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I'd go for AI! The problem I have with Civ is that they create these really sort of interesting and elaborate systems, but they've clearly long surpassed the ca

I'd go for AI! The problem I have with Civ is that they create these really sort of interesting and elaborate systems, but they've clearly long surpassed the capabilities of their AI systems to the point that the only way to create the illusion of competitiveness is with giving the AI ever more massive cheat bonuses (200% faster research, 200% more resources per tile, etc type stuff). 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.

ben_w 2y ago
That's essentially what they were doing at least as far back as Civ2 (I think there was a cheat menu for creating custom maps?) — the shields the AI needed for a unit or building, the bushels needed for city growth, were reduced on higher difficulty settings. (I've not seen the original game, dunno what they did for that).
- davedx 2y ago
  Original game was the same IIRC. You’d see it when you spied on enemy cities - ludicrously spaced out shields in their build bar
ainiriand 2y ago
That is also my main problem with the game. Playing deity difficulty is finding a way to game the game in order to overcome the bonuses your rivals get, it is not about creating brilliant strategies because your rivals are cunning. In fact the AI is rather dumb.
caseyy 2y ago
Firaxis’s team is quite skilled, and many of its designers also code, which helps them build features more intentionally than at many other studios. I’m pretty sure they considered doing more autonomous AI for Civ VII, but there are really good reasons not to. 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.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  It's not like the choices are between a 'lively' cheating AI that can't play worth a fiddle without massive cheat bonuses, and a soulless unbeatable superhuman AI that plays fair. 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.
  - caseyy 2y ago
    When one builds game AI, one of the core design decisions is whether they want the system to be autonomous or authorable. You are right, its not a strict dichotomy. But both choices offer many advantages that an undecided/mixed approach doesn’t. 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. :)
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
This is always a challenge in video games; the goal of enemy AI is not to beat you, but to make for an interesting and fun challenge. 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.
- short_sells_poo 2y ago
  You are right, but the issue here is slightly more nuanced. The CIV AI is just plain atrocious at playing the game. It's not about having a personality, it's that the developers add game mechanics that the AI is fundamentally incapable of dealing with. To give you an example, CIV 5 introduced the concept of 1 unit per tile - it used to be that you could stack as many units as you wanted into one tile before. Neat idea, right? Terrain and unit placement suddenly mattered! 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.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    No unit stacking even breaks the automated worker orders which are meant to help the player by reducing the amount of micro. Automated workers are borderline useless in Civ V compared to Civ II. This isn't a case where the AI is meant to have "authored personality" or whatever.
    - short_sells_poo 2y ago
      That's a very good point as well. Again, I think the point is not about making the AI human-like (ie play to win), but making it competent. Firaxis seems unwilling or incapable of making the AI competent. 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.
buzzardbait 2y ago
I've been playing a game called Old World, which is basically Civ with decent UI and AI. The UI is intuitive and uses a nested tooltip system similar to Crusader Kings 3. The AI is pretty decent at war, it will flank you, use its strengths against your weaknesses, and will retreat to heal units that you don't finish off instead of fighting unwinnable battles. 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.
- ACS_Solver 2y ago
  As one of the OW designers, and a daily HN reader, this is an unexpected but highly pleasant mention of the game here!
  - buzzardbait 2y ago
    Ah yes, the famed Solver! You're known for your inhumanly rapid responses to every Old World related discussion on the Internet but I didn't expect you to show up here.
    - ACS_Solver 2y ago
      I'm first and foremost a computer nerd, about the very target audience HN is for. Which also happens to be the target audience the early Civ games or Old World are often for!
- Secretmapper 2y ago
  > I've been playing a game called Old World, which is basically Civ with decent UI and AI. The UI is intuitive and uses a nested tooltip system similar to Crusader Kings 3. The AI is pretty decent at war, it will flank you, use its strengths against your weaknesses, and will retreat to heal units that you don't finish off instead of fighting unwinnable battles. Civ also does everything you mentioned - ie their units will flank and retreat. Is the AI markedly better than Civ?
drysine 2y ago
Absolutely. 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.
lurk2 2y ago
Most strategy games are like this. If the game were simple enough to be amenable to the AI competing on an equal playing field, it wouldn't be marketable to strategy gamers. If it becomes more complex, it's dubious that AI could be developed at a reasonable price point in the first place, or that it could be run on consumer hardware. 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.

