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Comment by init2null | Hacker News Reader

I always find it interesting that Civilization (especially 5+) is basically a board game with added fog of war. These specs seem a little extreme given that fact. That being said, anyone who's played older versions knows that the AI needs every cycle it can get. I'd love to see smarter multithreaded strategy for the AI. Its combat skills border on embarrassing.

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Simply increasing processing power for the AI isn't enough. Gameplay mechanics are intimately related to the capabilities of the AI.

For example, when they redesigned combat around the 1-Unit-Per-Tile (1UPT) mechanic for CIV 5, this crippled the ability of the AI to wage war. That's because even if a high-difficulty AI could out-produce the player in terms of military, they were logistics-limited in their ability to get those units to the front because of 1UPT. That means that the AI can't threaten a player militarily, and thus loses it's main lever in terms of it's ability to be "difficult."

Contrast this to Civ 4, where high-difficulty AIs were capable of completely overwhelming a player that didn't take them seriously. You couldn't just sit there and tech-up and use a small number of advanced units to fend off an invasion from a much larger and more aggressive neighbor. This was especially the case if you played against advanced fan-created AIs.

I'm hoping they get rid of 1UPT completely for Civ 7, but I have a feeling that it is unlikely because casual players (the majority purchaser for Civ) actually like that 1UPT effectively removes tactical combat from the game.

1UPT added tactical combat to the game. Before Civ 5, the lowest level of warfare was operational. If you got your units close to the enemy, they were in position to fight. You didn't have to worry much about battlefield formations, terrain, coordinating the actions of different units, and so on.

This addition of tactical combat crippled the AI, because it doesn't understand the situation on the battlefield, and it's not good at making and adjusting plans.

The combat system in Civ4 was deeper than you think. Stack composition, terrain, and positioning are crucial in MP games. This write-up [1] from a famous MP game where a 3v1 invasion was repelled by superior play shows how good the system was.

[1] https://sullla.com/Civ4/RBPB2-5.html

It had depth, but no tactical combat. A stack is an operational unit. Tactics deals with what the individual units within the stack do once the fighting starts. Civ 7 is supposed to introduce commanders, which are effectively stacks for moving troops combined with more specialized great generals. You can get the troops more easily to the battlefield, but individual units still need to occupy separate tiles in the battle.

I am not sure if I buy this resoning. While doom tile army is much easier to create, I found it hard to imagine major AAA game dev making same game for ever unable to create proper Ai that handles strategy and tactics with multi-tiled armies.

There are plenty of small games that handle complex armies fight with plenty units, choke-points and strategical and tactical views. Especially since the unit roaster in Civ games is quite limited in comparison to other strategy games.

Yes, difficulty scaling in CIV just equates to giving the AI unfair starting points and making it super easy and cheap for the computer controlled players to build advanced, OP units.

Try V with the Vox Populi mod. While it's also changing tons of mechanics, it vastly improves the AI by a ton.

Not just starting, the AI gets significant overall resource multipliers as you increase the difficulty. [1]

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty_level_(Civ6)

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