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Civilization VI - Now available, so you can sink all your free time into it

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,381
I'd rather blame multiplayer. Not only it gives a convenient excuse (durr, competitive players will want to play vs. other players anyway), it also means they take the path of least resistance when it comes to balancing - just mirror everything and you don't really have to give it a second thought.
AI is never flashy, so it's never on the priority list when advertising, and arguably the retarded customer base doesn't want to demand it.

Perhaps something of a Dark Souls-esque cult surrounding strategy games would help with this, because at the moment it seems that what we have on the market is e-sports, casualized shit and information-overload pretending-to-be-complex paradox stuff.
 

Jimmious

Arcane
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
But do people actually play these games multiplayer? I mean enough to influence their demographics? Wtf..
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,381
When it comes to civilization series, taking a glance at the civfanatics forum, I'd say it's a thing.
I don't see myself spending whole days to conclude a multiplayer session, so I am probably not the guy to talk.
A mate talked me into trying CivV multiplayer, but we were both bored out of our skulls.
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,944
So for anybody wondering about these emergency things:
-Emergency come in the form of:city states being taken,nukes,holy cities being converted and conquest
-Once the emergency has been declared civs and ai can choose whenever to act or not.
-You get bonuses during and if you are successful you get bonuses after.This can range fro more gold,better combat strength,etc
-You don't have to do anything during the emergency and if the ai gets it done you still get the accomplishment bonuses.
-The ai seems to be completely incompetent in actually going for the targeted civ/human

So basically you have to do everything and the ai will still get bonuses even if it doesn't lift a finger.Also the 30 turn time limit is way too much personally.
Also why not just always accept emergencies?If you loose ,nothing bad happens and if some ai accomplishes something you get bonuses while you were doing nothing.
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,944
You could also stop playing and overanalyzing games designed for retards.
Tough to play something that isn't out yet,and who says i am gonna play it?
Also any mechanic introduced in civ 6 will be copied my most 4x games that aren't indie.Also the mechanic themselves aren't completely shit,but the implementation is horrible.
I mean the ai ganging up on the human or other rising ai should have been introduced in other 4x games by now,if done properly it helps with the "ai or human running away problem" that plagues this genre.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
You could also stop playing and overanalyzing games designed for retards.
Tough to play something that isn't out yet,and who says i am gonna play it?
Also any mechanic introduced in civ 6 will be copied my most 4x games that aren't indie.Also the mechanic themselves aren't completely shit,but the implementation is horrible.
I mean the ai ganging up on the human or other rising ai should have been introduced in other 4x games by now,if done properly it helps with the "ai or human running away problem" that plagues this genre.
Now, now, john. You make enough glib and shitty scathing posts on games you don't like. Gotta learn to eat the shit you put out once-in-a-while, boo.
 

Dzupakazul

Arbiter
Joined
Jun 16, 2015
Messages
707
I mean the ai ganging up on the human or other rising ai should have been introduced in other 4x games by now,if done properly it helps with the "ai or human running away problem" that plagues this genre.
There have been plenty of 4X games which did stuff to make sure runaway players have to be at least somewhat wary (Master of Orion had the possibility of an enemy faction rolling an Erratic personality which was a very unreliable ally, SMAC AIs on high difficulty levels will never be diplomatically appeased by a player who's dominating them etc.), but it mostly never seems to work because the AI is less than exemplar and the games themselves offer a massive wealth of exploitable options to the player that the AI simply cannot utilize at all.

You could play Civ6 in Always War mode against you and it probably wouldn't help the fact that the AI simply does not understand how to maneuver on hexes or develop their cities at all, and, as such, it makes for a terribly incompetent opponent, no matter if the deck is completely stacked against you. Civ2 Multiplayer Gold Edition had a flag set into default options that pretty much prevented you from diplomacy against AIs - every turn, they'd go back to the lowest possible attitude versus the player; the only time you could trade with them would be after you showered them with gifts AND initiated a trade for yourself on the same turn as you sent them said gifts. It was still easy to utterly stomp. The AI in Civ3/4 was also quite exploitable, but pulling off consistent wins on the hardest difficulty setting is still quite difficult, if only because the massive production advantage the AI gets is much easier for them to leverage (as it's easier to move stacks on squares and it doesn't get as bogged down in complexities of base development).

And mechanics to shut down runaway players can be taken to a certain extreme; why would the AI ever vote for you in a Diplomatic Victory if it knows it will make them lose? From the perspective of someone who wants an empire-building simulation with semi-realistic diplomacy, what business does Montezuma on his tiny 5-city-peninsula have suddenly going from Friendly to Furious and trying to bumrush my Tanks with his outdated medieval infantry? I once saw Prokhor Zakharov declare war on me in SMAC when I was clearly in the lead in every single possible facet of the game. He had three cities after having been everyone's punching bag for decades, and his best unit was the standard issue Impact Rover. He got obliterated in a single turn. Does it make sense for the AI to behave this way?

