Partnering with the Shawnee Tribe for Civilization VII
civilization.2k.com
civilization.2k.com
>Native speakers 100-200 (2024)
Imagine knowing every single speaker of your language personally. You could invent neologisms and make them spread quickly.
"he (on) said it was okay, but he (tot) disagreed".
Imagine having no canonical word for 'tap' (to tap something on a touchscreen) and needing to come to a consensus on what that should be, where a number of speakers aren't digital natives.
Imagine doing any form of research/preservation/data collection involving audio, and having no practical ability to do this anonymously, because voices are recognisable.
Imagine holding back recordings and writings because your great grandmother may have said something unusual, and not wanting to bring shame on the family/her memory.
Imagine discovering that your language has translations of the N-word, and needing to decide whether to reintroduce this to the language.
Imagine taking on the responsibility of releasing a dictionary, and drastically changing the usage of the language.
I wish Humankind was a better game because its presentation is so good.
Eg. fleet cap, star base cap, empire size, new systems requires spending influence that ticks over slowly, leader caps, etc.
Yes there’s ways you can increase things like influence 25% faster but that means you’re only 25% larger in size (and you’ll then be hit by the empire cap). In general I just don’t think paradox makes great 4x games compared to what I’ve played in the past. There must be a smarter way to have a fun 4x without resorting to a ton of different types of caps to stop you getting too far ahead. I will definitely +1 that the genre needs a shakeup.
As a sidenote, somehow the setting, leaders, and tech blurbs in Alpha Centauri managed to construct a much better facade of a story generation game, IMO. Despite being very similar mechanically. The system allowed a lot more customization… even if it was just a bunch of little +1 bonuses here and there, it made it feel like “your” faction.
Anyway, it’s all a facade. Other than dwarf fortress. I’m sure those dwarfs will achieve sentience soon.
The correct order is Civ to classic Dwarf Fortress to EU4.
Give a chunk of new base functionality as a free update.
Charge for a more expanded form of that functionality as a DLC.
We can quibble over whether this DLC or that DLC was worth the price, and there are certainly balance issues that are patch resolved, but it keeps expanding their games for years with pretty serious new stuff.
That's more than you can say for other publishers' post-release behavior.
EU4: 11 years
HOI4: 8 years
Stellaris: 8 years
But Stellaris 1.0 and all the other were massive games people enjoyed playing, they weren't stripped down skeletons to build DLC on.
Were they as good at release as they are 8 years later? Not at all. But having them change and generally evolve over those 8 years is a key part of what makes people still play Stellaris today, when many other games from that time have long been abandoned.
Not to mention, plenty of people would have actually preferred it if instead of Civ VI and Civ VII, we were getting Civ V 4.0 today.
and has more DLCs planned for release in march and april
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/dlc/281990/Stellaris/#browse
What is success meant to look like? Many play and enjoy other Civ-style games, as they offer varied experiences and alternative styles of play. If success is just about becoming the biggest game, then that's a fairly narrow view of what entertainment is supposed to be.
Civ does seem to change a good amount each game.
Although I also will say, I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now
I'm skipping VII. Or maybe getting it when it's on sale for $10 with all addons included.
<Looks sadly at his collector's edition of VI, which is mostly unplayed.> They're going downhill...
I do want to be open minded - maybe these things are more fun than they seem to me. But I'm also not going to drop $70 just to find out. So until they release a demo, put it on game pass, or have a deep discount sale, I'm not going to risk my money on this one.
The game has a broken UI, broke gameplay and everything which should be included is dlc. Try playing on a random map. Oh no you can't as the game requires two continents.
Wait two years and then buy for 15$. At least you feel less cheated by then.
This is the most significant gameplay change for this edition, and from a concept point of view it's not a terrible idea, but the execution is extremely jarring. As you progress into the next age the game basically gets a reset. Alliances are gone, trade is reset, city states disappear unless you've pulled them into your civilization, most buildings become obsolete, units get reorganized in a rather dramatic way.
