State of War

[tu_79]

As for lower difficulties, sure. Many grand strategies have difficulties with no AI bonuses, but those are often very, very easy for a player with a decent amount of skill. I mean anyone can take away all of the bonuses an AI gets and find someone who doesn't know how to play to lose to an AI with no bonuses. That doesn't mean it's an AI that doesn't need bonuses. I'm talking about an AI that can give every player a challenge no matter their skill level without bonuses and with decent turn speeds, and I don't believe we'll see that until we have computers with computational power around that of the human brain, and maybe not even for quite awhile after that.

That's dynamic difficulty. It's not so difficult to implement, actually. The 'gangbang' against the leader I proposed for this release is one type of dynamic difficulty. The idea is that the game gets harder the better you play it. Don't get it wrong, if you play better you are still going to win more often, but your game will be much more difficult than it could have been for a relaxed gameplay.

I know you are talking about AI adapting to human behaviour, not just a mechanic that even good and bad players, but in the end it's the same result. G did a really interesting thing with AI difficulty, letting it choose a random action among the N best possible choices, where N is smaller the greater the difficulty. Now, if N were to be scaled upon scoring, AIs that are doing well will begin to make mistakes and AIs that are at the bottom will improve. Penalties are granted to the leaders, too. This is specially true with techs, when your civ can research faster a technology for being the last one to get it. We called them comeback mechanics.
The down side of this is that you don't need to care about balance among civs. If a civ has crappy uniques, the mechanics will let it be competitive.

 

[intelli]

I always thought it should be much easier for civs with low science scores for example to catch back up too, either via espionage or trade. It's not like in the real world every nation asides from the leader is 12 techs back is it? Same goes for social policies really. The WC proposals that should achieve this don't really seem very effective, I usually propose them to get the diplomatic brownie points even if I'm leading.

 

[intelli]

Also the AI has gotten quite effective at ganging up on and taking down the likes of runaway Mongolia lately it seems. Trouble is that just lets the human player who chooses good diplo behaviours to run away with it as their only rival gets knocked down. I seem to get hate for having city states but snowballing culture and science doesn't seem to trigger any AI competitivity.

Might annoy a few people but doing something like Mario Kart with positive/negative event modifiers based on position could be neat... actually not getting stuffed by those endless corruption events when you're struggling might be nice.

 

[vyyt]

It wastes a bunch of time processing how units not on the screen should be rendered as the AI is moving them.

Do you know the QuickTurns mod? It intelligently turns animations on and off for the non-enemy AI units which speeds up the AI turn processing greatly.

 

[tu_79]

Do you know the QuickTurns mod? It intelligently turns animations on and off for the non-enemy AI units which speeds up the AI turn processing greatly.

Is it better than just disabling animations on set up a new game?

 

[vyyt]

Is it better than just disabling animations on set up a new game?

Haha! Depends on what your priorities are Of course disabling all the animations makes the game even faster, but if you like watching the animations, then this is the way to go - the animations play only during your turn or when your units are under attack. It shortens the AI turns significantly.

 

[PapaRockett]

Haha! Depends on what your priorities are Of course disabling all the animations makes the game even faster, but if you like watching the animations, then this is the way to go - the animations play only during your turn or when your units are under attack. It shortens the AI turns significantly.

Just a heads up incase anyone doesn't know; you can toggle the option in the settings menu during the game too, regardless of what option you selected during game set up. Was pleasantly surprised about this myself.

 

[joncnunn]

Haha! Depends on what your priorities are Of course disabling all the animations makes the game even faster, but if you like watching the animations, then this is the way to go - the animations play only during your turn or when your units are under attack. It shortens the AI turns significantly.

To me what would be ideal is if it did animations I could see based on what portion of the map is on the screen (even if 3rd party) ; just skip them on ones I can't see. (Check to see if it's within view of the screen BEFORE entering the animation loops)

Actually, more efficient than that: Whichever controller responsible for calling the GUI that knows what portion of the map is visible to the user pushes notifications to anything that needs to know such as whatever would make an animation loop and so that receives a notification rather than it being polled every time a unit moves during the AI turn.

