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>Seriously, I'm starting to think turn based strategy games like Civilization, etc, will be the last to get any attention. Why? I don't think the answer is te

>Seriously, I'm starting to think turn based strategy games like Civilization, etc, will be the last to get any attention. Why? I don't think the answer is technical. A good AI for a game like Civilization would have knowledge of human social concepts like honor and vindictiveness, which are both concepts problematic to pin down. The definitions of concepts like these are fluid, they change with the times and societies in question. But that's not to say any possible setting for these concepts is equally valid when trying to emulate human behavior. Some settings will seem unrealistic, like a mustache twirling villain or a hyper-rational pointy-eared alien. Neither make for good AIs if you're shooting for human-like behavior. Humans can certainly individually craft fictional personalities that seem realistic; authors do it all the time. But from a gameplay perspective that tactic falls flat; you end up with a limited set of personalities the player becomes familiar with and the game consequently loses relay value. In the Civilization games, every player knows that Gandhi has a short temper and likes to launch nukes. Rather than crafting individual personalities, how does a game designer define a function that returns personalities with a realistic distribution? How can a game designer define such a function if the parameters aren't truly known by science and the artists who craft individual personalities are going off wishy-washy metrics like gut instinct and artistic intuition?

Voloskaya 7y ago
> A good AI for a game like Civilization would have knowledge of human social concepts like honor and vindictiveness, This is a pretty wild assumption to say the least.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I'm very curious why you're so skeptical of this. The AI that was created for the Civilization games did in fact try to model these and similar aspects of human behavior, with the intent of creating AIs that played in ways humans would consider natural or fitting. They named the AIs after historical humans and tried to make the AIs act in ways that would be perceived as similar to their namesakes. Nuke-happy Gandhi was originally a bug; that AI was intended to be a pacifist but apparently the in-game invention of democracy causes that value to underflow, rendering him as maximally aggressive. This trait was kept in later games due to fan demand, but that's the exception to the rule. Generally these AIs are intended to behave as humans might behave. These games have parameters for loyalty, forgiveness, propensity towards warmongering, and more. That's part of what these games are. If you took away that philosophy towards AI design, you'd no longer have a Civilization game.
  - oefrha 7y ago
    It's pretty damn easy to pin down "parameters for loyalty, forgiveness, propensity towards warmongering, and more" (in fact, they already pinned them down) while making the AI smart enough to not leave lucrative resources unimproved, and not smash waves and waves of units into a walled city with +30 strength.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      The problem is that not all combinations of those traits are equally valid, and the optimal distributions of those traits are ill defined. If warmongering is some number 0 to 1, with 0 being Gandhi and 1 being Genghis Khan, that's all fine and good. But what does the distribution curve of a randomly generated nation leader look like and how well does that curve conform to the expectations and perceptions of the player? You can't assume independence; players likely expect a high-warmonger/low-forgiveness leader to be more common than a high-warmonger/high-forgiveness leader, but the later combination shouldn't be strictly forbidden. Rather than pinning down all these curves, the Civilization series leans on a finite number of hand-crafted AI players, created by humans exercising intuition and instinct. As for tactical AI (which is only one component of Civilization), an optimal play from the AI probably isn't what most players desire, nor is optimal play with randomly imposed inefficiencies. Real humans don't run countries optimally, so an AI that runs a Civilization nation optimally won't ring true. You want an AI that rarely makes mistakes that a human wouldn't make, but frequently makes mistakes that a human would make. Making a good AI for a game like Civ is not nearly as straight forward as creating an AI for a game like Chess or Go because players have different expectations from the games.
      - oefrha 7y ago
        > As for tactical AI (which is only one component of Civilization), an optimal play from the AI probably isn't what most players desire, nor is optimal play with randomly imposed inefficiencies. No one's demanding optimal play from AI. Meanwhile I'm sure pretty much no one's happy with idiotic AI, which is what we have at the moment. I already gave an example: "smashing waves and waves of units into a walled city with +30 strength." Any human player familiar with the rules won't sink 100 city-turns worth of production over 20 turns into attacking an unconquerable city, losing everything while shaving 20% off the wall, then repeat that for another 40 turns; that's idiotic, and that's exactly how the AI behaves alarmingly often. Do you enjoy dealing with this kind of behavior? I bet you don't, unless you only derive pleasure from crushing AIs (which I do enjoy, but the satisfaction from the lack of challenge only lasts so long). Currently game difficulty in Civ is basically defined by how much of a head start AI players have and how much they cheat (which in theory is a consistent advantage throughout the game but in reality matters less and less once the human player starts conquering), so once you overcome your early disadvantages the late game becomes boring. > Making a good AI for a game like Civ is not nearly as straight forward... I never said it's easy to create a great AI for Civ. However, it shouldn't be hard to outdo the existing, idiotic AI by a huge margin (while preserving all the traits like nuke-happiness) if, say, DeepMind decides to put some resources into it.
sullyj3 7y ago
> if you're shooting for human-like behavior You're not though, you're just trying to build a bot that can win the game.
- Buttons840 7y ago
  Yep. Just beat a human 1v1 half the time. No AI can do it - none I've seen.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Not if you want a fun game. Civilization is a game about role-playing as the leader of a nation, not merely about sprinting to the finish. The AI is meant to take part in that roleplaying, to enhance the experience for the player. An AI that consistently loses but does so in a very human way is better than an AI that consistently wins but plays like a machine. (Obviously the ideal is an AI that plays like a human and can hold its own, but a playstyle similar to humans is definitely more important than ability to win.)
  - Buttons840 7y ago
    I disagree and have a hard time enjoying opponents that I know are cheating to enable thmselves to compete. After I learned the basics my own opinion is that Civilization is no longer a fun game, due to the poor AI. We can probably agree that finding fun and interesting ways to dumb down an AI will be a cool area for research and new ideas in the future, but we need strong AI before we can figure out fun ways to weaken it.
  - sullyj3 7y ago
    For sure, but the context of this discussion is AI research, not game design.

