The other answer is that if you make an even moderately efficient AI, then the game becomes incredibly tedious and difficult to win for the player. It's easier to tune difficulty via hidden bonuses than via behavior.
it's presumably a much easier development challenge to have one sorta-dumb AI and just give it bonuses than it is to have one that actually gets progressively more difficult/better
there's also the matter of computational load; turns on big maps can already be kinda slow on older hardware and the more each opponent has to 'think' the longer they take
and anyway I'm not sure playing against a map of 7 ruthlessly efficient AIs would actually be that much fun (though I don't think playing above immortal is that much fun anyway sooo)
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Yet I’m forever finding random AI workers sitting around doing nothing. Even with unimproved resources that it should be able to see, within a turn’s worth of movement.
I saw an explanation of this once on the reddit; essentially it happens when the AI already has too much of a resource, or thinks it'll have a new resource coming along soon that it'd prefer to improve
e.g. it won't build a lumber mill with a random worker cause it thinks it's gonna have iron soon and is saving the builder to make a mine there
it apparently also won't improve tiles a city can't work right then, which leads to an idle builder that a player probably would have consumed just to have it gone
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
If there's one thing I think they could probably tune the AI to going forward, is to, if not prioritize, but value pop growth a lot more than it currently does. I'll see the computers settle insanely bad cities that never grow on Deity just because they can spam out settlers, where if they'd settle one spot to the side they'd have a decent starting growth curve.
The other answer is that if you make an even moderately efficient AI, then the game becomes incredibly tedious and difficult to win for the player. It's easier to tune difficulty via hidden bonuses than via behavior.
If you've played Vox Populi (Civ 5 mod), you know this is true. Especially the tedious part.
enlightenedbum on
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
it's presumably a much easier development challenge to have one sorta-dumb AI and just give it bonuses than it is to have one that actually gets progressively more difficult/better
there's also the matter of computational load; turns on big maps can already be kinda slow on older hardware and the more each opponent has to 'think' the longer they take
and anyway I'm not sure playing against a map of 7 ruthlessly efficient AIs would actually be that much fun (though I don't think playing above immortal is that much fun anyway sooo)
I feel like the dynamic between king, emperor/immortal, and diety is wierd.
King for me is really fun for the first couple of eras then I just snowball away. Unless one ai runs away with the game somehow it’s just over around the time factories and universities show up.
Emporer and immortal is a huge massive jump in difficulty. Diety is a massive jump over that. The free city the ai gets at the beginning of the game is huge, and diety they get two free cities. But it ends up being a really weird curve, because that makes the game massively hard in the beginning but easier and easier the longer you go. Your options in emperor for the early game are pretty restricted, and deity you pretty much need to play a certain way to survive at all, and most of the diety strats seem to be built along the lines of “survive at a massive disadvantage until late game and then take advantage of the AI falling apart to win.”
I really wish they’d find a way to just make the early game feel more fair and less like a brutal slog but not have the player just massively snowball ahead past the renaissance.
I feel like Civilization needs to pick a lane in its approach to AI. Either one could work but straddling both is the worst option. The tricky part is that straddling both is how the last six games have done it, so choosing a lane will mean a dramatic change that will alienate people who wanted them to pick the other one.
Option 1 is to treat AI like a human player in a boardgame, subject to all the same rules and with players able to predict their capabilities and actions based on their own capabilities. You have to develop really robust AI for this to be at all challenging, and trying to develop varying difficulty levels compounds this problem. If you do combine this with any sort of handicap, I feel like it'd be better to have the AI be smart enough to be Hardest Difficulty when on a level playing field, and give it mechanical hindrances when on lower difficulties (rather than the current setup, which is closer to having the AI written to play at Easiest Difficulty and give them unfair advantages to scale up). But the better way to do this option would be to always have an even field in the mechanics and only scale the actual AI, but this is obviously very hard. Machine learning or whatever the current iteration of such is probably the best tool to do this, but I don't know if the game has the budget (both in terms of literal financial cost to develop, and whether it has the "processing budget" to run this during a game on a normal PC without becoming a slog.
