Just as an aside, I think you need to reconsider if you believe that most people on a forum have played even a popular video game for literally half of a working year (e.g. 40 hours a week for six months or so).
One thing I have realized about being on video game forums is that it can give you a very skewed idea of how much time people really put into games. There’s a sort of Facebook effect, where you see all of these posts about so many different games, and you start to feel like everyone is playing dozens of games per year for hundreds of hours each. I can pretty effectively verify this (even if only a bit anecdotally) just by looking at my Steam friends list, the games people own, and how much time they’ve actually spent on them (including the popular “good” games).
I shouldn’t have to explain why that is literally impossible.
I think it is also part of what leads people to buying so many games they’ll never be able to actually play, and having such a huge backlog.
I haven’t tried 5. Is it good? I played a lot of 2, and I’ve dabbled in 3, but the AI doesn’t seem very good. 3 seems to be huge in the Russian community – I see it all over twitch and youtube.
While I loved 2 as a kid, I’m not so fond of the general design of 2 and 3. It seems extremely luck-based and open to exploits, partially because much of the game you’re fighting generic monsters which can be farmed.
This is absolutely true, but nowadays youtube exists, which means that if an AI has obvious holes, you’ll find out about them just watching your favorite streamer.
In any case, given my limited gaming time, I don’t want to spend it learning the systems of a game that’s not really suited to multiplayer only to later find out the AI can’t play it. This is unfortunately the state of PC strategy games, but I can choose to avoid these games.
Sorry, I misspoke. I meant the Master of Orion threads, not Qt3 in general. Obviously there’s a lot of people at Qt3 who have never played MoO2. But the impression I got over the last 16/17 years of posting here is that the people discussing MoO2 here in various threads have played it a lot more than I have.
You have to also remember that people have more time to play games when they’re younger. And we’re talking about a game that came out in the mid 90s when Qt3 residents were a lot younger and had more time. I only discovered the game myself when a roommate and his friends introduced it to me around 2002. But we played the sh#* out of it at that point. There were quite a few weekends when we would do nothing but play hotseat MoO2, eat, go to the bathroom, and take a couple of breaks for sleep on Friday night and Saturday night. We’d finish our game by Sunday that way, having played for about 40 hours just that weekend.
I hope you don’t think I was yelling at you or something. It’s just a bit of an epiphany I’ve had lately. I think game forums and the modern internet can lead to buying a shit ton of games, where if you just step back and look at the number of hours available in a year, there is no way you can possibly play that many.
I mean, there’s a little under 6,000 waking hours in a year, assuming you sleep 8 hours a day. That also assumes you have literally no job, no other activities, nothing else taking up that time. Even on those standards, just buying 20 games means you would have 300 hours per game per year. Yet I see people routinely talking about backlogs in the hundreds of games.
I’m starting to realize how kind of sick and unreasonable it all is.
It has less to do with you (and isn’t a shot at you) and more thinking I’ve been doing lately.
Oh yeah, I generally agree with the sentiment. If I stopped buying games today, and lived for another 20, 30, 40 years, I’d still not have enough time to finish all the games in my backlog already.
But that’s why we have the backlog culling thread. You chop, chop, chop, and you entertain yourself with the newest games. In our game of the year thread we had a lot of games nominated in 2019, and I played maybe 10 of them. And that’s more than most years thanks to Game Pass giving me access to more of them at launch.
Heck, maybe in this backlog era, Game Pass and other services like it are the answer. I don’t buy movies, I subscribe to Netlix/HBO/Prime, etc and watch them on there. Similarly for games, maybe I’ll be playing them in the future through Game Pass, EA Access, Ubisoft+, etc. It might actually be a good solution in a world of too much content and too little time.
First of all, if you have kids, they can play your library of games, and they have a lot more time. So you can play vicariously through them!
Second, in retrospect, like all media, most games are average or below-average. It takes a while to realize which ones are truly great. So you’ll hopefully just sample from the best and let the rest just sit there.
I think maybe we’ve lost sight of what the Chick parabola is. It’s not about manipulating the AI – it’s the AI being inadequate at playing the game and putting up a challenge.
Obviously there are degrees here. Sometimes even the most basic AI is missing, and that’s obvious right away – At The Gates is an example. Sometimes it only becomes obvious after you’ve played for a little while, like in Civ games. And sometimes it only becomes clear when you get really good at the game, a good example being Chaos Reborn’s AI, which is surprisingly good.