Voloskaya 7y ago

> A good AI for a game like Civilization would have knowledge of human social concepts like honor and vindictiveness, This is a pretty wild assumption to say the least.

catalogia 7y ago
I'm very curious why you're so skeptical of this. The AI that was created for the Civilization games did in fact try to model these and similar aspects of human behavior, with the intent of creating AIs that played in ways humans would consider natural or fitting. They named the AIs after historical humans and tried to make the AIs act in ways that would be perceived as similar to their namesakes. Nuke-happy Gandhi was originally a bug; that AI was intended to be a pacifist but apparently the in-game invention of democracy causes that value to underflow, rendering him as maximally aggressive. This trait was kept in later games due to fan demand, but that's the exception to the rule. Generally these AIs are intended to behave as humans might behave. These games have parameters for loyalty, forgiveness, propensity towards warmongering, and more. That's part of what these games are. If you took away that philosophy towards AI design, you'd no longer have a Civilization game.
- oefrha 7y ago
  It's pretty damn easy to pin down "parameters for loyalty, forgiveness, propensity towards warmongering, and more" (in fact, they already pinned them down) while making the AI smart enough to not leave lucrative resources unimproved, and not smash waves and waves of units into a walled city with +30 strength.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    The problem is that not all combinations of those traits are equally valid, and the optimal distributions of those traits are ill defined. If warmongering is some number 0 to 1, with 0 being Gandhi and 1 being Genghis Khan, that's all fine and good. But what does the distribution curve of a randomly generated nation leader look like and how well does that curve conform to the expectations and perceptions of the player? You can't assume independence; players likely expect a high-warmonger/low-forgiveness leader to be more common than a high-warmonger/high-forgiveness leader, but the later combination shouldn't be strictly forbidden. Rather than pinning down all these curves, the Civilization series leans on a finite number of hand-crafted AI players, created by humans exercising intuition and instinct. As for tactical AI (which is only one component of Civilization), an optimal play from the AI probably isn't what most players desire, nor is optimal play with randomly imposed inefficiencies. Real humans don't run countries optimally, so an AI that runs a Civilization nation optimally won't ring true. You want an AI that rarely makes mistakes that a human wouldn't make, but frequently makes mistakes that a human would make. Making a good AI for a game like Civ is not nearly as straight forward as creating an AI for a game like Chess or Go because players have different expectations from the games.
    - oefrha 7y ago
      > As for tactical AI (which is only one component of Civilization), an optimal play from the AI probably isn't what most players desire, nor is optimal play with randomly imposed inefficiencies. No one's demanding optimal play from AI. Meanwhile I'm sure pretty much no one's happy with idiotic AI, which is what we have at the moment. I already gave an example: "smashing waves and waves of units into a walled city with +30 strength." Any human player familiar with the rules won't sink 100 city-turns worth of production over 20 turns into attacking an unconquerable city, losing everything while shaving 20% off the wall, then repeat that for another 40 turns; that's idiotic, and that's exactly how the AI behaves alarmingly often. Do you enjoy dealing with this kind of behavior? I bet you don't, unless you only derive pleasure from crushing AIs (which I do enjoy, but the satisfaction from the lack of challenge only lasts so long). Currently game difficulty in Civ is basically defined by how much of a head start AI players have and how much they cheat (which in theory is a consistent advantage throughout the game but in reality matters less and less once the human player starts conquering), so once you overcome your early disadvantages the late game becomes boring. > Making a good AI for a game like Civ is not nearly as straight forward... I never said it's easy to create a great AI for Civ. However, it shouldn't be hard to outdo the existing, idiotic AI by a huge margin (while preserving all the traits like nuke-happiness) if, say, DeepMind decides to put some resources into it.

sullyj3 7y ago

> if you're shooting for human-like behavior You're not though, you're just trying to build a bot that can win the game.

Buttons840 7y ago
Yep. Just beat a human 1v1 half the time. No AI can do it - none I've seen.
catalogia 7y ago
Not if you want a fun game. Civilization is a game about role-playing as the leader of a nation, not merely about sprinting to the finish. The AI is meant to take part in that roleplaying, to enhance the experience for the player. An AI that consistently loses but does so in a very human way is better than an AI that consistently wins but plays like a machine. (Obviously the ideal is an AI that plays like a human and can hold its own, but a playstyle similar to humans is definitely more important than ability to win.)
- Buttons840 7y ago
  I disagree and have a hard time enjoying opponents that I know are cheating to enable thmselves to compete. After I learned the basics my own opinion is that Civilization is no longer a fun game, due to the poor AI. We can probably agree that finding fun and interesting ways to dumb down an AI will be a cool area for research and new ideas in the future, but we need strong AI before we can figure out fun ways to weaken it.
- sullyj3 7y ago
  For sure, but the context of this discussion is AI research, not game design.