Pros: This is how the game currently (sort of) pretends to be and is probably the way a lot of players feel like it should be: like the AI are stand-ins for players and should follow all the same rules.
Cons: It's very very hard and might not be possible. It also leads you to play the game entirely as an adversarial boardgame--you'll never make real alliances with other factions because the goal isn't to roleplay world affairs, the goal is to generate one winner. Players will always play this way by design, but if the AI plays that way too, it completely removes the veneer of the game being about World Congress if every relationship is by necessity adversarial.
Option 2 is to treat AI as a part of the game, obstacles to be overcome and manipulated and used. Their actions and capabilities, and the reasoning behind those actions, should be transparent, knowable, exploitable. And the predictability of AI players is balanced out by cheating: they get free stuff, but you know when they get it. A shoddy example of this would be saying the computer gets a new military unit every "x" turns. You know they can and will output that unit that often, and maybe are even told what they are building and where. But they don't have to dedicate production time to it or build a certain building, it just happens. The AI is no longer pretending to be another player, it's just a mechanic in the game like barbarians or the production queue.
Pros: way, way less overhead to keep it running. Not only because you don't need AI, but you can even stop tracking certain stuff like enemy production queues and buildings. That doesn't mean every single action of the AI is defined that way or that they don't follow any of the player rules, but it still opens up opportunities to arbitrate enemy behavior like a board game Automaton. This also takes away from the Adversarial nature of enemy players and enhances the roleplaying in that way. An enemy nation may be okay with helping you win because it's goal isn't to win, it's goal is to be the Swedenest Sweden that ever Swedened and that is how it will behave. It makes diplomacy, war, trade, and pretty much every inter-faction activity become knowable and gameable and you can make decisions with a fair understanding of what the AI wants to do without having to read about AI quirks on a forum somewhere.
Cons: This is already kind of how barbarians and city-states play. Do people want AI factions to be that way too, or is the adversarial, player-like nature part of what makes both Civilizations and City-States worth having? This is also a bit more like how Total War does things and being more like another game isn't always better. It also means you're playing a different game depending on the percentage of human and AI players. The only time I play with real people is as a team-locked co-op game, so this would work fine for me, but of course there's a big community of people who want to play against real players and probably want their AI opponents to act similarly. And the biggest con is that this is a bigger departure from previous games than Option 1 (I'd argue it's just being more transparent about the way that it is than the prior games, but people would still see it as a big change). This risks alienating a lot of players and having them say (as many will say anyway) that this is the "worst Civ game ever" and go back to the last one.
To be honest I always felt like the idea of having the AI at least have the pretense of being a player with a personality was part of what made the games stand out. Like you run into Montezuma and thing “that guy is a crazy bastard, better watch out and make sure to pay him off” or you see Seandeok in the game and say “I better keep an eye on her if I want to get a science victory”.
I think feeling like the other players at least have goals and distinct personalities is better than just having it be like the old warhammer games where its just a bunch of faceless speedbumps.
I’ll note warhammer itself has moved largely in this direction with the last few games, in Warhammer, Troy, Three Kingdoms, and Pharoah, giving the factions distinct leaders with special abilities and personalities that you get attached to, to the point where it gets really disappointing when you’re playing three kingdoms and your rival Liu Bei or Cao Cao dies of old age in the late game somehow to only to be replaced by a random generic leader even if the generic leader largely functions exactly the same and has the same abilities.
But an AI that is programmed to play a certain way because it's warmongering or expansionist or whatever would be more achievable under Option 2. Whereas a true implementation of Option 1 would remove that personality (unless they could also layer unique personalities on them, which is a huge stretch). "Real" AI that plays to win doesn't have a personality anymore, it just does the optimal move or takes a random action when it's not sure. I feel like enemy personalities are stronger when hard coded in and when they are allowed to roleplay instead of playing to win.
But an AI that is programmed to play a certain way because it's warmongering or expansionist or whatever would be more achievable under Option 2. Whereas a true implementation of Option 1 would remove that personality (unless they could also layer unique personalities on them, which is a huge stretch). "Real" AI that plays to win doesn't have a personality anymore, it just does the optimal move or takes a random action when it's not sure. I feel like enemy personalities are stronger when hard coded in and when they are allowed to roleplay instead of playing to win.
