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Comment by samvher | Hacker News Reader

I have spent countless hours on this game (especially Civ 5) - it just felt so deep. It actually triggered quite some interests down the road around archeology, history, military strategy. Reading about some historic character I really often thought "ha - I know this person from Civilization" and the same game has you thinking about things like geographic choke points for someone else's navy and things like that.

I'm really hoping that at some point a version of Civilization will come out with a more realistic AI (I haven't really looked into this but assume that a lot more is possible now than 10 years ago given all recent advancements). To me that felt like the main thing that caused me to lose interest at some point, interaction with AI players was too scripted and a harder difficulty level just meant more units and faster progression for AI players. I never got into multiplayer, I imagine it would be way too slow to keep my attention.

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There is a subreddit for reporting on world politics in the format of Civ messages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CivPolitics/

Along similar lines are some of the Paradox Interactive games, specifically Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. The premise is that they start with a fairly accurate representation of the world at various critical moments, and from there, some kind of alternative history takes place. The simulation itself is quite interesting (with things like justifications for wars being a major focus), and the game is sprinkled with fascinating real historical events. Many of these play out as they did in real life, but many also have alternatives. One is often led to a Wikipedia rabbit-hole following them.

Multiplayer has advantages and disadvantages. As long as there is no war or certain unit movement, players can play simultaneously, but a single game still takes a lot of time. Played it mostly with 2 friends with beer at rainy weekends and it can easily take 5 sessions à 4 hours. It still was acceptable. On some occasions we had more players and the round timer becomes mandatory and it changes the play style a lot.

The general performance of CIV is also ridiculously bad for what is basically a board game, especially in multiplayer, and at some point you just now what the AI will do. I still like the AI since they did a good job at giving the different leaders a personality within the rules of the game. But if you start for the 50th time next to Montezuma you know it might be a good idea to build some military. He will just never accept you.

They do have a flag for random leader personalities. It doesn't help too much since you pretty quickly figure out which archetype they fit into.

I haven't played this, but there is an open source Civilization clone that would probably be ideal for AI hacking: http://freeciv.org/

Civ4 was significantly better than 5 or 6 in that regard in that the computer players weren't so game-ified into sociopathic lunatics that would go from long term allies or trade partners to instant chain-denouncing mortal enemies based on seemingly minor changes in the player's expansion or military strength.

Additionally the ability to stack units, while having problems of it own, made it a lot easier for the computer players to pose any serious tactical threat (without a gigantic technological advantage, a careful artillery and melee formation with a few healing units thrown in can destroy any computer-managed army of even ridiculous size; and the various "cheat" modifiers can magnify that to the point that independent city-states have been observed kicking the tar out of computer-player empires in both civ5 and 6 due to the regenerating free era-appropriate units that the tactical code simply can't out-maneuver)

Multiplayer in 4 tended to be all early rushes and road-ing/choke-ing (get some early unique units or archers to sit on key resources, stealing workers to build roads in between so your units could mass up to take cities faster). Back in the day I had a friend to play intentionally long games over weekends cooped up in the winter, those were immensely fun with a gentleperson's agreement to avoid direct conflict and try to win via tech/culture with maneuvering by proxy. The Civ4 AI personalities were much better suited to this as well.

Never tried MP in 6 but did some co-op in 5 that was reasonably fun, you really had to dedicate multiple evenings to it though so getting more than 3 people was impossible unless you were all sharing a dorm or something.

Overall the most fun multiplayer experience in a Civ-like game I've found was in Age of Wonders 3 as the games had a flatter tech ramp, tactical combat modes that took advantage of the hex map like war-games, and a RPG-light cast of semi-random hero generals to level up and give cute magic items to. Plus it had a variety of MP game modes for both competitive and co-op play.

> sociopathic lunatics that would go from long term allies or trade partners to instant chain-denouncing mortal enemies based on seemingly minor changes in the player's expansion or military strength

This... doesn't seem quite that unrealistic compared to how states act in the real world!

Not sure I've ever seen Vietnam, Ethiopia and France all simultaneously decide that Mexico is the WORST PLACE EVER and commit to its absolute destruction with poorly planned naval invasions because it demobilized a few units of archers in the Yucatan in history, but hey, that would be fun to read about :)

World War I doesn’t seem to far off. A Bosian assassinates an Austo-Hungarian prince and then Japan it taking control over German assists in China.

> World War I doesn’t seem to far off.

World War I, due to the prevalent myth of offense dominance that fueled the mobilization feedback loop that led to the war, is pretty much the exact opposite, so, yeah, it's pretty far off.

Never heard of this, do you have a link or a searchable phrase? TIA

Dan Carlin’s hardcore history podcast covers this pretty well and is a great listen.

But basically the idea is that everyone knew a straight-up fight between major powers would be an ugly grind. But national armies take time to mobilize. So you want to mobilize early and try to win before everyone else catches up. This means that once it looks like things might kick off, everyone immediately goes all in. But if your sucker punch fails, buckle up for WWI.

If you want everything about WWI the "Pandora Box" book by Jörn Leonhard is the thing.