Personally, as I stated, I’m not going to spend my time learning intricate mechanics only to find that the AI is unable to function and the game isn’t available or feasible online. That frustration would have been much better prevented ahead of time, at least in my case.
Well there’s always been disagreement here right? The AI needs some help, so we get stacks of doom and people complain about cheating. The AI doesn’t actually need a unit to find your most unguarded part of a wall or a city and just beelines for it and that’s cheating. Then you see the AI in some games clearly just not able to play the game itself, like it’s glaring. It’s not that I don’t notice these things. They just have to be glaring for me to stop and think man this AI is doing something weird or in adequate. But I do not expect nor demand any AI pretend like it’s a human playing.
The thing that strategy has though are all these different types of games. If the AI is just the world, it’s still AI but it’s not even close to the same footing you are on so then it’s more about difficulty then anything else. And that difficulty, hopefully, is adjustable. If it’s something like Civ, well it’s another faction so the expectation changes that they’re close to having started off just like you so I think the expectation is more of an equal footing, just for them to play well. And then you have something like CK and EU from Paradox… yes there are other factions/kingdoms and stuff but the expectation off the bat is a country France is going to kick ass for awhile if not the entire game, whether the AI or a human plays it because they have such an advantage from the get go.
I feel like the kind of discontent talked about here aimed more at the Civ, AOW type fair where the starting point is often the same and excluding the campaigns which are usually funneled or driven in ways that the AI still isn’t playing “the game.”
Oh board games. Any board games that has an AI that can’t play the game is usually pointed out pretty quickly. They’re usually of the Civ type variety though by nature, as in everyone has an equal like starting point.
Yes that’s a good example of the different degrees. Stacks of doom was never a real problem other than the AI getting some assistance, and I’m personally fine with that if that’s what it takes to create the illusion of a great player. The new Civs’ AI is completely unable to handle 1UPT. (though it seems like there’s a mod that does it well in Civ 5).
I don’t think it’s necessary to create AI that can handle system that don’t have to do with me. For example, if they’re abstracting away production because it’s too hard to make it work in enemy cities, I’m fine with that. But I was watching a Civ 1 play (which surprisingly still holds up really, really well) and the AI couldn’t understand there was this thing called a Mediterranean Sea in the way and kept throwing its units at the coast, trying to get at the player’s cities. When the AI fails in a way that directly relates to you as a player, that’s when the illusion breaks down.
Things are best when the game mechanics and the AI are designed hand in hand. Of course a human player will be more interesting to play against than an AI in Civ. But if you design the game to begin with so the AI does what it does best (follows rules) and those rules are predictable, you’ve maximized the synergy of gameplay and AI. Alternatively, if you make it so your game is easily playable by people because it only requires short bursts of input (Chaos Reborn, Antihero, Dominions), you’ve bypassed the need for an amazing AI.
Going along with your argument, this is where these games fail for me… specifically EU. Yes, France is strong. But it couldn’t blob the world. Because they’ve called this a historical simulation, I know that there were factors that prevented France from taking over the world. But those factors aren’t present to sufficient degree in the simulation, so instead, it’s up to the hapless AIs to try and stop the player. And that just doesn’t feel at all like something that lives up to its name or is very interesting. In CK this isn’t as bad, because the focus isn’t there. Yes, the strategic AIs are mostly feeble, but I could be poisoned by a wife or nephew, and that’s where the focus is. So even though there is symmetric AI in general, it’s really asymmetric by focus (“don’t look at how crap my AI is – it doesn’t even matter!”).
@tomchick has addressed this. It was originally about the AI (I made sure to go back to the original podcast), but Tom doesn’t mind if we expand the concept.
And this is why I am not a fan of Civ VI. I don’t think it can play the game well, AND i can see it. Like when, I think it was Victoria, declared war on me with absolutely no way, at all, to actually land on my continent. She had no ships, none. It was like a hundred years of shouting across the ocean, and why was that, my military strength was lower than hers, so A-B = attack… which a stack of doom probably could have done since she only would’ve need to get one ship over there somewhere to that one spot the old AI would know about but in the new one… just nothing, no worse than nothing. I got ahead of her because I was not so war based and I could handle the war weariness, and she started falling apart.
Aah, I have soft spot for Civ 1. Probably one of my earliest games ever, right up there with Serf City and XCom.
Well that and the game isn’t designed for one entity to actually take over the map. It would be foolish to even try. I mean I’ve seen people try and then of course it starts to fall apart. They just designed for a different way of playing but those games, no one really has an equal footing to start with and… they don’t need to. Working your way up can actually be an internal goal even.