I guess there’s a balance between making the AI opponents feel like people and making it optimized to win at all costs then.
I don’t want the AI to be like a high level competetive chess AI that just picks the optimum move every time, that seems about as fun as playing against a quake 2 bot set to 100% accuracy that just railguns you from across the map over and over.
But I also don’t want an AI to just be generic obstacles like barbarians and city states either. I think the effort needs to be towards making them interesting and fun to play against, whatever fudging you need to do to do that.
Which is why Civ4's AI is the best. It's mostly predictable though sometimes does something off script. It does present a challenge, no skeleton armies.
Whereas in 5 or especially 6 if you survive to have like 4 ranged units the game is over.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
Civ 4 accomplishes that by having combat not be particularly interesting though.
It isn’t really that hard to make an AI that can do “combine all your armies into massive doomstacks, make sure they have x% siege, plow them into your enemy.”
Civ 5 and 6 were bad though. I had a game recently where I had literally just archers and immortals and killed a big invasion force of coursers, men at arms, and crossbows because the computer just kept sending them to my city radius in one or two units at a time and let my walled city and units focus fire them down. I did lose some units, but not quicker than I could replace them. In the end the AI ended up giving me a big peace settlement even though by all rights I was completely outclassed and should have at least lost that city if not been defeated outright.
Edit: honestly though I have felt for a while that having some kind of AOW style tactical combat would be the best thing for civ.
ultimately you're deciding what you want the game, and the player's experience with it, to be; do you want a 'strict' game where the goal is to find the optimal move every time, or do you want a game that has the player drive a faux-historical story?
civ 5/6 have leaned more into the latter than the former, with the AI less an equal adversary than an obstacle the player has to overcome on their way to whatever victory condition. There's probably a lot of ways you could make the single player game feel more like multiplayer (where the optimal/efficient move is definitely the goal), but whether that results in a more fun game experience imo is doubtful
I do wish they could come up with a way to make the endgame more interesting though
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
+1
knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Personally I’d love for a way to win a culture victory without having to play 100+ more turns after you know you’re going to win it
And for it not to feel so damn opaque in how your progress is going/what you can do to speed it up
I know late game rock bands are how you move the needle but it still feels like
1. Steal underpants
2. ???
3. Win culture victory
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Humankind got some stuff right and some stuff wrong, but I definitely think Civ could just steal the Victory Stars thing (humankind stole it from Euros anyway). It's not perfect but it feels a lot better than most Civ victory conditions. None of the non-conquest victories have ever really felt right to me.
All this talk is making me want to go back and try a victory challenge I never actually pulled off - Pacifist Domination victory by capturing cities/capitals via Loyalty Pressure.
Humankind got some stuff right and some stuff wrong, but I definitely think Civ could just steal the Victory Stars thing (humankind stole it from Euros anyway). It's not perfect but it feels a lot better than most Civ victory conditions. None of the non-conquest victories have ever really felt right to me.
One thing that's would be humanity-ish that would have been really cool for civ 6 would have been choosing your civ/leader a bit after you start. Civ 6 is so map dependent it would be nice to have a mode where you could see your start and adjust to it.
And yeah Civ 6 victory conditions aside from science or domination and maybe religion are kind of lame to me. Sending a spaceship to another star? Seems like a victory. Conquering the world? Seems like a victory. Converting the world to your religion? I can see that I guess, though I wish converting a civ to your religion had a bit more of a real effect (I don't really get much from conversion other than religion bonuses so it seems a bit arbitrary). But Culture and Diplo seem like just blatant bucket filling.
I would like to see more feedback and progression. Like if I become culturally dominant over a civ maybe I get a portion of their yields or something. Or if the convert to my religion they should be a lot more diplomatically friendly. Or whatever. Because for those victories there doesn't seem like much progress, it's just basically no effect at all and then victory.
