3101

Agreed. Sulla has obviously looked at the game as Civ4 with pretty graphics and why it’s not Civ4 and proceeded to exploit and slam the game, rather than looking at the game as a new title on its own and meriting the game on it’s own features.

Civ5 by itself is a great game. It introduces a lot of great new features, removes some wildly complex and un-needed features and has a lot of fun for players. But you have to view the game as a new game, not Civ4 with pretty graphics.

3102

Many thanks, Kael. I doubt I’ll ever make a full-blown mod, but from time to time I do like to edit my immediate surroundings when I start a new game. For example, say I like my city site except for the fact that it has 6 nearby mountains or gobs of tundra. Is there a way to do this with the mod tools? I know I can make/edit maps, but games using said maps still randomize start locations, which takes me away from the region I just edited.

3103

Can a city state capture another city? I haven’t seen it so I’m curious.

3104

I am with you I’m still playing until 4 AM, but I am (was) a hard core Civ IV players. Emperor level while I never won any awards of the Civ fanatics Game of the Month contest, my scores were closer to the top than bottom. I assume mostly hard core players enter contest like this.

I compare to Civ V to much hyped "strategy’ game like Spore and Civ V is a heck of lot more fun. Victoria II is supposedly the most bug free Paradox product and yet was bug riddle with economic system that involved some weird kludges to get even partly right. . I didn’t buy Elemental but sounds likes Civ V AI would crush Elementals :). So by comparison Civ V is a great strategy game and that is why I hated Tom’s C

Civ V is remarkably stable, outside of some graphic issues no crashes after 70 hours and why I don’t agree with all of the design choice by and large the game works as designed. This is no mean accomplishment in a computer game. . So if the game was called “Guns, Germs and Steel”, I think people would be pretty impressed.

But alas Civ V follows Civ IV. Which thanks to Soren Johnson and the hard work of the Civ IV modding community ended with some best computer game AI ever. I’ve spent countless hours dreading the announcement that two or three Civs had ganged up on me and were declaring war and when the SOD(s) came , spending more hours (often vain) to save my empire. Civ V for the reason Sullie discussed isn’t close, and won’[t be with out better combat AI and removing the ability of human players to exploit the AI especially with things like City-States.

3105

Definitely yes, although it’s not very common. Therlun’s example of Genoa conquering Germany is rather unusual, although quite amusing.

In one of my games, Montezuma was very aggressive and I was worried about him. When he went to war with Dublin, I gave Dublin help with some units (which they had not asked for) and they managed to conquer one of his cities which was encroaching on my territory.

About 50-100 years later, Dublin decided to declare war on me! I’m still not quite sure what triggered that. They weren’t allied with anyone, and as soon as I requested they accepted a peace agreement.

3106

Great job, thanks! But… the new modding tools appear to be only a nice UI for the features that are already exposed via Lua and XML, and I see very little there that relates to the AI – just the global handicap list and some rather vague weighting tables. Your guide doesn’t mention AI modding either. Am I correct in assuming that Civ5 does not expose any way to tweak the AI code itself?

3107

AI will be in the DLL code base, which hasn’t been released yet.

3108

Thanks, that’s what I guessed. But they do intend to release the DLL codebase eventually as they did for Civ4, right?

3109

Agreed.
Some of his conclusions re city states are completely wrong, and I’d never trust a reviewer saying stuff like “this is where I stopped playing, because there’s really no point” to tell me about endgame balance.

And I really don’t care about balance in Civ. In theory I love the idea of playing a Civ game in multiplayer, but I’d have to travel back in time and give the game to my unemployed self 15 years ago for that to happen.
Give me fun edgy mechanics over those, that have been dulled to ensure balance - of course Civ V have plenty of those dull ones too (like most wonders unfortunately).

It bothers me, that the AI don’t know how to play. Not because I’m hardcore, but because winning loses some of its lustre when it’s clear that your opponent is a bumbling retard… but on the other hand, I’m not totally against the AI cheating as long as it’s not obvious (and covering it still making stupid mistakes - ie giving it 2x hitpoints to counter for its bad use of units wouldn’t be satisfying, I’m just not against cheating on principle).

But unlike that guy, I don’t want city states nerfed and the luck of getting a good starter position removed just to ensure balanced multiplayer. Because I don’t care.

I really like Civ V and I’m looking forward to, what they will add to the game over time.

3110

Well, after 18 or 20 hours with it I’ve decided, for me, this is the least involving Civ in the series. And it’s all due to the opaque diplomacy. As I play, all the Civs are interchangeable because I have no clue how anyone is shaping their empire or what kind of ruler they are. I can’t make informed decisions about who to ally with or who to stand and fight.

I’ve been having the most fun turtling up and playing for a Culture win with the One City Challenge, treating everyone else like they’re diseased (except for City States because at least with them I can see what being nice to them gets me). So, it’s a game, yeah, and I can play it and find some challenge; it is a game, but it’s not Civilization.

