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Comment by austinl | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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.

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.

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).

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