I get what they're trying to do, they're trying to balance the mid and late game to prevent snowballing. The problem with the way they've done it is that as you progress towards the end of the second age, as a player you have very few incentives to actually build most improvements. Outpace the AI in research and culture, or outproduce them and lay waste to their big cities.
The settlement limit as you go into the second age also tends to penalize early expansion, another balancing measure. You find the "new world" but you can't just go ahead and do the massive landgrab because doing so comes with a set of penalties which you'll have to offset by building things that'll compensate and in turn stunt growth. As you approach the end of the second age that limit is raised drastically which I can only guess is to promote conquest at that point, since the existing factions on the other continent will tend to expand but not be powerful enough to stop you from steamrolling them.
It leaves you with the impression that ages are just designed to stunt growth and expansion and you're fairly confined unless you want to stack penalties. I got the impression the AI doesn't deal with the reset particularly well either, since some AI players which were fairly strong early on started faltering in the second age.
Finally, the ages mechanic comes with an end-age crisis, which rather than an interesting challenge turns into a bunch of busywork. In the second age the crisis I got was religion related, where you get to pick your poison and then deal with your choice. In my case I had a choice to invest into a lot of buildings to boost happiness as the AI sent out waves of missionaries to stamp out my religion, or just churn out missionaries. The latter was cheaper and didn't take up precious space.
> you need to spread improvements across tiles instead of building tall.
I have mixed feelings about this in the long game. It's nice to see cities sprawl out into districts/quarters, but at the same time you're trading resources for growth. Overbuilding is a nice mechanic, but in the end I feel that buildings becoming obsolete at the end of an age makes me not want to invest too much in certain buildings despite having a massive amount of production. A particular game I played I ended up with Rome next to the sea, which grew and grew until there was no room for expansion anymore until the end of the age. Maybe it'd have been better to have one or two more buildings in a district?
In Civ 6 I felt it was a neat feature with some nice gameplay mechanics, but in 7 I feel the mechanic has expanded so much that you're constantly weighing options trying to plan ahead that it weighs things down. Maybe I'll feel differently about it over time.
> I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now
Honestly, this is the first time I'm really on the fence about Civ. There's a lot of ideas in there that kind of work, but at the same time kind of don't work. If I were to summarize my sentiment in a single sentence: the motto "a civilization to stand the test of time" has been supplanted with the dread of looming impermanence whispering "this too will pass".
Outdated buildings lose adjacency but have a yield of +2 (if from antiquity) or +3 (if from exploration) yield of whatever their base yields were, so they aren't worthless.
> The settlement limit as you go into the second age also tends to penalize early expansion, another balancing measure. You find the "new world" but you can't just go ahead and do the massive landgrab because doing so comes with a set of penalties which you'll have to offset by building things that'll compensate and in turn stunt growth.
I'm not sure that "things you might want to do require you to devote some of your limited resources and sacrifice something else" is really a bad thing.
> A particular game I played I ended up with Rome next to the sea, which grew and grew until there was no room for expansion anymore until the end of the age.
Having big cities grow to (very close to) footprint-filling urban conglomerations supported by fishing/farming/mining towns is quite clearly an explicit design intent.
I liked Civ(1, 2, uh.. 3 and 4 I think)because it felt like a good balance of strategy, discovery, and turn-based action. Actually I was hooked by Civ I because it was like nothing I'd ever played before, having missed out on Empire. The closest thing to it I'd played at the time was Dan(i) Bunton's Modem Wars on c64/128.
They failed because they were not the full "civ experience", which is to say attention to detail with character design, artwork, music, voice acting, etc. etc. They were mostly just attempts at innovating on the gameplay mechanics and treating the historical aspect as an afterthought, rather than a main focus.
Indie devs can make great games with great mechanics, but this video from the OP kinda demonstrates the difference between indie and AAA dev. No matter how good of a game you can make, you simply will never have the resources for the level of polish required to truly compete against something like Civ. Short of another AAA studio taking up the mantle, I doubt anyone will ever outdo them.
Especially Gandhi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
(Note that while the original bug apparently wasn’t real, they _did_ play with it in subsequent games, at least V and VI).