Hell bring back vassalage too for domination. That way I get to feel like I really beat a civ rather than taking their capital and then not killing the last city or two because I don't want the grievances, and then the rest of the game that 2 city civ just yells and denounces me over and over like an angry squirrel.
Edit: I should say though I don’t mind so much what you have to actually do to win culture or religion, I just wish there was more a sense of progression than just passing the magic number on culture or converting the last city. Let me feel like I am actually slowly taking over the world with my culture or religion.
Right now tourism doesn’t matter much until you hit that last point. Converting civs doesn’t matter much until you get the last one. When you conquer a civ via domination you feel that, it should feel at least a little like that when you convert a civ or become culturally dominant. Not take them out of the game necessarily but you should feel like you get a tangible, noticeable benefit.
Jealous Deva on
+2
Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
edited June 11
I just want the following scenario to stop happening:
Neighbor AI: "I'm declaring war on you because you violated my secret condition, which you had no real way of knowing or not violating even if you knew."
Me: "Okay I guess, you know I'm an industrial powerhouse and can pump out in army in like 2 turns to kick your ass right?"
Neighbor: "Have at you fiend!"
*Several turns later*
Me: "Okay, I'm bored of looting all your improvements, tell you what, give me your nearest smallest city and we'll call in even."
Literally every other AI: "We all hate you for warmongering now, prepare to die!"
Golgo: "Except me, I hate you for suing for peace so cheaply, like a coward would."
This is functionally every game of Civ 6 I play, which is to say, also right about where I stop playing Civ 6 for 6-9 months before I try again.
I loved the neolithic era in Humankind where you got to explore the map a bit before choosing where to settle down.
IMO it fixed the problem of rerolling for good starts.
I also liked how you can see strategic resources you have not discovered yet, just not what they are. Really helped with the whole "ops you built a university over your only source of Uranium, no Eurka for you."
I think Civ 4 had the best AI. Civ 5 was passable. 6 triggers the fuck out of me.
The main thing I don't like about 6 is that on top of all of Civ's well known AI issues, they added these hardwired tendencies that make games extremely predictable and stale (or on the extreme opposite end, the hidden traits can have a huge impact with no real way to address them at crucial early game junctures)
I am pretty sure Civ 4 and 5 had some baked in traits as well (ghandi nukes meme) but im not sure it was as pervasive or extensive.. but for the most part particularly in 4 it was hard for me to look at the map and predict how things would go. the games were a bit of a mystery and that kept me going
i would really like to see the tendencies system deleted entirely, or have that at least be an option, and have civs more or less play in a straight up traditional way, with their preferences for one victory or another only modestly influenced by their civ, much like how a normal person might play
I just want the following scenario to stop happening:
Neighbor AI: "I'm declaring war on you because you violated my secret condition, which you had no real way of knowing or not violating even if you knew."
Me: "Okay I guess, you know I'm an industrial powerhouse and can pump out in army in like 2 turns to kick your ass right?"
Neighbor: "Have at you fiend!"
*Several turns later*
Me: "Okay, I'm bored of looting all your improvements, tell you what, give me your nearest smallest city and we'll call in even."
Literally every other AI: "We all hate you for warmongering now, prepare to die!"
Golgo: "Except me, I hate you for suing for peace so cheaply, like a coward would."
This is functionally every game of Civ 6 I play, which is to say, also right about where I stop playing Civ 6 for 6-9 months before I try again.
this is one of those places where "realism" (or maybe, verisimilitude) kinda collides with the AI using the game systems
the AI starts to dislike you when you're beating them (i.e. you generate more faith or whatever), and/or when they think they can successfully attack you. This winds up feeling kinda off to the player because it gives you the idea you're somehow incorrect for doing well, or for having however many units you actually need to defend yourself against the AI as opposed to how many it thinks you need.
they kinda try to account for it by making warmongering penalties expire faster in the early game, but in practice once you've got that warmonger stink on you things kinda snowball (at least in my experience) because everyone starts disliking you
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
+1
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
I never have these warmonger issues because I only really end up in two types of wars:
1) Getting deity rushed immediately by an adjacent AI, which if I survive and hit back to take their now-undefended cities... I haven't met anyone else to get mad at me bc it was all hands on deck defending the early war.