And if emergencies are somehow supposed to put a damper on players who are doing well... doesn't it kinda mean they're being arbitrarily punished for doing well? There are so many ways to get this wrong; in its final version Civ5 actually gave you a flat penalty to the science rate across the board depending on how many cities you owned, which, so far, seems to have been the absolute worst way the developers ever tried to deter people from mindless horizontal expansion.

I'm generally skeptical about the notion from the last page that bad AI is only a plague of "modern" 4X games, because it's been the case pretty much always; it just took longer for us to master the game systems by ourselves, but once we did, the flaws in the AI become transparent. That's definitely the case for SMAC, Civ4 and many other games that the Codex generally loves.
it's there and it's generally fun. Civ4 was generally really good in multiplayer and Civ5/6's absolute lack of care for the multiplayer (you can't even host a proper Pitboss in Civ6) is kinda bizarre because the hexes and 1UPT would have been so much better in the hands of actual players. I can think of a few ways you can play Civ4 in MP:
- Succession Games, which is actually just a single player game, but you pass other players the save every few turns on equal intervals, and you discuss what should be done. You can make a collaborative story out of those or simply have one "strong" player supervise a few weaker players by looking over the game and telling them what they did well or poorly. Or you could have two strong players with very different playstyles butt heads on the most optimal way to go forward. I'd maybe host one on the Codex someday.
- "Diplo" games where you roll a random Civ or pick it from a roster and try to lead it to victory against other players. You aren't explicitly in an FFA mode and you can actually conduct diplomacy with others. It's often hosted by large Civ communities on public forums, and there's a secret, hidden thread for each faction and a public thread where they can talk trash to one another or lurkers can comment on what's going on. Simultaneous turns are often on. It's actually pretty fast-paced.
- The 1v1 scene used to be really lively and it wasn't a symmetrical mirror at all. Granted, the "best" civilizations for competitive play have been figured out, but there's still plenty of them and plenty of playstyles so it's never been a case of "pick Shaka 2 win ezpz gogogo".
- Pitboss is pretty fun and is about making your turn in regular intervals (something like 24 hours). You just log in, play your turn to the best of your ability, conduct whatever diplomacy you need with other players, and there you go, every day for a little while you spend a comfy 30 minutes of your life.
- I also played a team game or two and those are generally quite fun too. For instance, your typical 3v3 map will often have two "outer" civs and one "inner" civ which will be shielded from most aggression by their friends' borders; that civ in the middle is often the team's builder and biggest contributor to science and snagging wonders. I'd say team maps open up civ choices a bit because some strong leaders with unremarkable early game (Louis XIV/France or Bismarck/Germany) can find their niche as the team's "builder".
- Civ4 also lets you start a game in a different era than ancient, which wildly changes the available tactics and makes other civs shine. Suddenly the civs that unlock their UUs in the renaissance or modern era might shine way brighter than the cookie cutter roflstomp brigade that is Egypt, Rome or Persia.
 
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Space Satan

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Dickie

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Messages
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
They should've used Groundskeeper Willie as the leader of Scotland. He's already got the famous Civ diplomacy AI down.

 

GarfunkeL

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Insert clever insult here
I'm generally skeptical about the notion from the last page that bad AI is only a plague of "modern" 4X games, because it's been the case pretty much always; it just took longer for us to master the game systems by ourselves, but once we did, the flaws in the AI become transparent. That's definitely the case for SMAC, Civ4 and many other games that the Codex generally loves.
And this problem is endlessly repeated because coding a good AI is really fucking difficult and vast majority of mouth-breathing playerbase cannot comprehend or appreciate it regardless of how good it is. So Firaxis and Creative Assembly and Paradox have made the commercially better choice to have just enough to depth to somewhat satisfy their base while loading up as much eye candy as possible to get as many sales as possible. Bad AI has been the bane of strategy games forever and will remain so.
 

Jimmious

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 18, 2015
Messages
5,132
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Bad AI has been the bane of strategy games forever and will remain so.
It always has been an issue, indeed, but the more the time passes and the more the developers add layers of "complexity" and small nuances in their games, inevitably the AI falls behind.
For example -IN THEORY- the single military unit per tile is an improvement to the simple blobs of the past... In practice though it adds a huge overhead to the AI which has to calculate positioning and all these stuff per unit and as a whole.... And obviously the developers will not try to make that actually work. So the AI definitely feels even worse now in Civ games regardless if it never was really good anyway
 

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