axe-rush.
Ding, raze.
Ding, take cap city.
Ding, REX to block off chokepoints.

Yawn.

Zzzzz.