As to the integer underflow, that appears to either be debunked or to be something that Sid Meyer misremembered (IMO both are possible). I don't think you need an integer underflow for Gandhi to go nuclear in an early Civ game, though.
The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack".
Blitzkrieg style operations were death stacks too (e.g.: schwerpunkt)
And almost every major conflict involved a decisive battle with two death stacks on each side.
The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic. This is the moment Civ became a completely different game. The last true Civ game was Civ 4.
Civ 5 onwards plays completely different because how tile movements are restricted.
In real life those silly restrictions they added do not exist and get in the way of simulating a war.
The level of detail of battles is meant to be low because it's focused in wars not battles. You are not a war general you are a head of government.
There are still plenty of tactics in Civ 4. Units have different bonuses depending on terrain and other factors. You have to plan where the combat takes place and what types units you want to use.
Some unit types have collateral damage (catapult, trebuchet, cannon, artillery, mobile artillery, etc.), and there are similar mechanics with air units, cavalry, etc.
The game is not short of battle tactics just not the board game inspired mechanic of Civ 5+.
- you can destroy roads (needed for some resources)
- you can also occupy the tile or destroy the improvement (mine/plantation/camp/quarry/etc) needed to harvest a resource
- you can use diplomacy to deny a resource
- you can use a spy to destroy an improvement
IMO it was sort of more “honest” from a realism point of view to just admit that the simulation is not that accurate at the unit level, you smash the stacks into each other and assume the officer corps of each army is handling flanking.
It is hard to say which way is more fun really. Seems like a matter of preference. I like tactical games better anyway, so IMO the new way is an improvement. But, realism? Not really.
The shift from death-stacks to one-unit-per-tile made economic advantage relatively less important and battlefield tactics relatively more important. Tech is still important, though.
Some players like the old feel where battlefield tactics were abstracted away, and some players like the new feel where battlefield tactics are a big part of the game. But they are two very different feels from the same franchise, so we get into this debate.
I actually love Humankind’s approach where you have a fairly chunky stack and the stack gets spread out over the map into individual units during combat where you do some short term tactics that pulls in all surrounding units as reinforcements with temporary combat only movements.
Knowing how to concentrate your forces is a tactical element. Once you get railroad you can move your units across your territory easier.
I agree, it's not fun or interesting
There was even a tile improvement you could build "fortress" which was useful to build in chokepoint areas as it gave defenders a big advantage. It made this blockading tactic more effective.
The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.
Alpha Centauri was the peak civ game for me had so many cool things you could do like nerve stapling (removed the cities unhappy population permanently but also removed specialists), population booms - where you could grow cities extremely fast by funneling a massive amount of growth resources into them, Supply crawlers (could ferry resources from any tile on the map to crawlers home city), multi tiered social civics (for example rather than just playing a constitutional republic, you could be a combination of Democratic/Planned Economy or Fundamentalist + Free Market, Police State + Green Economy etc.)
I haven't played Civ VII, and I don't think I played much of Civ II or III, but tile improvements is still a thing in Civ IV, V, and VI. In Civ I, the settler unit would do tile improvements and found cities, and at some point they switched to a settler that only founds cities and a worker unit that does tile improvements. In Civ VI, the worker only has a certain number of charges and then disbands, and they separated out road construction to happen with trade routes, but you still need workers to irrigate and add mines and whatever you need for special resources (in Civ I, there was one special resource and it was called resources; later games there's like spices and bananas and coffee and gold and what have you)
Maybe a better mechanic could be for units to be able to pass by each other, but it could cause attrition for the moving unit (representing the fact that the moving unit will have trouble foraging with all the entrenched defenders hanging around).
Tile improvements have used units (settlers in Civ 1, settlers/engineers in Civ 2, workers in Civ 3-5, builders and military engineers in Civ 6) in all version of Civ in the main franchise line until Civ 7, in Civ 7 non-road improvementsare created automatically by working a tile (and you can't change which tiles are worked once selected, while road and railroad are created by creating cities close enough [roads] or close enough and with rail station buildings [railroads].)
