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I still stick with Civ 5 myself. Never really cared for Civ 6. Although Civ isn't really my type of strategy game anyway. It's fun, but man the games take fore

I still stick with Civ 5 myself. Never really cared for Civ 6. Although Civ isn't really my type of strategy game anyway. It's fun, but man the games take forever(and I play classical chess...). And for single player, the AI is so dumb, annoying and belligerent it kinda saps the fun out of it for me. The difficulty levels in Civ 5 are actually all the same dumb AI, just with varying levels of cheats enabled. I believe on Diety it starts with 3 settlers or something bonkers like that, and a huge production multiplier to boot. And yet the AI is still so dumb that a strong human player can win a game against 5 diety AIs on the same team. If Civ 5 had a somewhat passable AI I would play a lot more I think, because then I could actually get practice put of single player mode. Additionally there's so much busy work(micromanaging tiles/workers can get pretty tedious). I feel like strategically and tactically the game is pretty simple. In games against much more experienced players where I get a lucky start and we're even entering the endgame I tend to win because I'm just a better tactician due to studying chess. But they usually get much better early games because they know all the mechanics more intricately, which is basically rote. I'm kind of more partial to Risk for that reason. The rules are dead simple, yet it is still tactically very complicated.

kingkongjaffa 4y ago
I wouldn’t mind but diplomacy is broken still. Civs stay mad at you for invading a neighbouring civ for the entirety of the game. Things like denouncement and warmongering issues don’t fade away nearly as fast enough to allow varied gameplay. Usually a civ will start expanding into your land, cause a war, then you take them out but of course everyone else is now mad at you and it stays like that for the rest of the game.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
distances 4y ago
With Civ5 you probably want to use Vox Populi. It really improves the game to a completely new level, including the AI. It's not a human opponent but much better than any Civ version ever shipped officially. Vox Populi is a DLL mod though so Windows only. This mod is basically the only reason I keep Windows around. Edit: and forgot to say that the development and community is very active, 12 years after the game originally shipped. New versions come out regularly.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  You can likely use Proton to run Civ 5.
  - distances 4y ago
    Likely, I'll have to search a bit if someone already took a stab at getting the mod work too.
    - 29athrowaway 4y ago
      It should not be a problem. Proton runs unmodified Windows software.
      - distances 4y ago
        Running yes but the mod is shipped as a Windows installer package so that needs to be extracted, either by running the installer or by some other means. So needs a bit of effort to figure it out unless someone already posted working instructions.
        29athrowaway 4y ago
        Proton is basically Wine. Wine creates a "Wineprefix", which is a folder hierarchy similar to that of a Windows installation. You can run the installer within that Wineprefix using wine. That will install the files. Then you can run Civ 5 and everything should be in place.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Spellman 4y ago
  Vox Populi has added SO MUCH, especially in the AI
GameOfFrowns 4y ago
>I tend to win because I'm just a better tactician due to studying chess Can you give an example situation where your chess experience gave you an edge over your opponent? I'm failing to see how chess tactics would translate to a more complex sim like Civ.
- bitexploder 4y ago
  It is an interesting assertion. What we know about learning and chunking in our brains implies that chess knowledge is too specific to be used elsewhere directly. The years of playing chess probably just mean parent is good at analysis and learning things like chess, and is why they were interested in chess to begin with. Maybe some chess concepts work and apply, but chess memory and skill is rather specific.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    A lot of it is specific, but it's not like chess and civ are completely disjunct either. There is some significant overlap between some of the thought processes involved. They both have minimax game trees, though civ obviously has a much bigger branching factor so you have to be a lot fuzzier about it. But I'd argue that just having played a lot of chess with a more managable branching factor makes it easier to make the meta decision of how to think about these games.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  It's not very tangible like "oh that's just like a skewer tactic in chess!", it's more a general ability to think ahead and enumerate various likely scenarios, and ways of deciding what to do. Chess is not just pure pattern recognition. It's also a game of decisions, understanding what your opponent is trying to do, swallowing your own pride, etc. You can play chess in an almost poker type way, playing risky lines betting that your opponent won't find a tricky refutation. It seems like the board state(and clock) is all there is, but that is far from the truth. One of the biggest challenges for learning chess players is to learn to consider your opponent's plans and factoring it into your own. This sounds obvious, but from my experience tutoring kids it's very much not the natural state of things. The natural thing is to only consider what you want to do. Which doesn't work if the opponent's plan is quicker. Then you need to find a new idea. Even if you're just a few moves away from completing yours. There's a mental discipline to avoiding the sunk cost fallacy there that can easily be worth a few hundred rating points. Now, most of the research on transfer of chess skills has focused on things like IQ and working memory, and found no meaningful transfer. But there's a lot more to chess(or any other skill) than that. I'm not convinced this is adequately expored by the field of psychology at all. I regularly beat people at simpler strategy games even though they're the ones teaching me the rules of the game. You could argue I'm just naturally good at strategy games, and that's why I play chess. And that must be at least partially the reason. But it's my intuition that some of these more abstract game decision making, opponent modelling, etc skills do transfer(I am biased though, obviously). But that's a lot harder to research than doing an IQ test and a short term recall test.
the_only_law 4y ago
The cool thing about Civ is my friends will actually play it. It has the right mix of looking approachable and having depth of mechanics. Paradox games on the other hand, are too intimidating for most people I know to try.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Yeah... I love history, so I really want to enjoy HOI4, there's just so much fucking busy work to deal with. I think I'm just spoiled by playing chess where there is nothing but the "battle of ideas", as GM Yasser Seirawan likes to put it.
- spacehunt 4y ago
  Their more recent titles (Crusader Kings 3, Stellaris) are actually quite approachable, and the upcoming Victoria 3 is looking pretty good too.
Pxtl 4y ago
If you're interested in F/OSS Civ 5, there's a decent F/OSS mobile-first implementation called Unciv. https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv I've played a terrifying number of hours of it in bed on my phone. edit: on AI, since I'm rate-limited:| I think it gives higher AI difficulties a massive productivity boost so they just crush you under a flood of units.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Woah, this looks slick! I had no idea this existed. Now I kinda want to have a poke at this Civ AI business. Or at least look at the code so I can get a better idea of how the AI is implemented and why it's so bad. Edit: that is, assuming this version has similarly bad AI to the original.
  - entropicdrifter 4y ago
    Having played a good number of hours of Unciv myself as well as Civ V, the AI is indeed similarly bad. Their meta-strategies are largely one-trick ponies making them trivial to predict. Harder difficulties just wildly tip the resource scales in the AI's favor without improving their decision making at all.
  - Spellman 4y ago
    Mostly because the AI isn't able to really strategically "plan". Most of the work goes into iterating over all units and giving each an action based on certain metrics. Thus coordinating units and strategy isn't really present. Now with some work you could add a higher level planner system. Vox Populi, a Civ5 mod, has done some really clever stuff with organizing units into formations for battle.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      Makes sense. Only game AI I know intimately is chess AI, so my intuition is to do minimax tree search(like alphabeta). The implementation is tricky though because there's multiple moves. And likely the branching factor is far to high for alphabeta to be helpful. I think Monte Carlo methods might be more promising. Maybe with some simplified gamestate, allowing you to modify it more cheaply, reducing the overhead per node. "Computing a turn" can take a long time in late game civ5. Probably a lot of probabilistic stuff is needed to get it cheap enough. Like you could have credences based on current information about which win condition is most likely for each civ. Then you could feasibly decide what the long term goal should be. Kinda feels like a cognitive architecture(like soar) is necessary to get anything even resembling decent play. It's sort of hard to have an intuition of what kind of heuristic search is feasible without having some idea of the branching factor, though.