3111

The aggressive barbarians in my Prince game have been a repeated blockade nuisance on a number of my ports, and my enemies tried the same dirty trick a number of times in my previous game (aborted as a result of realizing that the number of city states I’d unwittingly activated made the game speed prohibitively slow).

3112

I am naturally curious as to whether there would be an increased CPU overhead on creating a “smarter” AI. So, if it were to be as smart as Panzer General’s AI in a combat situation, plus add in the other facets of AI requirements in Civ, would it mean that the CPU requirements will have to increase?

Of course, the link earlier to Sulla’s findings on Civ V do highlight the shortcomings with the AI with regards to city management and terrain improvement. I don’t care about his thoughts on city states, or comparing with/against Civ IV, however, the point of the AI improving its lands poorly stood out, as well as some of the features in Civ V that are poorly done, or missing. Admittedly, I think it took until Civ IV BTS before being able to view captured city status screens was implemented, but surely that should have been in from day 1 with Civ V, right? Those decisions are important, considering the effect of #of cities influencing nation wide happiness, and whether each city is worth keeping. Just one small example pulled from that article wrap up.

One caveat, I don’t mind Civ V. However, it does need some more work, some more thinking into the systems at play. Hardly what I’d call incomplete, but could be better.

3113

Yeah, they can, and it’s not that rare. The city states seem to borrow your tech if they are your allies. In last game, I researched Mechanized Infantry while conquering overseas, and a Militaristic city state on that continent built one and used it to take a city away from my enemy who had only Pikemen. Similarly, in my current game they’re building Infantry against Germany’s Landschneckts (pikeman replacement), and having an easy time of it. With a big enough tech advantage, having a bunch of allied City States can be a huge material advantage in a war.

One thing about this, the city-states will raze any cities they take. At least, that’s my experience.

3114

Heck, my kid played his first game on the easiest level (I don’t even know what it’s called) and he got blockaded by normal barbarians.

3115

I still like it, but I don’t disagree. They do blend together… but it’s not like I felt they had any real personality in IV either… just a list like some online dating site (“Caesar likes you because…” “He dislikes…”). And while I miss the idea of religion, I don’t miss the way it interacted with diplomacy like others have pointed out “Caesar hates that you’re his neighbour, but he loves that you’re a fellow hindu…”)

3116

It depends on what problem you’re trying to solve. Certain tasks tend to be CPU-intensive because of the number of objects you have to consider, particularly if you’re comparing pairs of objects, in which case the process is ord(N^2) instead of ord(N). Pathfinding is expensive because it’s proportional to the size of the map x the number of objects which need pathfinding.

However, I don’t see CPU overhead as being a huge cost for a good tactical AI. You do have to evaluate where multiple objects can path, but you only have to plot one turn’s movement for everything but the current object, and you can prune a lot of objects just because they’re distant.

3117

True. In terms of personality, I only really noticed the fanatics like Catherine, since they were so much more sensitive to religion than the other Civs. Otherwise, it was more situational, and a game mechanic, not personality.

I dislike Civ V diplomacy, but I’m kind of jaded about it. Civ Revolution is the last version I played extensively, and diplomacy is purely an early-game tactic in that game, since the AI plays it like a boardgame, not a sim - all players are essentially at war with you from turn 1, it’s just a matter of them waiting until their army is big enough to make it overt. Prior games in the main sequence have been on and off with diplomacy, I don’t recall it being useful in Civ II for example.

  • Gus
3118

Alot of casual players might prefer dumb AI. My mates at work are bragging about what tactical geniuses they are and give condescending advice about how how a small force can beat a larger force “if its set up just right”. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that the AI might be doing something wrong, they write it all down to their amazing generalship.

A popular game like Civ probably attracts alot of casual gamers who feel the same way.

Tony

3119

Thanks Gus. That basically answers my question. Quite simply put really. Thing is, I believe the AI would need to think beyond 1 turn in order to truly make the most of bombarding and throw up a real challenge combat wise. Pruning to two turns perhaps, but then that would increase possibilities even more, and can screw things over badly in other ways I’d envisage.

Also, obviously, I am no programmer, I am just using my lackey “this way makes sense to me.” Makes me grateful too, I don’t know where the AI guys would start with a system like Civ V. I do have a lot of respect for the programmers out there.

3120

I agree Tony, Civ is the sort of game that should be accessible to everyone. Even children in schools for their history lessons and the like, as well as casual gamers. If it were to take on too much of a hard core, difficult to get into game, then it would lose a large part of the appeal. For me though, because I’ve been playing Civ since Civ II, I have reached the point where I do want a challenge, where building an empire against the cheating AI, and still making it to 2050 is an achievement in itself. Civ II I was hanging around mostly the warlord style difficult (second from easiest) and didn’t move up much from there. III and IV, I actively pushed myself to be better, and it does need that part in it to for an established series where a player should, or could expect to continue to be better.