Civ 6 made roadbuilding automatic with trade route creation, but still required units for other tile improvements, including railroads.
Both sides have 10 guys. Let’s say one of them puts 10 in a stack. The other splits into 5/5 to tackle two nearby objectives.
In death stack civ games the 10 stack can just instantly swallow the 5’s without suffering much in the way of losses.
Alternatively you have two cities to defend. You have 9 units vs. their 10 and would win if defending from walls or lose if they fight in the field. Does it really make sense that you have no option but to let them take a city for free because you can’t split your defenses to any effect? Nah.
Humankind’s combat is simply far more elegant. If you attack the 5, the nearby 5 can reinforce them. The combat also takes time. So if a small force can hold off a large force at a defensible choke point or maybe a walled city you can buy time for your other troops to arrive at the battle. The focus on gamey movement points and timing of inputs is gone.
That gap means death stacks are magically logistically-supported.
But fair, as that's not the kind of game it wants to be.
It's clear to me that the designers wanted to include flanking as a mechanic, and other positioning elements of warfare (ranged attacks, zone of control, etc) thus stacks of doom had to go.
If you want to be pedantic about it, Normandy was 5 separate beaches in a 50 mile stretch, and involved paratroopers behind the beachfront ahead of time. And the game does model concentration of power to some degree, in the form of armies and corps.
WW2 battles were physically large, often spread over hundreds of kilometers. When the main threat was artillery, dense concentrations of force made no sense.
And Normandy was multiple units moving against multiple defensive units occupying the same space. This is far better approximated by the original of many units in one spot moving into a singular space occupied by many other units, than the new method of singular units spread hundreds to thousands of miles apart.
[0] Post in thread 'How much area does a single tile cover in Civ?' https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-much-area-does-a-...
On the largest map size in the last game to have squares at all (Civ 4), about 278km east-west if you assume that the cylindrical map has the same circumference as earth does at the equator. Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference. (The answer you linked is based on the hexes of a later civ game, but based on Earth’s land area.)
Later Civ games the answers are larger, since, as well as switching to hexes, the largest map size is smaller in each subsequent Civ iteration (5 is smaller than 4, 6 smaller than 5, and 7 uses the same sizes as 6 but cuts off the two largest.)
Part of the abstraction of the game is that the map for cities and the map for units are at different scales (despite being the same map), and scales change depending on what year you’re in
Well, if we are talking about games where the size of a square is a coherent question, they can only do that in Civ III; Civ 1/2 units have only attack/defense, units with weapons "better range" just goes into the attack/defense abstraction, whereas in Civ IV archery units get first strike, and artillery units damage city defenses, but, like all other units that can attack at all, they can attack only adjacent units. (Even the single use missile units in Civ 4 are just units with a lot of movement that are destroyed when they attack, not ones that have a "range" capability distinct from movement.)
Range units came back with Civ V, along with the introduction of hexes and the elimination of stacks.
This would make no sense; the top and bottom of the map are always land that blocks you from going that way. If you assume that you're on a spherical Earth, you also need to assume that the regions around the north and south pole don't appear on the ingame map.
Thinking about this some more it might be possible to make "doomstacks" that actually have some tactics.
Idea:
Unlimited stacking is allowed. Units are ordered in the stack based on melee attack power * current health. When stacks attack one another only one melee type unit and one ranged unit may attack any particular single unit on the other side. Both attackers and defenders work from the top down. If an attacker or defender destroys their unit then leftover attack power will be used against the next available unit, after all initial attacks have been completed, but that melee unit will take return damage based on the percentage of the attack they have remaining.
For example, side 1 has a stack with 3 warriors and 2 archers. Side 2 has 1 warrior and 4 archers.