2) I'm doing a midgame timing attack with a unique unit or some such, at which point I'll have gotten a couple of friendships and your friends don't give a shit how much of a warmonger you are.
I think Civ 4 had the best AI. Civ 5 was passable. 6 triggers the fuck out of me.
The main thing I don't like about 6 is that on top of all of Civ's well known AI issues, they added these hardwired tendencies that make games extremely predictable and stale (or on the extreme opposite end, the hidden traits can have a huge impact with no real way to address them at crucial early game junctures)
I am pretty sure Civ 4 and 5 had some baked in traits as well (ghandi nukes meme) but im not sure it was as pervasive or extensive.. but for the most part particularly in 4 it was hard for me to look at the map and predict how things would go. the games were a bit of a mystery and that kept me going
i would really like to see the tendencies system deleted entirely, or have that at least be an option, and have civs more or less play in a straight up traditional way, with their preferences for one victory or another only modestly influenced by their civ, much like how a normal person might play
4 has really consistent personalities and tech preferences. Most infamously Isabella is an enormous religious zealot. If you have the same religion as her you can basically not defend that border. If you have a different religion, you are 100% going to war. Others just love to spam wonders and go for the culture win (Louis, Gandhi) and there are some who are hyper aggressive losers (Ragnar, Shaka).
To the point where there's a guy on the internet that does an annual AI only tournament and he and his readers are pretty good at predicting who's going to win, when, and how. But enough random nonsense happens that it's interesting. Huayna Capac is consistently the best AI leader (terraces OP), if you were wondering.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
Humankind got some stuff right and some stuff wrong, but I definitely think Civ could just steal the Victory Stars thing (humankind stole it from Euros anyway). It's not perfect but it feels a lot better than most Civ victory conditions. None of the non-conquest victories have ever really felt right to me.
One thing that's would be humanity-ish that would have been really cool for civ 6 would have been choosing your civ/leader a bit after you start. Civ 6 is so map dependent it would be nice to have a mode where you could see your start and adjust to it.
And yeah Civ 6 victory conditions aside from science or domination and maybe religion are kind of lame to me. Sending a spaceship to another star? Seems like a victory. Conquering the world? Seems like a victory. Converting the world to your religion? I can see that I guess, though I wish converting a civ to your religion had a bit more of a real effect (I don't really get much from conversion other than religion bonuses so it seems a bit arbitrary). But Culture and Diplo seem like just blatant bucket filling.
I would like to see more feedback and progression. Like if I become culturally dominant over a civ maybe I get a portion of their yields or something. Or if the convert to my religion they should be a lot more diplomatically friendly. Or whatever. Because for those victories there doesn't seem like much progress, it's just basically no effect at all and then victory.
Hell bring back vassalage too for domination. That way I get to feel like I really beat a civ rather than taking their capital and then not killing the last city or two because I don't want the grievances, and then the rest of the game that 2 city civ just yells and denounces me over and over like an angry squirrel.
Edit: I should say though I don’t mind so much what you have to actually do to win culture or religion, I just wish there was more a sense of progression than just passing the magic number on culture or converting the last city. Let me feel like I am actually slowly taking over the world with my culture or religion.
Right now tourism doesn’t matter much until you hit that last point. Converting civs doesn’t matter much until you get the last one. When you conquer a civ via domination you feel that, it should feel at least a little like that when you convert a civ or become culturally dominant. Not take them out of the game necessarily but you should feel like you get a tangible, noticeable benefit.
Another thing they could borrow from board games is the idea that getting VPs is the way to win, but has a "downside" that makes you have to think about whether you want to go for it right now. Like how province cards in Dominion screw up your draws, or some games where actions to get VPs are less efficient than other actions. Or even better, when getting VPs helps your opponents.
So building a Wonder gives you VPs, which you want at all stages in the game because eventually it will be how you win. But building the Wonder also gives its mechanical bonus to everyone. People adopting your cultural or religious tenets gives you VP but gives them whatever benefit the tenet provides. That sort of thing.
