GhostSalsa
Emperor
Which you seemed to agree with, when you said this:
The difference is I did not include the word "situations." I said "changed agendas." Without a grasp of situations as such, there's no way for the AI to imagine and progress-check and update "agenda change x" without repeating the same blind process by way of a new superimposed pseudo-strategic conditional, the "check if values have improved after implementing the previous agenda change and opt to change the agenda again" conditional, which is never going to approach "on the fly" without devolving into bloated random thrashing.
Exactly, agreed. Which is why we can't expect a solution to "the system's optimal strategy for the human is too template-able," a-la Community Patch, within the first three years.You can program AI to do a lot of things (not anything, of course), but the more complex AI becomes, the more it's dependent on the exact game balance and values. That's significant. If developers release some balance patch, they want to be able to change only couple of values in the AI to be in sync with the patch. If they have to reprogram the AI for each patch (which would surely involves a lot of testing), this would hurt patching schedule a lot. Say, instead of monthly patches we'll get patches every 3-5 months (with the same amount of changes). Eventually this would lead to much less developed game in the end of its cycle.
I think we can see that VI is trying to lay groundwork for what Patch accomplished, which is specialization-punishment (amenities as a placeholder for city needs), but without closing off expansions that would toss the whole delicate balance out.
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