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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 dichot

by 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. :)

somenameforme 2y ago
I find the detail interesting but I think this is somewhat tangential. What we're talking about is cheating vs non-cheating AI. How it happens to be implemented is largely inconsequential. And it's obviously entirely possible to create a non-cheating AI with scalable difficulty, and there's not a player alive that'd miss the current systems of incapable AI that generates a challenge by excessive cheating.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Why does it matter if the AI is "cheating"? There's nothing inherently virtuous about symmetric advantages, and Civ is already highly asymmetric in its fundamental design (map generation, spawn locations, faction bonuses). If you wish you had the option of facing a human-like opponent without inherent advantages, that's fair. But it's entirely unfounded to claim that giving an opponent advantages is somehow intrinsically illegitimate. It's a game, the nature of the challenge is an extraordinarily broad design space.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    I think there's a simple issue to sum up the problem - implementation details should be hidden from the user. But AI systems that rely primarily on excessive cheating become a game where knowing their implementation is essentially 100% of the strategy because overcoming such an unfair gulf is basically impossible without breaking the AI. This lends itself to awkward strategies that should not work, but do. And it simultaneously also makes many aspects of the game basically red herrings in that they simply don't work. And that's seriously (!!!) a shame because the designers in Civ have done a great job of creating lots of really interesting systems, but these systems have gone far beyond the AI's capability, which is just compensated for by extreme cheating. 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.'
  - presentation 2y ago
    Because it becomes very not fun to play with the AI when the unfair boosts make it very difficult to win without just cheesing it in ways that exploit its predictable stupidity.
short_sells_poo 2y ago
I'm not disagreeing with what you are saying, but I think the issue at hand is very different than what you are arguing about and must be taken in context of the greater game design: past CIV 4, the game design got disconnected and ran ahead of the AI. I'd imagine that the AI in the later games is actually much more advanced, but it feels incredibly dumb. Truly catastrophically dumb, because the game mechanics were not made in mind with the capabilities of the AI, or the AI was not made smart enough to function with the game mechanics. I'd argue the latter is much more difficult to do (and here we agree), but it doesn't excuse the development team. 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.

by caseyy 2y ago

somenameforme 2y ago

I find the detail interesting but I think this is somewhat tangential. What we're talking about is cheating vs non-cheating AI. How it happens to be implemented is largely inconsequential. And it's obviously entirely possible to create a non-cheating AI with scalable difficulty, and there's not a player alive that'd miss the current systems of incapable AI that generates a challenge by excessive cheating.

kibwen 2y ago
Why does it matter if the AI is "cheating"? There's nothing inherently virtuous about symmetric advantages, and Civ is already highly asymmetric in its fundamental design (map generation, spawn locations, faction bonuses). If you wish you had the option of facing a human-like opponent without inherent advantages, that's fair. But it's entirely unfounded to claim that giving an opponent advantages is somehow intrinsically illegitimate. It's a game, the nature of the challenge is an extraordinarily broad design space.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- somenameforme 2y ago
  I think there's a simple issue to sum up the problem - implementation details should be hidden from the user. But AI systems that rely primarily on excessive cheating become a game where knowing their implementation is essentially 100% of the strategy because overcoming such an unfair gulf is basically impossible without breaking the AI. This lends itself to awkward strategies that should not work, but do. And it simultaneously also makes many aspects of the game basically red herrings in that they simply don't work. And that's seriously (!!!) a shame because the designers in Civ have done a great job of creating lots of really interesting systems, but these systems have gone far beyond the AI's capability, which is just compensated for by extreme cheating. 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.'
- presentation 2y ago
  Because it becomes very not fun to play with the AI when the unfair boosts make it very difficult to win without just cheesing it in ways that exploit its predictable stupidity.

short_sells_poo 2y ago

I'm not disagreeing with what you are saying, but I think the issue at hand is very different than what you are arguing about and must be taken in context of the greater game design: past CIV 4, the game design got disconnected and ran ahead of the AI. I'd imagine that the AI in the later games is actually much more advanced, but it feels incredibly dumb. Truly catastrophically dumb, because the game mechanics were not made in mind with the capabilities of the AI, or the AI was not made smart enough to function with the game mechanics. I'd argue the latter is much more difficult to do (and here we agree), but it doesn't excuse the development team. 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.