I don't necessarily want an AI that tries to play like a human, though it would be a fun option, I want an AI that isn't just straight up terrible given the same starting resources and rules as the player.
Part of the problem, I think, is that each iteration of Civ, they make the game more complicated in a way that makes it even harder for the AI to do as well as a good player, but probably most players don't care and there isn't a lot of reason to become good at the game anyway.
In particular, humans are very good at reasoning based on limited information. We can form hypotheses about where resources or objectives might be, or if an enemy unit goes out if the visible map, estimating where it could be on a later turn, or what it’s presence indicates about its home civilisation’s disposition out of sigh. That sort of thing is extremely hard to program, so the only way to compensate for the AIs inability to intuit information is by actually giving it the information.
Which is why the parent of the entire chain mentioned the advances in AI.
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/cicero-ai-negotiates-persuades-...
I'd love God mode AI to put up any sort of half decent fight without needing to have so many more units that just go through an endless meat grinder because they can't coordinate or figure out how to back off and heal.
1) Break the problem down into strategic goals and tactical actions, and then group the tactical actions into areas (e.g. diplomacy, resourcing, combat, research).
2) Process recorded online games of human players into streams of relevant events / choices.
3) Continually retrain your models on the output of 2.
You should thus have an AI that approximates the meta approaches of humans, which is really what we're talking about.
New players look exactly like bad AI: making poor choices, oblivious to things "the players community" already knows are always optimal, etc.
So really the problem is "How do we build a model that already knows what most of our players do, at this stage of the game's lifecycle?"
Which is essentially what one of the recent fighting games(?) did with their AI.
Is it that players hate good AI or that flagrant cheating breaks immersion? I think the latter would be an interesting AI target: can you make something which plays well but doesn’t do things which are obviously impossible for the player to do in-game - e.g. helping the AI with some extra resources isn’t glaring but having attacks perfectly target things the AI shouldn’t be able to see, or instantly repair damaged units, etc. is something you could never duplicate even if you were the best player in the world.
The problem is AI for complex games like that is absurdly hard to develop. The combinatorial complexity of a game like Axis & Allies is something like a hundred orders of magnitude greater than chess. It’s probably similar with Civ, probably a lot more so.
But aside from just competency, what makes playing humans so compelling is personality. Human players range the full spectrum from terrible to excellent, but even beyond that they vary massively in the ways they are terrible, and the ways in which they are excellent. With A&AOL there are top tiered players that employ radically different strategies, to great effect.
In the context of Civ, you could have each civ leader have unique personality, and that would add a lot of color to the game.
"Nuclear Gandhi" being the prime example.
The lack of choice in buildings, reasonably inconsequential bonus tile yields, minimalist tech tree where you have to research everything, lack of synergies between buildings-resources-terrains, etc. all make a lot more sense when you see what horrendous decisions the AI makes even on hardest difficulties.
Also, it feels _really_ good when you get to a new ship tier faster than your neighbors. The reverse is, however, very frustrating, as you are forced to play catch.
In SMAC you could make a single proposal per turn. If it was good, they would accept it, if it was almost good, they would counter your offer, if it wasn't good enough, they would actually get madder at you and stop talking for the rest of the turn (or for a few turns if you relations were that bad). That was the only feedback you'd get.
This small change made parlaying with AI leaders feel more realistic. Instead of going "Hm, you won't give me Zaragoza and all your money, because 'we are losing' is only at +15, I'll come next turn when it should be at +17" you start building a mental model of each leader and proposing deals you think they should accept.
We want AI that is capable to never miss, and then is tuned down in a controllable matter. We want smart AI that are dumbed down in precise ways to create illusion of dumb AI, not dumb AI boosted by resources and damage modifiers to give illusion of a smart one.
You can make smart AI look dumb (thus weaker), but hardly ever you can make dumb AI look smart, thus now the strong AI is just dumb AI with advantage
The issue is that a lot of things a computer controlled player does is entirely too easy to implement with just a few random rolls. This starts to fall apart if you want to vary the difficulty. So you can get a credible if disdained "AI" in a lot less effort that say training a Neural net to predict what action a human would likely take next.
There simply is no "GPT-1" AI of playing a game yet much less a "GPT-3" level one and I do not think that it would be entirely easy at all to "tune" it in any way to get a consistent difficulty scale.
Every one gets a challenge (or not if they chose so). We are probably not quite there yet.
And that was 10 or so years ago.
Which is more constrained than your average 4X, but not fundamentally different (resource + research + movement + combat).
The dirty secret is that we don't know if we want that. So far we don't have technology to make Civ AI play remotely like a reasonable human (at least not on a consumer grade PC). So we have absolute zero data point on how players will react to that.
The neighbour saw this and sent me a message saying "If this were a harder difficulty mode, I would think you were planning to attack me!"
E.g. you could start an "interesting" conversation with a random NPC in GTA or Hitman instead of getting the same pre-canned reactions over and over.
The downside then however is that the scripted characters which are important for driving the story forward will feel like pre-programmed robots compared to any 'unpredictable' random NPC ;)
If the diplomacy mechanic cannot survive with players playing to win, then it’s clearly the diplomacy mechanic that’s wrong — diplomacy in reality is an inevitable result of multiple players playing to win; you don’t do diplomacy for fun, but to shift the world-state slightly in your favor by unifying against common threats.
Something must be fundamentally wrong with the model if it cannot encourage the most basic action within that model, without a player acting completely against his own interest
Let the AI know everything, in the way that a father knows everything when teaching chess to his kid. But instead of just nurturing an independent chess player, feed the player with dopamine experiences that keeps him playing. Early victories, the joy of discovery, interesting diplomatic situations. Once they can play better, stretch it out a bit, more intricate setups.
No idea how to code this up.
Meanwhile an AI better at roleplaying now seems to be a low investment for a decent reward situation ?
AI doesn't come free, GalCiv2 has been built around the AI being competent, but is IMHO a boring game as a result.
I guess I would agree with you for Civ 5 (and 6 ?) where the decision to switch to the 1 unit par tile system has crippled the AI... (while being pushed by Firaxis wanting to make the game more friendly to those sub-median-experience players !) But then I would argue that this system is bad for Civ itself, and this is an outlier.
(There's also the example of both AI Wars being built around embracing that the AI plays a different game, which from I hear works very well. It's questionable how applicable that is to your average 4X.)
Nah, I mean everybody as in pretty much anybody I see talking about AI in these games, it's almost always negatively. And honestly, I don't care how experienced players are. If your average player is complaining about your AI, then you've failed.
Experienced players are just better at quantifying and identifying how AI fails and how it affects the gameplay.
Honestly, I struggle to see what your point is. That devs just shouldn't bother with AI?
My point, trying to restate it in a different way, is that these language models might be low-hanging fruit to make an AI interacting with whom feels more like a head of state (and a specific historic one too !)
Though I'll note that Alpha Centauri has already achieved something like this using a very simple dialog AI (in a specific context).
3 starter cities compared to your 1. That can be brutal to overcome. Top players like potato mcwhisky basically have to know every little thing possible to win.
If AI was playing rationally then you would actually be able to understand it’s decisions and it wouldn’t do random shit or block deals because of RNG
idk know why this keeps getting repeated, it is NOT a statistical analysis of past data and a prompt. It is not just pattern matching. It is building models to predict patterns, which is a very different statement. And the fact of the matter is, is that is mostly still an unknown blackbox. It is an area of active research to understand the mechanisms of this blackbox.
I suspect that our brains are so profoundly hardwired to recognize certain signal patterns as proof of conscious intent that soon, even experts who should know better are doomed to be fooled. The layman has no chance.