Initial attack:
side 1 archer 1 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
side 2 archer 1 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
side 1 warrior 1 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 50% damage to warrior
side 2 warrior 1 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 50% damage to warrior
side 1 archer 2 vs. side 2 archer 2: 60% damage to archer
side 2 archer 2 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
side 1 warrior 2 vs. side 2 archer 2: 40% damage to archer, 60% attack remaining
side 2 archer 3 vs. side 1 warrior 3: 40% damage to warrior
side 1 warrior 3 vs. side 2 archer 3: 100% damage to archer, 0% attack remaining
side 2 archer 4 can not make it to the battle lines and does not take an action
Followup attacks:
side 1 warrior 2 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 3% damage to warrior (10% health, 60% attack), takes 3% damage in return
I think this could be an interesting way to do combat, but it is relatively complicated and the AI would probably be even worse at managing it.
Congratulations, you have basically invented Civ 4's collateral damage mechanic.
> Thinking about this some more it might be possible to make "doomstacks" that actually have some tactics.
Yes, it is. For one more fully developed example, see
https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Combat_(Civ4)
(They have a different solution to modeling ranged capability -- in addition to the collateral damage effect of artillery, it includes the First Strike ability of archery and certain other units.)
https://www.metacritic.com/pictures/every-sid-meiers-civiliz...
[0] https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Fall_from_Heaven_(Civ4)
This is true, but it was also completely changed after Civ 1, Civ 2, and Civ 3 (and, for that matter, Civ 5 and Civ 6.)
> The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic.
Civ III radically changed stack mechanics by eliminating "defeating the strongest defender destroys the stack" (it also added ranged units), Civ IV radically changed stack mechanics by adding in collateral damage from certain attackers (it also got rid of ranged units, replacing them with first strike or archery, and collateral damage for artillery.) Each of these changed the game as radically as Civ 5s one-unit-per-tile (which also so substantial changes with Civ 6's Corps/Army and Fleet/Armada mechanics, and Civ 7's different Army/Fleet/Squadron mechanic.)
The idea that Civ 4 was the single point that changed everything is silly.
Like making Gandhi hurl nukes around like no other? :) Love my Shawnee neighbors though, happy to see my One More Turn habit helping them preserve their language.
Translate into Shawnee: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights"
Translating a specific sentence like "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" into Shawnee can be challenging without expertise in the language or input from a fluent speaker, due to nuances in meaning and the language's polysynthetic nature. Furthermore, high-quality and detailed language resources or native speakers are often necessary for accurate translation, considering contextual and cultural factors.
If you need an accurate translation, it might be best to consult resources or individuals specializing in Shawnee, such as language preservation organizations or native speakers involved in language revitalization efforts. These individuals would have the nuanced understanding necessary to convey the meaning appropriately in Shawnee.
Asked a random online translation service [0], I have no idea if this is accurate or if I just insulted someone's mother. The translator service also has the input field labeled "normal language", which is pretty oof.
[0] https://anythingtranslate.com/translators/shawnee-translator...
For the example sentence "The house is red.", it gave me "Nikiki sîhîi.", "Iko nèeki kèya.", and "Kanǫ́kǫ ǩąn ʌpa nǫhǫ." in three subsequent attempts. Now I don't speak Shawnee but it seems highly unlikely that these very different results all correspond to the original sentence in any language. Plus, the few examples of Shawnee I could find online [1] also suggest it's not written with non-Latin characters and diacritics such as were produced by this "translator".
who needs linguists when you can just make shit up
I much more strongly suspect it was "we're going to hire one person to do the work of three" and the result was "get it working as quick as I can".
That’s certainly what it looks like. When I first tried the game, before getting a refund shortly after, my first thought was “wtf, did they accidentally ship an old build?”. The UI feels so u finished, lacking feedback and visual clarity.
That really ruins the 'real' game and creates this sort of meta layer where you're specifically aiming to compete against these cheat bonuses rather than actually playing the game. It'd be analogous to a really weak chess AI trying to create the facade of challenge by randomly giving itself a new pawn every 2 turns, a a knight every 5 turns, and a rook every 20.
(I've not seen the original game, dunno what they did for that).
