Think of this way: would England or France suddenly declare on the US because we are close to a culture victory? No, they wouldn't, because we are allies. It should the same way in the game.
No, real life does not have set "victory conditions" with a hard end-date for score. Real life does not have clear "victory conditions" for a given nation at all.
It's not reasonable to project "real life" rules to a game board where one decision making entity controls the same nation for 6000 years and *does* have a win condition. Lead isn't mushrooms.
We're discussing how the AI should act in the framework of Civ 6, and my argument is that it should act according to the mechanics in Civ 6 and pursue a victory condition, because the game is Civ 6.
Yea the problem with this mechanic of everyone declare war on you if you're winning is that it would require the same thing against other AI to make sense, and it could create scenarios where no one is winning because every time someone gets close, all other players immediately declare war on them and send all available units to destroy them. This would be total chaos in every game.
There's some game theory on how to approach this scenario, not to mention evidence in how MP games go suggests that these dogpiles are not always winning ventures.
Or, you know, making mechanics work in a way where everyone trying to win still realistically allows a winner.
It would also put too much emphasis on military domination since the player would need to either stockpile a big defensive military or beat the crap out of everybody first to make sure nobody can threaten you when you do get close a science or culture victory. And if you are going to conquer a bunch of your neighbors to prevent them stopping you from winning, you might as well finish the job and win a domination victory.
Exactly right,
that's how the game is mechanically designed right now. It doesn't have to be, but it is. That's on the devs. Doing that then saying "let's all play pretend" is lazy. We don't need a video game with fixed win conditions to play pretend.
Again, I think it needs to make sense in-game. A neighbor who hates you should declare war on you. A neighbor who can realistically invade and take your city with a space district, should attack to try to prevent you from winning.
It does need to make sense. Right now, there is only one winner. Actively throwing the game does not "make sense".
How can I ever respond to such a cogent rebuttal. Truly your repartee has left my argument in shambles.
The whole point is that you didn't actually present an argument, still aren't by the way. For "x is gamey" to have meaning, there must be some self-consistent definition of "gamey".
Without that, there's no principle difference in your statement vs me claiming that the AI role playing is "ridiculously norferiddles". What does a mechanic being norferiddles mean?
Every bit as much as the statement about trying to win a game being "gamey", possibly more since it's not a negatively correlated statement that suggests a game agent should actively avoid playing the game.
Except the AI shouldn't be pursuing no-holds-barred victory-at-all-cost strategies, IMO. It should be playing competently
The cognitive dissonance is real! Quoted statement is straight up saying the AI should not play competently, but should play competently.
Sure, there's "winning," but that's a metagame concept.
No, it's a game concept. As in the win conditions are literally defined by the game rules directly. That's not "metagame", it's part of the game full stop.
Nobody's saying you can't play pretend in the game, but the major qualm here is the assertion that the AI itself shouldn't play Civ 6.
I don't see any reason to prefer any arbitrary "not Civ 6" framework to another for an AI. However, because it's a Civ 6 AI, there is a clear reason to ask that the AI plays Civ 6 and not something other than Civ 6. We don't want it being too norferiddles after all.
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