kingkongjaffa 4y ago

I wouldn’t mind but diplomacy is broken still. Civs stay mad at you for invading a neighbouring civ for the entirety of the game. Things like denouncement and warmongering issues don’t fade away nearly as fast enough to allow varied gameplay. Usually a civ will start expanding into your land, cause a war, then you take them out but of course everyone else is now mad at you and it stays like that for the rest of the game.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

distances 4y ago

With Civ5 you probably want to use Vox Populi. It really improves the game to a completely new level, including the AI. It's not a human opponent but much better than any Civ version ever shipped officially. Vox Populi is a DLL mod though so Windows only. This mod is basically the only reason I keep Windows around. Edit: and forgot to say that the development and community is very active, 12 years after the game originally shipped. New versions come out regularly.

29athrowaway 4y ago
You can likely use Proton to run Civ 5.
- distances 4y ago
  Likely, I'll have to search a bit if someone already took a stab at getting the mod work too.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    It should not be a problem. Proton runs unmodified Windows software.
    - distances 4y ago
      Running yes but the mod is shipped as a Windows installer package so that needs to be extracted, either by running the installer or by some other means. So needs a bit of effort to figure it out unless someone already posted working instructions.
      - 29athrowaway 4y ago
        Proton is basically Wine. Wine creates a "Wineprefix", which is a folder hierarchy similar to that of a Windows installation. You can run the installer within that Wineprefix using wine. That will install the files. Then you can run Civ 5 and everything should be in place.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Spellman 4y ago
Vox Populi has added SO MUCH, especially in the AI

GameOfFrowns 4y ago

>I tend to win because I'm just a better tactician due to studying chess Can you give an example situation where your chess experience gave you an edge over your opponent? I'm failing to see how chess tactics would translate to a more complex sim like Civ.