In most strategy games, rule-based AI is easier to author, contextualize, and theme. Players usually prefer AI agents with memorable and varied traits instead of excellent high autonomy (complex utility, HTN, ML) AI. They like evident strategy more than complex strategy. Smarter and harder AI sounds appealing on paper, but it’s often less fun for most players who want a predictable, beatable opponent.
High-fidelity human-level opponent AI is only really appreciated in eSports, where it serves a training purpose. However, eSports people have fun in an aim trainer—they are not the “normal” gamer.
Most people want “really weak chess” and wouldn't enjoy hard or complex chess. They like game AI opponents acting in simple and vulnerable patterns they can outsmart and feel clever. And the more they dominate the agents by learning them, the more they like the game. Even if they say they don't, the user testing shows they do. The cheat bonuses that are super easy to win against are probably intentional :)
There is also another reason for building simple game AI — the illusion of intelligence is not created by complexity but rather by anthropomorphization/personification. It's the same as with LLMs — the big breakthrough was when they started speaking like humans, and all further complications aren't adding much to the broad and intuitive feeling of their intelligence. Similarly, a game AI agent that tells you what they are thinking achieves more perceived intelligence than an AI agent that is actually more intelligent. With this in mind, game developers don't waste much time on deep intelligence. This time is better used making agents bark, animate, display human reactions, show context awareness, etc. It is very much about the agents being showhorses, not workhorses.
I say this from pretty long AAA game AI design and architecting experience. It’s wiser to do what Firaxis did.
If it were possible to create a superhuman fair playing AI then the Civ bonuses themselves would create personality (in fact often strongly related to the desired personality characteristics of each civ!) even without additional 'hard coded' imperatives, which would of course also be possible.
And in this scenario create a compelling weaker AI would be much easier than trying to create a compelling strong AI (from a very weak base). There will need to be some 'move' evaluator function and simply picking weaker 'moves' would so fine. If that creates uncompelling AI then we could get back to cheating and impose resource penalties, but with much more compelling play. E.g. - kind of like playing a strong chess engine with knight odds.
Look up different game AI architectures: scripted, rule-based, finite state machines, behavior/decision tree, utility, planning, hierarchical task networks, and machine learning. Hard-coded imperatives are very difficult on highly autonomous architectures, as is complex systemic behavior in authored ones. Consider how hard it is to make an autonomous AI system like ChatGPT implement one simple hard imperative: not revealing the system prompt.
Weak AI and strong AI are ambiguous terms. Most junior-level software engineers can create very complex gameplay systems if you're talking about complexity. It’s much harder to build simple ones that effectively create the illusion of intelligence on limited hardware. If you are talking about difficulty, then challenging AI is no harder to make than easy AI. Usually, game designers will naturally create hard AI as they play the game so much they become experts, and player testing is used to make it easy again.
As you describe it, the move evaluator is a utility function approach that is neither very authorable/personable nor very autonomous. It is pretty limiting on both fronts, so it’s rarely used. A simple rule-based approach is more straightforward to balance and personalize for each agent/archetype. And difficulty scaling or balancing the game differently doesn’t require what you propose. They just chose not to do the balancing you want.
There’s nothing wrong if you prefer a utility approach. We all have our preferences, and I like some pretty clever AI systems like GOAP that aren’t always a good fit for games like Civ. They are cool and smart systems but players rarely respond better to them than simple FSMs or rule-based game AI, which are easier to author. The utility approach is somewhere in the middle and could also be made context-specific with enough separate utility functions the agent would evaluate. But it is so much more work than to define simple if-then rules. :)
It can also lead to the appearance of buggy behavior if you don't understand the implementation. For instance I think Firaxis did a much better job of the AI in XCom (in that it's enjoyable to play against at least), but there too you kind of need to understand the implementation or you might wonder about why, for instance, enemies seem to be magically teleporting around the map. The answer, of course, is that they indeed are.
Of course creating a non-cheating AI that's competitive against skilled humans is extremely non-trivial. But if you at least work on improving the AI you can tune down the amount of cheating necessary to create a challenge, which means the experience can feel much closer to 'organic.'