Humankind got some stuff right and some stuff wrong, but I definitely think Civ could just steal the Victory Stars thing (humankind stole it from Euros anyway). It's not perfect but it feels a lot better than most Civ victory conditions. None of the non-conquest victories have ever really felt right to me.
One thing that's would be humanity-ish that would have been really cool for civ 6 would have been choosing your civ/leader a bit after you start. Civ 6 is so map dependent it would be nice to have a mode where you could see your start and adjust to it.
And yeah Civ 6 victory conditions aside from science or domination and maybe religion are kind of lame to me. Sending a spaceship to another star? Seems like a victory. Conquering the world? Seems like a victory. Converting the world to your religion? I can see that I guess, though I wish converting a civ to your religion had a bit more of a real effect (I don't really get much from conversion other than religion bonuses so it seems a bit arbitrary). But Culture and Diplo seem like just blatant bucket filling.
I would like to see more feedback and progression. Like if I become culturally dominant over a civ maybe I get a portion of their yields or something. Or if the convert to my religion they should be a lot more diplomatically friendly. Or whatever. Because for those victories there doesn't seem like much progress, it's just basically no effect at all and then victory.
Hell bring back vassalage too for domination. That way I get to feel like I really beat a civ rather than taking their capital and then not killing the last city or two because I don't want the grievances, and then the rest of the game that 2 city civ just yells and denounces me over and over like an angry squirrel.
Edit: I should say though I don’t mind so much what you have to actually do to win culture or religion, I just wish there was more a sense of progression than just passing the magic number on culture or converting the last city. Let me feel like I am actually slowly taking over the world with my culture or religion.
Right now tourism doesn’t matter much until you hit that last point. Converting civs doesn’t matter much until you get the last one. When you conquer a civ via domination you feel that, it should feel at least a little like that when you convert a civ or become culturally dominant. Not take them out of the game necessarily but you should feel like you get a tangible, noticeable benefit.
Another thing they could borrow from board games is the idea that getting VPs is the way to win, but has a "downside" that makes you have to think about whether you want to go for it right now. Like how province cards in Dominion screw up your draws, or some games where actions to get VPs are less efficient than other actions. Or even better, when getting VPs helps your opponents.
So building a Wonder gives you VPs, which you want at all stages in the game because eventually it will be how you win. But building the Wonder also gives its mechanical bonus to everyone. People adopting your cultural or religious tenets gives you VP but gives them whatever benefit the tenet provides. That sort of thing.
I feel like that might be a good mechanic for a “Diplomatic” victory. You are helping improve the world, but at a potential cost to your own personal strength.
Like you pass a “fair trade” initiative that gives VPs but also gives econ bonuses to the most behind civs, that sort of thing.
I think mostly what I would like to see though is some sense of progression with the non-domination or non-science victories. In domination as you progress towards victory you feel a change. You have less opponents and less credible opponents. In science as you proceed towards victory you get lots of toys. New units, buildings, etc.
I know people will say “you get toys with culture too” and government cards are nice but don’t feel quite as neat as building a new powerplant or tank. Most of the actual stuff you can build from culture is just stuff to help you get a culture or religion victory. I feel like as I do a religious or cultural victory I am doing cool stuff - spreading religion and building cathedrals or building museums and natural parks, etc. But I just don’t feel like that has a huge impact on the game until I hit that magic number point where you get a win. There’s never a point where I become dominant in tourism over a civ or religiously convert a civ and say “oh thats awesome, I really beat that guy” the way I do when I conquer a civs capital.
And you don’t get that with science, but you do get a lot of cool stuff that makes everything about your civ better, not just science, and makes you feel like you are progressing towards a zenith point that you don’t really get the same feel from in culture.
Edit: and for the kind of things you could give culture or religion- there is a point where your civ becomes “dominant” over another in both victories, I feel like that should do something. Culture/tourism should be more impactful than religion because if is harder to acheive, but there should be consequences for both. Right now also as a player you can just ignore both unless someone is about to win, which is bad too.
I was thinking something like:
Religion: a civ converts state religion to a religion you founded.
