This is good, fertile land, with cows, horses, and sheep all nearby. Start work on a Stable immediately, my son!
That was great! It’s love it when the AI can surprise you, for sure. One of the best things about strategy games in general, so it’s too bad more developers aren’t given the resources to really expand on AI.
I had, in my last game, the Greeks constantly hounding me and denouncing me from accross the pond, mostly because I kept buying up all their city-state allies but also because I was trying to win the game the same way they were (culturual victory, clearly).
Every time one of my allied city-states dipped down in influence to about half way between ‘allies’ and loosing that alliance, Alexander would snatch them up with cash and make them his allies, as it seems whoever has the most influcence at the time gets their allegience. He also was going full bore on Piety, so it made sense for him to do that, but it irritated me to no end.
The AI loves to sneak settlers through gaps in your borders. When I settle a couple of cities that are supposed to seal the border to another civ I always try to buy up enough land to close any gaps. Otherwise I’ll suddenly find an enemy city in the middle of my empire.
Yep - it ticks your neighbors off when you buy off or settle land near them, but it’s almost invariably worth their grumpiness.
Mazuo
5525
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/computer-reads-manual-wins-civ
Pretty interesting approach to AI development and cool story overall.
Edge lazily reprinted the MIT press release, so here’s some link digging. The actual research paper is linked from the MIT page, and the test resources are linked from that paper.
First of all, they actually played FreeCiv – which they only admit on page 7 of the PDF, after talking about Civilization 2 up to that point! They never mention the AI difficulty; perhaps FreeCiv only has a single level? Is the game’s AI even any good?
They also only tried two-player games on a 1000-square map. Having only two players largely eliminates diplomacy and also the task of juggling advantages vs one player against setbacks vs another, which is one of the principal difficulties in 4x games.
So all in all… pretty cool as an example of a self-guiding AI, but unlikely to result in a better Civ5 AI. :)
Meanwhile, good news on the modding front: Dennis Shirk says DLL modding is almost ready for beta. Not sure exactly what aspects of the game will be moddable in this way, though.
Mazuo
5528
Ah, I thought the piece sounded a little short on detail but couldn’t find the relevant research quickly. Thanks for providing it. Still, the concept for future AI construction seems to have merit.
KevinC
5529
Hey that’s good news. If they’re working on the modding infrastructure, I hope they also start to allow them to be enabled in MP. FFH2 in multiplayer was some very, very good times.
I’m having an issue with performance: framerates are okay when I’m sitting in one place (animations play like they ought to, UI elements appear when I expect them), but scrolling at all, even just tapping an arrow key, absolutely murders my machine, setting the hard disk thrashing for seconds on end while I struggle fruitlessly to click on some bit of the interface. Is my only recourse still lower graphics settings?
I could only imagine that’s your solution (that or add more RAM). What kind of rig are you running it on?
Pretty old: an Athlon X2 something or another from before college, but two gigabytes of RAM and an HD4850 with half a gigabyte of memory, too. It seems strange that I’d be having trouble with memory here, and not in (say) Far Cry 2; I’d lean toward the latter having bigger assets.
It depends on the particulars of each, but Civ V is quite demanding. 2 GB is pretty small for it to run, unfortunately. If you’re noticing “hard drive thrashing” (I wish I knew where this term originally started - they’re supposed to have moving parts afterall, lol) then that’s likely not due to an old graphics card but rather from being a little short on RAM.
Well, I’ve got a new machine coming before too much longer. I guess I can deal with it until then. As for the etymology, I understand it’s from the idea that disk activity isn’t necessarily bad, but disk activity bounding the use of other resources is. I think of it as an Olympic swimmer vs. someone who can’t swim flailing around in the water. :P
KevinC
5535
I would think it is RAM related, not graphics. And disk activity is very bad, at least when it comes to performance. Hard drive access times are orders of magnitude slower than RAM and if Civ5 is having to hit the HD for virtual memory… you’ll get pretty much what you’re describing above.
Yeah, sounds like a case of trying to load more textures than you have memory for. I’d turn down texture resolution as a first step. It may be uglier, but I’ll take playable over pretty any day.
Of course, Civ V is as bad of a resource hog as IV is, so I feel your pain.
Turning settings down did make things good enough to continue my game. Part of the performance problem probably stems from the game I played: the largest map size with the biggest number of players. So far it’s been going well. Ever since Alpha Centauri I’ve been a fan of archipelago-style maps, so I loaded up one of those and picked Arabia for their unique building–I didn’t want to feel obliged to use unique units to get everything out of a faction. It turned out to be a pretty good choice. I ended up in a small chain of islands populated by me and four city-states, quite a ways from everyone else. The obvious path was to go for a victory condition that didn’t require much in the way of interaction with others, so I set my sights on culture.
Fast-forward to about 1450 AD, and my lone trireme explorer (an actual oceangoing vessel is coming soon) has met about half of the major powers: Mongolia, Germany, France, and Russia are all packed into a large archipelago in the center of the map, and India and Arabia are located off to the sides, making something of a very wide H. I haven’t been bothered by anyone yet, my three cities are becoming super-cities (Mecca in particular, site of a couple of wonders and making a good deal more than half of my research and culture), and things are looking good for my eventual culture win.
I just realized after the 100s of hours I’ve put into the game that Rome’s Legion unit can build roads like workers, which combined with their building-focused strategy, may now make it my favorite civilization.
Spain has a surprisingly good special ability too which nets them 500g for discovering landmarks first and 100g for ones already discovered. Probably my second favorite civ now.
I am getting trounced by the AI since the latest patch on King. My most recent game as France (Earth map, large, Epic) has been almost constant warfare and it has been a challenge. One thing that really annoys me is the city sprawl by the AI when I barely manage to squeek by on happiness with 5 cities and tons of happy resources. Prince was a cake walk though, so I guess I prefer this setting.
King is a decent step up from Prince. And yeah, the AI gets some kind of obvious happy bonuses that let it expand well beyond what you can do.
OTOH, if you can develop a decent super science city it’s not too hard to rush out and keep a decent tech lead on King post-Education, even against large, developed AIs.
You’re trading all your excess resources, right? That makes a huge difference.