WW1 was a powderkeg that was getting matches flicked on it for multiple decades[1], that was then fanned by the incompetence of the diplomats involved[2].

[1] France wanted revenge since the Franco-Prussian wars, Germany wanted a repeat of the Franco-Prussian wars, Russia wanted revenge since its humiliation in a prior conflict (It was ready to go to war over another crisis in Serbia, but then backed down when it became clear that it would not win), and Austria-Hungary wanted to bring its unruly Balkan subjects under its heel.

Everyone involved was itching for a fight for decades.

[2] The British did not make it clear to the Germans that they would actually enter the war (Which probably would have dissuaded them from starting it.) The Germans gave the Austro-Hungarian empire a free hand in deciding German foreign policy. The Austro-Hungarian empire counted on the Germans bailing them out, and for a repeat of an earlier standoff with Russia. (Without taking into account that Russia, instead of standing alone, as it did in their previous conflict, picked up France and Britain as allies.)

All of this played out in slow motion, over the span of a few weeks, prior to the war beginning in earnest.

That is how they teach it in elementary school, but it was all more complicated in reality.

A turn based game like Civ is the next milestone in AI I'm looking forward too. Researchers have focused on more popular games like DotA or StarCraft, but I would be more impressed with an AI that could beat the best human at pure decision making in a turn based game like Civ.

You may enjoy a story in which such an AI (played by 4chan randos, at that) is pitted against the God of the Left Behind series.

https://emlia.org/pmwiki/pub/web/LeftBeyond.TalesFromTheBeyo...

For me it works the other way around: learning history tends to get me in the mood to play a civ game (rather then a better designed and more interesting game in the genre like Endless Legend or Stellaris). Basically, the aesthic of historicity is what brings me to that game specifically, even if it is of... limited depth.

for anyone who likes Civ V but dislikes the balance or the bad AI (and, sorry, is on windows [0]): the mod Vox Populi [1] (formerly community balance patch, formerly communitas) is still in active development and raises the game to a new level.

[0] the mod grew too large for pure lua scripting long ago and the SDK was only released for windows. At least that is my understanding.

[1] current stable, there have been many beta releases since then: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t...

Talking about AI, I wonder if Civilization is more complex than Go, and, in that case, if AlphaGo Zero could beat human players in Civ.

There are mods for Civ 6 and probably 5 that change the AI completely. Worth trying out.

Civ5 didn't allow unit stacking which left artillery vulnerable. I couldn't get into it.

Civ 4 4ever

I disliked civ6 due to the warmonger penalty. It seems like all the other civs will dislike you for hundreds of years for waging even a defensive war agressively.

That is fixed with the Gathering Storm expansion. Warmonger Penalties are replaced with Grievances, which each civ tracks individually against each other civ. So long as you have more Grievances against a given civ than they do against you, other civs do not care what you do. It makes fighting defensive/retributive wars much easier. I think it works pretty well overall.

That's why you just make sure you get 3-5 artillery units able to move into position and attack a city on the same turn, and have shielding melee units. Don't give the NPC civ's time to fight back.

I never got that into Civ, so maybe it is mostly my ignorance of 'proper' play speaking, but I actually rather liked the change to non-stacking units as it seemed to make the combat more tactical and less an exercise in simply who had the bigger numbers.

The two big problems with it were that a) the computer player coding was just shockingly bad at dealing with it, particularly around any sort of geographic chokepoints, and b) it was incredibly tedious to deal with moving more than a handful of units.

Many other games like Total War series or Age of Wonders dealt with the overall question by having split strategic and tactical game modes, and they're hardly alone in that. Civ5 and 6 tried to keep the bastard child of those two game concepts in the same strategic-map and it just doesn't work that well.

There are a lot of subtle consequences of 1UPT as well. You can't let the player produce too many units, or the whole map will lock up. You can't make units too expensive though, or they'll just be hitting next-turn 40 times between each production in the ancient era. So tiny cities have to punch above their weight, and big ones below. Once you do that though you have to heavily penalize expansion. What they really needed was to increase the tile-density of the map several times, give room to maneuver. That would seriously change the city management gameplay though, potentially make it too tedious.

I can see a split of using large hexes for cities and strategic deployment but having 7 child hexes inside each strategic one for precise unit movement working out. Effectively limiting stacks to 7 units for combat, and also potentially letting a few groups of units move around each other with multiple turns of micromanagement.

The corp/army mechanic could also be tied into that.

You can still protect your artillery, although it's more complicated. You may need to position melee units tactically so that they and their zones of control [0] prevent enemy units from easily (and quickly, during a single turn) reaching your artillery units. Using terrain tactically not just to get a defensive edge in combat strength but also to make your ranged units less easily reachable to enemy melee units may also become even more important.

What I find most difficult about protecting your artillery in Civ 5 is attempting to siege cities with units that have a range of 2, because they'll be vulnerable to bombardment from the city no matter what.

But yeah, the artillery is more vulnerable in Civ 5. You can counteract some of that.

[0] https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Zone_of_control_(Civ5)

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