Due to your religious dominance you get:
20% of any faith or gold surplus they generate (religious pilgrimages, etc)
Civ cannot declare surprise wars on you, as canada ability (formal wars allowed)
You get a moderate opinion boost with the civ and they ignore third party grievances against you.
Tourism dominance: a civ has totally converted to your way of life. They listen to your music, read your books, learn your language, and visit your beaches and national parks. You get:
30% of any gold surplus they generate (tourism spending cash) and a bonus to your science if they are ahead of you.
Civs cannot declare surprise OR formal wars on you (legitimate CB or emergency wars are allowed)
You get a large diplomatic opinion boost with the civ and they ignore third party grievances against you.
I wonder if they're going to tiptoe around slavery again. It really should be a massive factor in how conquest, empire-building, and economic development is handled, leading in to a potential switchover to serfdom once you've unlocked the civics for that.
0
knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Yeah I just got done playing as Aztecs and, well…
As your Aztec empire unfurls across the land, you will never want for people to raise your walls, for you will be blessed with new, loyal workers as you conquer those around you.
“Blessed with new, loyal workers” is one hell of a euphemism for “enslave enemy units”
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
They’ve always been fairly shy about really crossing the line into actually depicting it directly, making it more tied into things like stealing workers, paying population or workers to rush production, the aztec example, etc.
Thats probably fine honestly. I don’t know if we need a more direct depiction in a game with cartoon Ghandi.
If we are tackling touchy subjects though I’d really like to get my early iron age era Hebrews civ.
Civ games have to figure out how they want to deal with ugly themes just like board games have (mostly) been trying to do. Ruling an empire is a bad thing that bad people do. Democracy being better than Monarchy is fine. Solar being better than coal is fine. But the approach to environmentalism, for example, has basically been that doing the "right" thing is also the most expedient thing, in the short and long term. An industrialized mechanical powerhouse of a nation is one with verdent forests everywhere and solar/wind power? It'd be more meaningful if doing the evil thing actually provided some short term benefit with long term consequences. Civ 6 kind of got this with the climate change stuff but it still never felt like a hard choice.
So if a coal plant is useful in the short term but could literally result in losing part of your empire to sea rise, that's a good way to not shy away from the dark side of empire building while still offering incentive to do things better. Slavery could easily be handled similarly, providing massive production gains with social repercussions and the knowledge that abolition will come at some point and upend your economy if you haven't shared it up with other avenues.
A big problem is that (as in reality) even if you go green, if your neighbors don't you still get stuck with the consequences.
There is very little reason to avoid industrializing in Civ, just like reality sadly. If you don't and your neighbors do you are now behind and suffering from floods.
An even bigger problem is that the consequences of climate change hit some places harder than others. In an adversarial system like Civilization uses, being able to make a rival's lands stop producing food without them having any way to stop you from doing it short of wiping you out would give you a massive lategame edge. Depending on the setup, it might be in your best interests to just go full-out Captain Planet villain.
Again that's just the reality of it. People living in low lying islands are being hit hardest by climate change.
Anyways, back to Civ 7 wish list I would like to see a way to make grabbing land more worth it. Like I don't want to go back to infinite city spam where building cities all over the place was THE play, but the game feels odd in that while so much of it mirrors human history there is rarely a reason to start grabbing land in the late game. Cities take a while to pay off the investment, and its always been strange to me that this is not mid-to-late game colonization race like there was IRL. getting deep sea sailing and taking unclaimed land should be a huge boon, but its sometimes just isn't.
Really, I guess I'd just like a way to get the nice ocean resources like oil and pearls off those one or two tile island without feeling like its a waste of resources.
yeah i agree with that... mid/late expansion rarely feels rewarding unless there's some huge resource boon... it always feels like those cities are limited and feeble even under ideal conditions... there should be some sort of mega-settler that kickstarts a city and gives huge bonuses for like 20-30 turns to get your city off the ground... a free wall, stuff like that
finding and claiming a big island in the ocean should feel amazing but to me it feels like a struggle
One game I made a city I built like 200 turns in my spaceship building city. Was a desert with a ton of hills and I rushed Petra turn one, but still!