bitexploder 4y ago
It is an interesting assertion. What we know about learning and chunking in our brains implies that chess knowledge is too specific to be used elsewhere directly. The years of playing chess probably just mean parent is good at analysis and learning things like chess, and is why they were interested in chess to begin with. Maybe some chess concepts work and apply, but chess memory and skill is rather specific.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  A lot of it is specific, but it's not like chess and civ are completely disjunct either. There is some significant overlap between some of the thought processes involved. They both have minimax game trees, though civ obviously has a much bigger branching factor so you have to be a lot fuzzier about it. But I'd argue that just having played a lot of chess with a more managable branching factor makes it easier to make the meta decision of how to think about these games.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
It's not very tangible like "oh that's just like a skewer tactic in chess!", it's more a general ability to think ahead and enumerate various likely scenarios, and ways of deciding what to do. Chess is not just pure pattern recognition. It's also a game of decisions, understanding what your opponent is trying to do, swallowing your own pride, etc. You can play chess in an almost poker type way, playing risky lines betting that your opponent won't find a tricky refutation. It seems like the board state(and clock) is all there is, but that is far from the truth. One of the biggest challenges for learning chess players is to learn to consider your opponent's plans and factoring it into your own. This sounds obvious, but from my experience tutoring kids it's very much not the natural state of things. The natural thing is to only consider what you want to do. Which doesn't work if the opponent's plan is quicker. Then you need to find a new idea. Even if you're just a few moves away from completing yours. There's a mental discipline to avoiding the sunk cost fallacy there that can easily be worth a few hundred rating points. Now, most of the research on transfer of chess skills has focused on things like IQ and working memory, and found no meaningful transfer. But there's a lot more to chess(or any other skill) than that. I'm not convinced this is adequately expored by the field of psychology at all. I regularly beat people at simpler strategy games even though they're the ones teaching me the rules of the game. You could argue I'm just naturally good at strategy games, and that's why I play chess. And that must be at least partially the reason. But it's my intuition that some of these more abstract game decision making, opponent modelling, etc skills do transfer(I am biased though, obviously). But that's a lot harder to research than doing an IQ test and a short term recall test.

the_only_law 4y ago

The cool thing about Civ is my friends will actually play it. It has the right mix of looking approachable and having depth of mechanics. Paradox games on the other hand, are too intimidating for most people I know to try.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Yeah... I love history, so I really want to enjoy HOI4, there's just so much fucking busy work to deal with. I think I'm just spoiled by playing chess where there is nothing but the "battle of ideas", as GM Yasser Seirawan likes to put it.
spacehunt 4y ago
Their more recent titles (Crusader Kings 3, Stellaris) are actually quite approachable, and the upcoming Victoria 3 is looking pretty good too.

Pxtl 4y ago

If you're interested in F/OSS Civ 5, there's a decent F/OSS mobile-first implementation called Unciv. https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv I've played a terrifying number of hours of it in bed on my phone. edit: on AI, since I'm rate-limited:| I think it gives higher AI difficulties a massive productivity boost so they just crush you under a flood of units.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Woah, this looks slick! I had no idea this existed. Now I kinda want to have a poke at this Civ AI business. Or at least look at the code so I can get a better idea of how the AI is implemented and why it's so bad. Edit: that is, assuming this version has similarly bad AI to the original.
- entropicdrifter 4y ago
  Having played a good number of hours of Unciv myself as well as Civ V, the AI is indeed similarly bad. Their meta-strategies are largely one-trick ponies making them trivial to predict. Harder difficulties just wildly tip the resource scales in the AI's favor without improving their decision making at all.
- Spellman 4y ago
  Mostly because the AI isn't able to really strategically "plan". Most of the work goes into iterating over all units and giving each an action based on certain metrics. Thus coordinating units and strategy isn't really present. Now with some work you could add a higher level planner system. Vox Populi, a Civ5 mod, has done some really clever stuff with organizing units into formations for battle.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Makes sense. Only game AI I know intimately is chess AI, so my intuition is to do minimax tree search(like alphabeta). The implementation is tricky though because there's multiple moves. And likely the branching factor is far to high for alphabeta to be helpful. I think Monte Carlo methods might be more promising. Maybe with some simplified gamestate, allowing you to modify it more cheaply, reducing the overhead per node. "Computing a turn" can take a long time in late game civ5. Probably a lot of probabilistic stuff is needed to get it cheap enough. Like you could have credences based on current information about which win condition is most likely for each civ. Then you could feasibly decide what the long term goal should be. Kinda feels like a cognitive architecture(like soar) is necessary to get anything even resembling decent play. It's sort of hard to have an intuition of what kind of heuristic search is feasible without having some idea of the branching factor, though.