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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 th

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.

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.