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Civ 5 (or was it Civ 4?) attempted this by giving you city governors that you could give "general directions" for what to focus on, and then ignore. The workers

Civ 5 (or was it Civ 4?) attempted this by giving you city governors that you could give "general directions" for what to focus on, and then ignore. The workers were also automatable in this way. It works pretty well for casual play, but playing higher difficulties still requires micromanagement. Since you can micromanage, you can zoom in on the nitty gritty as desired. For a certain kind of self-actualized casual gaming, it might actually work. You have to trust / live with the bad choices of your automatons, yet also remember to tell them when you want to change direction.

mntmoss 7y ago
The main limitation to the AI governor model, which has been tried in many games to varying success, is that the solver necessary to make them play like an optimal player tends to start encompassing more and more parts of the game mechanics as you add in tricks like "use a worker to rush production" or "plan improvements to coincide with tech advances". The player, likely to be of a controlling or anxious mindset, will reject the idea that these details can be left up to an unaware AI, and given the option to do so they will micro-manage the fun out of the game. When the game has relatively few options that can be played to a high depth, like Chess, of course, it's easy to write such a competent AI with a brute-force approach. But that's usually not how 4X games are structured: there are a ton of decisions involving overlapping timers and resource bonuses and force committments, and so the top-end strategy revolves around leveraging everything in a just-so way to accelerate growth and minimize losses. The move towards lower micro and symmetric balancing in newer games has the upside of downplaying much of this; your advantage, where you get one, is much less likely to come from careful micro employed to replicate a 50% advantage in a single scenario hundreds of times, and AI benefits as well. But it also loses some of the charm of weirdly unbalanced 90's strategy.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  You summed up more perfectly than I could why the AI governors are really only suitable for a certain kind of casual (relaxed) style of play.

mntmoss 7y ago

The main limitation to the AI governor model, which has been tried in many games to varying success, is that the solver necessary to make them play like an optimal player tends to start encompassing more and more parts of the game mechanics as you add in tricks like "use a worker to rush production" or "plan improvements to coincide with tech advances". The player, likely to be of a controlling or anxious mindset, will reject the idea that these details can be left up to an unaware AI, and given the option to do so they will micro-manage the fun out of the game. When the game has relatively few options that can be played to a high depth, like Chess, of course, it's easy to write such a competent AI with a brute-force approach. But that's usually not how 4X games are structured: there are a ton of decisions involving overlapping timers and resource bonuses and force committments, and so the top-end strategy revolves around leveraging everything in a just-so way to accelerate growth and minimize losses. The move towards lower micro and symmetric balancing in newer games has the upside of downplaying much of this; your advantage, where you get one, is much less likely to come from careful micro employed to replicate a 50% advantage in a single scenario hundreds of times, and AI benefits as well. But it also loses some of the charm of weirdly unbalanced 90's strategy.

IggleSniggle 7y ago
You summed up more perfectly than I could why the AI governors are really only suitable for a certain kind of casual (relaxed) style of play.