 

[Arkatakor]

This thread has lost its focus slightly over the last weeks. I had proposed some changes to increase war weariness which were deemed too difficult to implement. Then I proposed a far easier suggestion which I suggested be made optional and did not get a response to that. Therefore I would like to try out my own suggestion which is to significantly increase war weariness for initiators of wars. For this I would need to know which files (i'm guessing lua) need to be modified and ideally where to make the changes in the code. Can someone point me in the right direction?

 

[tommytoxen]

On higher settings the AI is given cheats, that's how it is even in vanilla game. AI doesn't scale in difficulty or 'smartness'. It's just given more cheats to cheat against you. If you don't want the AI to cheat and magically spawn a million units without costing them a penny just turn the settings down if you find it tedious and unfun.

I find the game and battles with VP is fun enough on the normalish difficulties anyway. AI is much better than in vanilla and I've had some really fun wars without having to give deliberately give the AI money cheats. Of course the AI needs some cheats to make up for its lack of self-conscious thinking so you want them to be able to resupply a little faster than you can as they can't think strategically.

I don't understand people that deliberately choose a higher difficulty setting knowing that gives the AI free units etc and then complain about it? Why choose it then?? System seems fine as it is.

 

[ashendashin]

On higher settings the AI is given cheats, that's how it is even in vanilla game. AI doesn't scale in difficulty or 'smartness'. It's just given more cheats to cheat against you. If you don't want the AI to cheat and magically spawn a million units without costing them a penny just turn the settings down if you find it tedious and unfun.

I find the game and battles with VP is fun enough on the normalish difficulties anyway. AI is much better than in vanilla and I've had some really fun wars without having to give deliberately give the AI money cheats. Of course the AI needs some cheats to make up for its lack of self-conscious thinking so you want them to be able to resupply a little faster than you can as they can't think strategically.

I don't understand people that deliberately choose a higher difficulty setting knowing that gives the AI free units etc and then complain about it? Why choose it then?? System seems fine as it is.

Proclivity towards picking the best option out of a pool is increased on higher difficulties for the AI, so there is a difference. I don't view it as cheating either, as for the most part, it fills in the things that the AI has trouble with. Their starter units are really the only thing that I'd understand to be a bit to up front for some people, but everything else feels mostly natural. Pop differences get a bit insane on higher difficulties, but there's little else that would really stand out as "cheats! Damn AI is so hard purely due to cheats!".

The new war rebalances made a certain thing stand out from the rest. The AI pop and other small boosts along with the new relevance of slots and weariness made the difference stand out more than ever, so this thread was created with the mindset that the rest of the game would remain unaffected. But from playing so far, I think I can drop a difficulty level and still have as much fun as before. I'm not a fan of how constricting the slots feel, but the AI feels so immensely improved that to some degree I agree with you that Deity could legitimately be viewed as the difficulty where only masochists go. I think I can still have a regular time there with most civs on a more standard map, but G has been making so much progress that I feel satisfied with the current game, though I would prefer something to make caps feel more natural.

Seriously, I won't be playing Deity with Germany again. At least not on massive 43 civ games. There isn't enough to work with and the AI gets twice the number of slots (more pop, keeps up on everything while going through militarization at the same time) and can actually afford to fill them with modern units.

 

[Stalker0]

I don't understand people that deliberately choose a higher difficulty setting knowing that gives the AI free units etc and then complain about it? Why choose it then?? System seems fine as it is.

The summary of the thread is this:

1) The current war difficulty on Immortal and especially Diety levels is good. Players feel an appropriate level of challenge in conducting wars against the AI.
2) However, this difficulty has come at a cost. The enormous troop numbers the AI must produce to generate the needed difficulty creates a tedium that reduces fun.

In shorter summary....warfare is difficult but not enjoyable.

 

[CrazyG]

I have a question related to war. How does the AI starting with those massive numbers of warriors make things more difficult?

It seems to me that it just encourages them to be needlessly aggressive, as I often have a pretty decent military early game but my score is still garbage since the rest of the world has these hordes. As for making the AI harder to attack/conquer early on, it seems to me that if I play Authority the more warriors the merrier.

 

[peterw1987]

I have a question related to war. How does the AI starting with those massive numbers of warriors make things more difficult?