It matters for the same reason that people don't want to play against a human-like AI, because that AI would be a double crossing bastard who tries to win at all costs. They want to play against a roleplaying AI who tries to appear like Ghenghis Khan or Tutanchamon. But if I see my sworn enemy Attila the Hun spawn in an endless stream of battering rams out of thin air, and yet is so utterly incompetent and dumb that it cannot navigate a simple pass between mountains, that's a worse transgression against my suspension of disbelief than if he was just plain bad at the game.
Firaxis might simply be balancing with formulas like y = mx + b, where the AI starts with a bonus b and gets better at a rate m through the age/game. I am only speculating, but perhaps they want the AI agents to seem harder at the start and make it more likely that the player overcomes them over the game. The feeling of dominating an opponent is one component of a design pillar in many games called "power fantasy," which players love. Dominating them from a position of the underdog is even more rewarding. Whether this plays as well as never giving the AI agents an "unfair" advantage is another question, but this advantage is a part of the Civ formula now. And there is a bit of inertia around design traditions in game series - many things are built around them that wouldn't work and would have to be redone if they changed. Perhaps they didn't want to spend time here.
One way or the other, this is a matter of balancing and not big-picture game AI design, architecture, or systems as much. So, if you are only concerned with cheating, then set all of what I said about these big-picture things aside. However, the comment I was responding to was more about the overall quality of AI systems.
I hope the context I've given anyone who reads this lets them communicate with Firaxis about the cheating problem in a more direct and constructive way. Saying that AI is bad overall from the perspective of system modernity does not express that sentiment and would confuse them. I am happy with the game AI in Civ in the same way most programmers are okay with bugs in software. It's not perfect, but I understand why it is this way. You can challenge the cheating in their forums if you'd like.
Take one of the most controversial features of CIV 5: one unit per tile. On the face of it, this is a great feature that opens up interesting tactical opportunities. Blockading, the importance of terrain, formations etc.
Unfortunately, whether due to unwillingness or lack of competence, the AI was completely befuddled by this. It'd make big armies, and then be fundamentally incapable of moving them. It would shuffle units one by one around endlessly and get stuck in the smallest of congestions.
This is not about whether an AI should play to win like a human or it should roleplay. I agree - and the majority of playerbase agrees - that the CIV AI should primarily roleplay. We all remember the frustrating double-crossing bastards during the early days of CIV 5.
This is not about the AI being complex or not. This is about making a game where the AI is competent, and this is not just the AI being some super smart intelligence in absolute terms. It is (mostly) about designing the game such that the AI can appear competent and pose a threat where the human player can feel like they are playing against an opponent that can test their skill, instead of just trying to beat some pre-determined math that is stacked against them.
CIV 4 was a game built in an era where computers were orders of magnitude less capable, and yet the AI in the game poses a much better and more competent appearing threat than in the current iterations. Not because it was more advanced, but because the game was built such that the AI didn't need to be that advanced. The AI still cheated of course, but it only needed a few simple heuristics and rules to build doomstacks that appeared "smart". A simple A* was enough for it to navigate this doomstack to your capital and make you sweat.
Now we have very complex tactical battles with positioning and formations, but this would require vastly more complex AI to do well. Unfortunately, the AI has not kept up, so we are left with opponents that appear dumb as bricks because they don't play the game the human plays. The AI simply spawns resources and armies into existence out of thin air in ever more blatant ways. The less the AI plays by the same rules the player has to, the less it feels like a story and more like a math puzzle.
I fully believe that the great mass of the bell curve is happy with the bad AI, but for those of us who are a little better at the game, we will keep complaining about how terrible the AI is.
The AI certainly does tell you what it's thinking: "Duuuuhhhhhhhhhhh"
I'm sure there's a community where they build alternative enemy computer players though. And else there's always online multiplayer, but that's not for everyone.
But there was a significant issue with this: the AI was terrible at moving units and armies. It'd get confused by the smallest congestion. The AI would build a large army, and then be incapable of moving it anywhere.
The AI can still have personality and roleyplay instead of attempting to win, and yet be a competent strategist and tactician.
