Will they ever fix broken AI for 1UPT, Civ VI ?

[UWHabs]

AI is a challenge. You can code in to build them a mixed army, but even just figuring out which unit should shoot first, or which ones to target, is always a very tough problem. Never mind mixing in strategies of "What do you build in a city" as well as "should I even go to war" make it so incredibly complex. As well, when you have the carpet of doom, even as a human I have trouble maneuvering my units to get them lined up how I like.

Which is a flaw, because I much prefer the 1upt than the stack of doom. Maybe the "correct" strategy is a mixed strategy: you build units, and add them to an "army" unit. That unit moves as a single unit through the map, and has a large and extended zone of control. Then you no longer have unit vs unit battles, it turns into army vs army battles. When they fight, the map zooms into a little mini-game (kind of like Castles II, if anyone played that), where you can then line your units up. Inside the mini-map, the armies could battle it up for positioning inside the hex, and eventually either side would retreat/be destroyed. That would be a huge change to the game and series, but it would certainly be a way to balance the map scale, and would likely let the AI have less to worry about.

 

[hyn]

"AI is tough" is no excuse for them when they had the choice of either overhauling the system or reverting to the old MUPT. Now we're stuck with a broken system that will still be broken in future expansion packs (just look at CiV).

 

[Stalker0]

I love 1upt myself but at some point if you can't make an ai to play the game...in a distinctly sp genre, it's time to consider a different game

 

[Lord Tirian]

@Wizard: limited stacks, "armies" in other words occurred to me as well..

The problems you have with limited stacks is the same as with 1UPT. Once you have a tile limitation, it becomes beneficial to fill it up and then it's often a 1UPT but with more moving parts.

Unless you have penalties for stacking, in that case, you have extra fiddliness and have to make the AI understand that stacking is bad which is a problem very similar to 1UPT again.

While it sounds like it, mechanically, there isn't much middle ground between 1UPT and (effectively) infinite UPT.

 

[ddd123]

When next Civ 6 comes close I will have only one question for devs... AI...? 1UPT....?

Or maybe few more questions like... are you sure AI ? ....1UPT ?....are you relly, relly sure.... AI ? ....1UPT ?..... AI?

I don't care about the damn graphic and leaders, and other crap...
Is it to much to ask for some ( god damn ) competition in a strategy game????

you still dont realize there never will be any

for competition, go play HUMANS in a multiplayert game

single player is not meant for competition

 

[Rexfelis69]

The best balance I have seen was all the way back in 1994 with Master of Magic. Each tile had a limit of 9 units. No 100 unit stack of dooms but the AI could put up a fight. I envision a 7 unit limit. Each unit on a "Mini-hex" within a hex. A central unit, a forward and a rear unit, and left and right forward and rear flankers. Each position would provide bonuses/penalties relative to the unit in it and the units in the other mini-hexes. Sorry AI programmers.

 

[stiefel_ss]

you still dont realize there never will be any

for competition, go play HUMANS in a multiplayert game

single player is not meant for competition

Multiplayer is also broken.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I know not everyone shares this opinion, but I find 1UPT with questionable AI is still more fun than smashing stacks of doom together.

This. Incompetent tactical AI means you could set higher difficulty level and have fun of skill vs. number.

 

[joncnunn]

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas and Suggestions

 

[Resipsa]

Add in Medieval Tech Combined Arms which allows the tile to contain 1range/1 melee unit.

Easy fix as you can program the AI to favor placing ranged units under the protection of melee units; less moving around, more shooting your city. CIV4 fans will never let go of their stacks of doom will they?

 

[endymon]

From what I understand the problems stem from this:
1) The graphic fidelity limits the size of maps (so as to bypass a prohibitively expensive a gaming rig)
2) The limited number of tiles per map makes 1UPT difficult to execute, units have too much or too little movement, and get clogged easily.
3a) Unit movement being complicated and complex makes the AI really stupid.
3b) Having an extremely limited number of places to put units, or maneuver them forces unit production to be much slower to prevent unit clog. (hence why it takes 15 turns to build a warrior)

Since these logically flow from 1> 2 > 3 The correct place to address this is point 1.
To that end the simplest solution is to shrink the title size without raising the graphical complexity. EG, have the same number of polygons and textures and particle effects, but subdivide the map into much smaller tiles.
The way to accomplish this is would be to use 2 different grid sizes. One for units and movement, and one for cities, workers, and improvements.
For instance if the unit hex grid was half the size of the city hex grid, that would give 4 smaller hexes within the size of one of the larger hexes.
Granted hexes don't exactly sub-divide evenly (ie some unit hexes would have to overlap 2 or more terrain hexes), but even that might yield some interesting strategic implications. Maybe by positioning your units in certain locations you could block workers from multiple tiles at the same time.

With the graphical load being determined by the number of distinct terrain tiles being displayed, increasing the unit movement granularity in this way will not put excess load on people's systems.
The only real drawback I can see to this method is it would necessitate the military units icons/models being proportionately smaller so as to fit within the new smaller movement tiles.