ben_w 2y ago

That's essentially what they were doing at least as far back as Civ2 (I think there was a cheat menu for creating custom maps?) — the shields the AI needed for a unit or building, the bushels needed for city growth, were reduced on higher difficulty settings. (I've not seen the original game, dunno what they did for that).

davedx 2y ago
Original game was the same IIRC. You’d see it when you spied on enemy cities - ludicrously spaced out shields in their build bar

ainiriand 2y ago

That is also my main problem with the game. Playing deity difficulty is finding a way to game the game in order to overcome the bonuses your rivals get, it is not about creating brilliant strategies because your rivals are cunning. In fact the AI is rather dumb.

caseyy 2y ago

Firaxis’s team is quite skilled, and many of its designers also code, which helps them build features more intentionally than at many other studios. I’m pretty sure they considered doing more autonomous AI for Civ VII, but there are really good reasons not to. 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.

somenameforme 2y ago
It's not like the choices are between a 'lively' cheating AI that can't play worth a fiddle without massive cheat bonuses, and a soulless unbeatable superhuman AI that plays fair. 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.
- caseyy 2y ago
  When one builds game AI, one of the core design decisions is whether they want the system to be autonomous or authorable. You are right, its not a strict dichotomy. But both choices offer many advantages that an undecided/mixed approach doesn’t. 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. :)

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

This is always a challenge in video games; the goal of enemy AI is not to beat you, but to make for an interesting and fun challenge. 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.

short_sells_poo 2y ago
You are right, but the issue here is slightly more nuanced. The CIV AI is just plain atrocious at playing the game. It's not about having a personality, it's that the developers add game mechanics that the AI is fundamentally incapable of dealing with. To give you an example, CIV 5 introduced the concept of 1 unit per tile - it used to be that you could stack as many units as you wanted into one tile before. Neat idea, right? Terrain and unit placement suddenly mattered! 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.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  No unit stacking even breaks the automated worker orders which are meant to help the player by reducing the amount of micro. Automated workers are borderline useless in Civ V compared to Civ II. This isn't a case where the AI is meant to have "authored personality" or whatever.
  - short_sells_poo 2y ago
    That's a very good point as well. Again, I think the point is not about making the AI human-like (ie play to win), but making it competent. Firaxis seems unwilling or incapable of making the AI competent. 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.

buzzardbait 2y ago

I've been playing a game called Old World, which is basically Civ with decent UI and AI. The UI is intuitive and uses a nested tooltip system similar to Crusader Kings 3. The AI is pretty decent at war, it will flank you, use its strengths against your weaknesses, and will retreat to heal units that you don't finish off instead of fighting unwinnable battles. 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.

ACS_Solver 2y ago
As one of the OW designers, and a daily HN reader, this is an unexpected but highly pleasant mention of the game here!
- buzzardbait 2y ago
  Ah yes, the famed Solver! You're known for your inhumanly rapid responses to every Old World related discussion on the Internet but I didn't expect you to show up here.
  - ACS_Solver 2y ago
    I'm first and foremost a computer nerd, about the very target audience HN is for. Which also happens to be the target audience the early Civ games or Old World are often for!
Secretmapper 2y ago
> I've been playing a game called Old World, which is basically Civ with decent UI and AI. The UI is intuitive and uses a nested tooltip system similar to Crusader Kings 3. The AI is pretty decent at war, it will flank you, use its strengths against your weaknesses, and will retreat to heal units that you don't finish off instead of fighting unwinnable battles. Civ also does everything you mentioned - ie their units will flank and retreat. Is the AI markedly better than Civ?

drysine 2y ago

Absolutely. 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.

lurk2 2y ago

Most strategy games are like this. If the game were simple enough to be amenable to the AI competing on an equal playing field, it wouldn't be marketable to strategy gamers. If it becomes more complex, it's dubious that AI could be developed at a reasonable price point in the first place, or that it could be run on consumer hardware. 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.