Contents of this post:
- Response to @Disgustipated
- Agendas: Maybe not a mess
- Snowballing
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Actually what may be interesting is have 2 modes of AI. Competitive and Role playing. Because sometimes I'm in the mood for both, would be neat to have both types of AI. The first would be an AI that is programmed to win at all costs. Ignoring things like even their agenda and districts that don't help with their favored win condition (each civ should have this designated). The 2nd would be the role playing AI, similar to how it is now, but with things like agendas fully fleshed out to create a personality, not just a hard 0 or 1 for satisfying an agenda.
Not an insane proposal, considering that "Ruthless" setting has been a thing in the past.
In my view there are five true difficulty settings:
Training wheels
Casual
Normal
Ruthless
Deity
Ruthless and Deity aren't on the same scale, exactly. Deity still "handicaps" the AI with its historical behaviours, its personality. You're playing the regular game but among giants - and yeah, Sid Meier's Civilization is primarily a single-player, historical themed RPG experience. The sales numbers have made it so. Normal and Casual could be Casual and Hard, the important thing is just to give a basic setting difference for those who "want" to lose and those who'd rather not fail. And Ruthless is the single setting where the AI plays to win. No point putting knobs and sliders for this behaviour - the goal is clear. Try to simulate a smart opponent.
The handicaps for Ruthless would be as Meier figures, from that panel talk he gave on AI. Like, players actually expect an AI to cheat a little even at the 'fair' setting, "because the Human can reload a game to get what they want". I'm not saying I agree with it, I'm just capitulating to some unchangeable facts.
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I think the Agenda system is a good one from the perspective of iterative design, and its problems are not too far from solutions. Like, one huge one (which I think someone posted up about elsewhere) is that an AI should not judge any lack of yours until their own performance in that metric is better. So Trajan can't hate you for having a small empire until he makes his larger. Of course this only is for the 'sympathetic' agendas and not the 'contrary' ones like Emperor Qin or Pedro. This fix is well within the infrastructure's ability to measure - just measure the AI too. A matter of writing the logic, really.
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I want to challenge the idea that strategy game always means success must breed success. I dunno. It looks like an inevitability, even the definition of a strategy game, but I have become more and more desperate to find an exception. A game that intrigues me is one called
Through the Ages designed by Vlaada Chvatil. In that game, somehow, the progress of ages still keeps players within reach of each other, yet also your choices definitely can be failures. It must be partly due to how "tech" progress (mechanically, just "progress", of a card-rotisserie backbone) comes down to all the players equally (though their ability to employ what they draft is delimited by earlier success). A worthy study, in my opinion. I despise the idea of a World-tech tree in Civ every time I see it, but the
structure of the proposal, of having one, pillar backbone for all player's growth, that must,
must surely, be the key.
Another place to look is to RTSs, where the data is clear. 4X can be diverted from snowballing by balancing around one, constant resource: attention.
Starcraft is commanded through clicks, and clicks can be enhanced with skill, but an upper limit is reached in Human possibility instead of having ALL resources act like textbook economic capital, multiplying without fail. Of course, a TBS has no concept of attention, but the search becomes for something that has the same quality, which can be used as a pillar for that balance in the same way.
Alternately, a game could simply be designed to END FASTER, in response to the snowball. It's only a history of the turn-grinds in this franchise that make us look for the problem elsewhere, as if we can't change that. If your win is inevitable, the system must be made smart enough to tell that you've won... and let you win. Of course, a nearby, preferable option to
that would be using some kind of dampener or downscaler to reduce the effects of the snowball to within the same magnitude as the effects of ongoing skill and stewardship. Perhaps looking to the RISE AND FALL of empires as a thematic inspiration for such effects. If only Civ could attempt such a thing. . .