This isn't a case where the AI is meant to have "authored personality" or whatever.
We could argue that making a competent AI is difficult - it is! But then a competent game designer comes up with mechanics that the AI can handle. A well designed game is put together knowing the capabilities of each game component so that they work together, not against each other.
This is I feel the source of brilliance of CIV 4. It was a game running on vastly less powerful machines than what we have today, and yet the AI felt vastly more competent. It is likely actually less "smart" than the AI in CIV 7 in absolute terms, but it was operating in a world which it understood and could reason about much better.
It's an issue with a lot of modern games. People have starry ideas about fancy features, but then they can't integrate the features together into a cohesive whole. I think this is something we lost in the modern days of game development. It has never been easier and more accessible, but this accessibility (which I support wholeheartedly), has made it easy for people to design themselves into a corner.
Civ's multiplayer is traditionally very poor (frequent crashes, desyncs etc), which is a big reason why there's such demand for good AI, moreso than other games.
It's set entirely in the ancient time period instead of having multiple ages, which I find this to be a strength since units and technologies remain relevant throughout the entire game. Also, ethical sales practices: the base game is very complete and DLC only adds small changes unlike most games in this genre (looking at you Paradox). The game's also on GOG, which itself is a green flag in several ways.
The developers are active daily on all support channels (Discord, Steam, forums etc). I've seen people attach saves asking for help, and a dev always respond a couple hours later in great detail.
Civ also does everything you mentioned - ie their units will flank and retreat. Is the AI markedly better than Civ?
It has a lot more going on than Civ (1 turn in OW is equivalent to about 3 turns of Civ), but somehow it's a lot more polished. There's a free demo, feel free to try it. It's often on deep discount as well. It has a 200 page manual. I find that skimming a manual gives me a good feel for a game before I play it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hb4dmDKxpf3pJJtpdFA4y4OOY-d...
The lead designer is Soren Johnson, who was also the lead designer for Civ 4, so if you liked that particular iteration you might like OW.
Not only they turned Civ6 into a board game for PC, they equipped it with extremely dumb AI which can be easily beaten even at the highest difficulty level.
Now I'm looking at the gameplay of Civ7 on youtube and no way I'm buying it. Maybe I'll play Civ5 when I feel nostalgic.
People looking for novel strategy gaming generally just go online, and those people are such a small minority of users it wouldn't make much sense to develop the game around their preferences. It would be interesting if an AI could be trained on ingesting data from multiplayer and single player games to come up with novel strategies, but the training costs probably exceed the total value of the market for any particular game.
Civ IV was interesting in that it patched its AI across multiple expansions based on playtesting and user feedback. The AI in IV is generally predictable, but it doesn't fall for a lot of cheap feints that you might expect because of this.
I always thought there might be some model that could support development like this - something like the season pass model, where the same game gets updated with novel content every year. Minecraft does this for free, FIFA does it every year by retailing what is effectively the same game with updated content, and Fortnite operates a traditional season pass. Microsoft has kind of done this by revamping some old titles like Age of Empires II, but the only studio I can think of that operates on this model is Paradox. That does get expensive though - Crusader Kings II with all of its expansions retailed for around $250 USD. Not bad for a game you play over the course of years (comparable to many MMORPGs), but a lot to pay for a game all at once.
(Though Kagi isn't perfect: I find it slower than Google: it'll take maybe 500ms for a result compared to <100ms on Google; Search-autocomplete is also less responsive, and their privacy-first approach means they don't save your search-history, whereas I want them to save my search-history for me, but anyway).
Awhile back I daydreamed about other "victory" conditions (what other victory is there but an interesting story across generations, a sense of meaning and purpose to life, and the continuation of a diverse interrelation of life forms on Earth?), and would like to have played a game where I set up the initial conditions, played out as many turns as I wanted, and then turned it over to the algorithm (not AI, not the current ML/LLM fad, but something far cheaper to run, and with just the biases of the devs as a result of all their research) to see how things shook out over the next ten thousand years.