Civ VI 'AI Battle Royale' on Twitch | Hacker News Reader

Civ VI 'AI Battle Royale' on Twitch

civilization.com

79 pointssdebrule24 comments

I'm a long time Civ player, and I'm curious to see how the AI compares to the previous versions.

I've been somewhat disappointed in the past, because the challenge of playing on the higher difficulties comes less from a smarter AI opponent and more from the handicaps given to the player. For example, on Deity, your base happiness is lower than the AI's, you start 5 techs behind, you pay up to 2x the price for routes, buildings, units, and so on: (http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Difficulty_level_(Civ5)).

It definitely forces you to play smarter, but the AI seems to more or less play the same way on King and up. I'd be really interested to hear some commentary on difficulty level and AI tactics!

That's the most frustrating thing about every previous Civ on higher difficulty levels, to me. It doesn't require you to just play smarter, it requires you to exploit the limitations of the AI. AI wages war (incredibly) stupidly, so you have go to war a lot. AI will always build wonders faster, so you have to take the cities the AI built them in rather than build them yourself (you might be able to beeline to some specific wonder, but if a neighbor attacks you while you're doing it, you're done for because everything else suffers). Because the advantages are so extreme on higher levels, if you get a bad start, there's pretty much no turning the game around no matter how well you play (I've tried replaying the same bad start three different times with three different strategies, to no avail). That's frustrating, to me.

I have a bunch of complaints about Civ (particularly compared to Civ IV with all expansions), but the AI is among the biggest complaints, and it's always been a problem in Civ games. I do hope it's gotten better.

It's a really hard problem I think. Consider the complexity and branchiness of civ compared to go where humans have only recently been beaten.

Better ai would be great however I don't think Firaxis has the resources to try to do it all themselves. However maybe this ai competition shows the way forward? Perhaps someone could mod in an interface (or Firaxis could add it themselves) to make writing ai agents very easy in the spirit of ALE ( the arcade learning environment [1]) so that the next ai battle royale is actually different community designed ais competing.

1: http://www.arcadelearningenvironment.org

IMO a good API for developing AIs is an absolute no-brainer for a strategy game. Especially one like Civ that doesn't focus on multiplayer at all.

I never knew, until just now, that I would really enjoy being able to write AI modules for Civ games and compete against other people's AIs. That would be fun as hell, if there were a simple framework for doing it; I wouldn't want to have to do all of the grunt work of hooking into the game, but if Firaxis exposed it all via an API that's usable from Lua (or whatever language...doesn't really matter, as long as it's something high level and preferably not proprietary).

And, it might help them solve their biggest problem in Civ games. Seems like they could just license the best AIs from a contest, and give someone a nice prize for making the best one. Kind of like the Netflix Prize.

I was really interested in this kind of thing. The goal for me was to make an AI that was fun to play casually (for people who think diplomacy should have been a feature in civ V, like it was in civ IV). The secondary goal would be that anyone could write whatever AI types they wanted and could also mix them in one game. FreeCiv kind of sucks and I don't know if their AI was intended to be extendable. It seems too min-maxy and edgecase perfectionist to be fun to play against, unless that's your idea of fun. But I would need to solve several problems first. I would need a server component that only sends remote players/AIs the data they have access to (no cheating possible). I haven't been able to start on the parts of my idea that I'm really interested in because I would need to create the entire universe before I could start. But imagine open source servers, open source AIs, and open source clients. It would be amazing.

Yeah, civ 5 ai sucks, and don't even get me started about combat (builds all the wrong units and can't properly control the armies it has). I blame 1-unit-per-tile change.

It's a shame, especially since in multiplayer this game is amazing (except for, cough, networking code, cough).

Not sure if you are aware, but Vox Populi [0] (fka Community Balance Patch) has done a lot of work improving the Civ V AI and is still under active development (currently there's a beta running to improve the tactical AI (combat) even further). I have over 1k hours played in Civ V and under 200 have been with the unmodded version (before it became forked to CBP, it was known as Communitas Patch).

You can choose to just get the patch or the full package which rebalances the whole game and adds extra features.

[0] http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-to...

I've been playing with the CBP ever since it came out. It definitely makes the game feel much more polished and well rounded.

I went back and played the base game for a bit on my Linux machine (since DLL mods are not supported on the Linux port) and found it to be a fairly sub-par experience. I'll be interested to see how Civ VI stacks up to CBP.

Not sure about Civ VI. I mean you shouldn't judge it by its looks, but it does look like some weird mix of Settlers III and this Clash of Clans mobile game. That together with the (for me) total disaster that was Beyond Earth will make me need a lot of positive reviews before I consider buying it.

I hope Civilization 7 or Civilization 8 use neural networks for AI. In development, get a ton of dedicated Civilization players ranging in skill, and train the networks on these players. The best of the players will be for the toughest NPCs. Then, when the game goes live, every player in the world will contribute to the strategies of the NPCs. Beginning players contribute to the training of easier NPCs, and the best players contribute to the strategies of the hardest NPCs.

Oh this should be fun. Commentary will be interesting to hear what the devs will say about AI logic.

Use Slack for work? just type

  /remind me Catch every turn, live on twitch.tv/2k at TIME on Wednesday, October 19

and replace TIME with 3:30pm ET / 12:30pm PT / 8:30pm or whatever :)

I just wish the Mac OS version was also being released on the same day.

Same re: the Linux version, though I believe it's still up in the air whether it'll even be released.

I've been lied a few times and will no longer pre-order, so this time I'll wait for official Linux release + at least 3 weeks.

If there's no Linux version, I'll keep playing Civ V. The only reason I switched to Civ V from IV was that I wouldn't need to reboot or use Wine to play it (and deal with the quirks of doing that). My excitement the day I saw that Civ V was available for Linux was massive.

Oh no! I didn't realize it wasn't released on OSX on the release date. UGH. Do you know when? Time to change my calendar entry :(

Really looking forward to this edition. This game was my intro to video games back on the first release. Such a well thought out game.

It looks like it might be: https://blog.aspyr.com/2016/10/04/sid-meiers-civilization-vi...

This is the kind of AI that matters to me as a gamer, not yet another chat bot :)

AI in games like civ isn't some unsolved problem. It's just limited by what your computer can do in reasonable amount of time to not get in the way of other things the game does.

Civ games in general are kind of a solvable problem, because there's little randomness there. So if they really wanted they would make AI so good it would be impossible to win. Whole challenge is to make AI bad enough to be enjoyable. So it's not very interesting from AI science point of view.

How are they going to do the video? I'm guessing you just have to watch what the current player is doing and can't pan/zoom around. Does anyone know of any "player" that allows for more interactive "watching"? I want to say StarCraft (1, not sure about 2) had a replay option but that was of course built into the game and not available via something like a web player.

How much does it cost to convert to UTC?

iirc it's should be 20:30.

BST is GMT+1, and UTC ~ GMT, so 20:30 BST should be 19:30 UTC

Brazil is now one of the "great civilisations"?

RIP Civilisation, your quality is been declining every iteration anyway and if I want a fantasy world, I'm better off with Endless Legend, at least they have good mechanics and the game doesn't need a NASA server to run properly.

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