It seems to me that it just encourages them to be needlessly aggressive, as I often have a pretty decent military early game but my score is still garbage since the rest of the world has these hordes. As for making the AI harder to attack/conquer early on, it seems to me that if I play Authority the more warriors the merrier.

The only big thing about more starting unit are:
1. Faster exploring and grabbing all the ruins. Human player mostly left with only 2 or 3 runes.
2. Easier to clear barbarian camp and get cs influence, which really help AI to snowball early.
Human player mostly cannot clear barbarian camp early(i mostly wait around the camp when I see AI is attacking it and try to steal last hit early game).

This probably should be in another thread, but massive AI troop in deity with Mongol is just insanely ridiculous. All CS is flipping like othelo piece one by one once it start rolling.

 

[Txurce]

I have a question related to war. How does the AI starting with those massive numbers of warriors make things more difficult?

It seems to me that it just encourages them to be needlessly aggressive, as I often have a pretty decent military early game but my score is still garbage since the rest of the world has these hordes. As for making the AI harder to attack/conquer early on, it seems to me that if I play Authority the more warriors the merrier.

That's because you know how to contend with that situation. Players who post about being swamped in the ancient/early Classical era by the AI clearly feel differently about that aggressiveness. Hence, the imperfect middle ground we're currently standing on.

You could argue that both sides would be happier with a smaller early AI contingent, but presumably that would have to be made up with buffs elsewhere. Having recently retreated to Emperor from Immortal, I'm not sure that would be a gameplay improvement.

 

[tu_79]

That's because you know how to contend with that situation. Players who post about being swamped in the ancient/early Classical era by the AI clearly feel differently about that aggressiveness. Hence, the imperfect middle ground we're currently standing on.

You could argue that both sides would be happier with a smaller early AI contingent, but presumably that would have to be made up with buffs elsewhere. Having recently retreated to Emperor from Immortal, I'm not sure that would be a gameplay improvement.

I think the idea was to reduce hassle. Fewer units to handle is less time expent in every turn and faster AI turns. CrazyG idea is good. Scaling AI units strength every passing era let players participate in the early game and makes AI stronger when players are ready to crush it with high leveled and far reaching units. This way we can keep difficulty while not giving AI higher unit caps.

 

[Txurce]

I think the idea was to reduce hassle. Fewer units to handle is less time expent in every turn and faster AI turns. CrazyG idea is good. Scaling AI units strength every passing era let players participate in the early game and makes AI stronger when players are ready to crush it with high leveled and far reaching units. This way we can keep difficulty while not giving AI higher unit caps.

I somehow missed all that in CG's post. I thought he was talking about aggressiveness, not hassle, and strictly about the early game.

 

[tu_79]

I somehow missed all that in CG's post. I thought he was talking about aggressiveness, not hassle, and strictly about the early game.

It happens. He said players disliked when AI units got stronger CS as handicap because it was impossible to fight early game thus no fun. Then he suggested a Scaling on era combat bonus, but just for highest difficulties. I then replied that the idea is golden, but I liked it better if the scaling difficulty was set for every difficulty level, more spread out. Now try to figure out how the difficulty may rise and lower unit caps accordingly.

 

[CrazyG]

Honestly all I was doing was asking a question, didn't mean to imply anything. I understand why on each level of difficulty it would make sense to add more units, but warriors are a weird unit in that they are pretty much useless for conquest. And those first few bonus warriors absolutely do help the AI. I was just wondering if warriors number 7 and 8 really do that much for an AI civ (other than Mongol or Aztec)

 

[Txurce]

Honestly all I was doing was asking a question, didn't mean to imply anything. I understand why on each level of difficulty it would make sense to add more units, but warriors are a weird unit in that they are pretty much useless for conquest. And those first few bonus warriors absolutely do help the AI. I was just wondering if warriors number 7 and 8 really do that much for an AI civ (other than Mongol or Aztec)

That's what I thought. Those early warriors help vs outmatched players, help overall due to taking camps, yet paradoxically hurt a certain amount of the time vs experienced players. In terms of gameplay, it'd be nice to have a different approach (which is where tu 79 was coming from).