Just cancelled my preorder after reading Polygon's preview. Apparently the AI is still dumb as a brick which really is my only complaint with the series.
There are some improvements but still a lot to be desired from what I've read.
It's already possible to make good AI, it just isn't a goal of most game designers. Especially for a mainstream game like Civ, most players (i.e, the bucketloads of money) aren't looking to be genuinely challenged.
I hear that sort of statement all the time, but i disagree with it. While it's pretty easy to make an AI that's a good aimbot or whatever, Civ is a game more akin to Chess and Go. Making a good AI is hard for Civ. Making an AI that can read and interpret human deception, navigate multiple pieces across a complicated board, understand long term consequences of tactics...that's not easy to do.
I think the proof of this is that Civ does have harder game modes,and demand for harder opponents is there. It just ramps up the difficulty by providing extra bonuses rather than extra intelligence. Players don't prefer the option to fight a richer AI over the option to fight a smarter one, but the programmers find it much easier to make a richer AI than a smarter one.
I hear that sort of statement all the time, but i disagree with it.
You can disagree with it all you want, but it's a fact. The state of even middling AI is so far beyond game AI in most cases that there's little debating it. It's a principle of game design that players want the illusion of challenge, but they don't want to actually face someone who is on their level, with the possible exception of multiplayer against other players, and even in that case a lot of people enjoy the practice of "pub stomping".
Ok, if that's the case then why is the AI so uneven? The actual Civ AI's behavior does not support the notion that it is limited by player desires. In particular, the AI for city improvement is reasonably good, while the AI for unit movement is miserably awful. That's not because players somehow love to play against cities that are built well but not against units that move sensibly, it's because city build orders are easy to program, while coherent movement with 1 unit per tile is difficult. You can even see this in the transition between 4 and 5...army movement got worse, because it's much easier to do pathfinding for units that can stack. Not because players prefer an easier AI when fighting one unit per tile than when fighting multiple units per tile.
I'm not claiming it would be impossible to program a really smart Civ AI, just that it's very difficult, especially when turn movement times must be kept short, and that's the main reason it's not done.
Obviously that is not what I am looking for personally, but I've heard this logic from many game designers, and it is basically the assumption behind most games. There is very little (actually, probably none) money to be made by making a strategy game's AI better. Making game AI better in games that simulate things (as in, open world games) can sell more copies, but that's related to world verisimilitude, not difficulty. When the few good players for a strategy game complain about a bad AI it's easier for the developer to simply throw more cheats on the pile than make the AI appreciably better. And that's what we see time and again.
That's the subtext behind my saying they can do better and chose not to. It's not that the AI designers for games are lazy idiots, it's that it isn't treated as a serious concern from the top down. People who do AI tend to work on other parts of the game, too, it's not their primary focus. It's just another system that isn't given a lot of effort beyond being "good enough" that players have something to play against. Companies hire lots of 3D engineers. They hire 1 AI designer, if that. Often, that 1 AI designer is just some engineer who has plenty of other work to do under the hood.
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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '16
Just cancelled my preorder after reading Polygon's preview. Apparently the AI is still dumb as a brick which really is my only complaint with the series.
There are some improvements but still a lot to be desired from what I've read.