Anyway, I am playing a genuinely hard Civ4 game (I'm back to Civ4) where I got stuck on 5 cities because everyone was right on top of me. As arguably the worst leader in the game (Sitting Bull). Also no iron, so literally no attacking units until maces. And Shaka/Monty/Toku are on my border. Do have some nice river valleys. Basically went heavy specialist economy and am slooooooowly taking cities off the border, but those three assholes are allied and keep intervening. So I keep having to turn around because I just don't have the production queues to fight on two fronts. I'm up to 10 cities, but more importantly almost at rifling. Also somewhere off in the distance I've got a financial civ (Wang Kon) teching like mad.
Civ4 is still the best one.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
Something I'd like to see done differently in Civ VII compared to Civ VI, is a slower ramping up and addition of the extra systems. I'm a veteran of strategy games for a long time and even I was a bit thrown at how fast Civ VI threw additional layers of systems and ways you could tweak elements of your civilization at you.
Have there been any Civlikes that attempt to properly handle resource exhaustion? The closest that Civilization comes to that is clearcutting forests for production boosts, but things like mines and special resources will remain productive forever.
well, in six you do need resources/turn to power and maintain all your industrial buildings/units and that creates competition for them, but they've never done anything like e.g. Peak Oil (aside from resource tiles getting submerged/destroyed by climate change anyway)
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
my personal hope for 7 is that they do something to make the diplomatic systems less of a hassle; the world congress/UN/favor mechanics in six have always felt very kludgy to me. I wind up just trading my favor for resources/gold and letting the AI mess around with the stuff most of the time
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I have always enjoyed the AI with distinct personalities. I know the Mad libs dialogue in Alpha Centauri did a lot of heavy lifting for the characterization, but the AIs in that game always felt like they had more personality. When Civilization has its diplomacy move more towards the boardgame player style it becomes less interesting to play against.
I miss 4's alternate forms of economies. Settling great people for a permanent boost was really fun. I'd also like a way to reliably get at resources just outside your city rings without settling an entirely new city or waiting for culture to grab it randomly. Maybe a new district or a revamp of the neighborhood that extends the sphere of influence of a city. I don't care for the infinite city sprawl, but I want to take advantage of extra fish or whatever just out of reach.
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there's also the matter of computational load; turns on big maps can already be kinda slow on older hardware and the more each opponent has to 'think' the longer they take
and anyway I'm not sure playing against a map of 7 ruthlessly efficient AIs would actually be that much fun (though I don't think playing above immortal is that much fun anyway sooo)
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I saw an explanation of this once on the reddit; essentially it happens when the AI already has too much of a resource, or thinks it'll have a new resource coming along soon that it'd prefer to improve
e.g. it won't build a lumber mill with a random worker cause it thinks it's gonna have iron soon and is saving the builder to make a mine there
it apparently also won't improve tiles a city can't work right then, which leads to an idle builder that a player probably would have consumed just to have it gone
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
If you've played Vox Populi (Civ 5 mod), you know this is true. Especially the tedious part.
I feel like the dynamic between king, emperor/immortal, and diety is wierd.
King for me is really fun for the first couple of eras then I just snowball away. Unless one ai runs away with the game somehow it’s just over around the time factories and universities show up.
Emporer and immortal is a huge massive jump in difficulty. Diety is a massive jump over that. The free city the ai gets at the beginning of the game is huge, and diety they get two free cities. But it ends up being a really weird curve, because that makes the game massively hard in the beginning but easier and easier the longer you go. Your options in emperor for the early game are pretty restricted, and deity you pretty much need to play a certain way to survive at all, and most of the diety strats seem to be built along the lines of “survive at a massive disadvantage until late game and then take advantage of the AI falling apart to win.”
I really wish they’d find a way to just make the early game feel more fair and less like a brutal slog but not have the player just massively snowball ahead past the renaissance.
Option 1 is to treat AI like a human player in a boardgame, subject to all the same rules and with players able to predict their capabilities and actions based on their own capabilities. You have to develop really robust AI for this to be at all challenging, and trying to develop varying difficulty levels compounds this problem. If you do combine this with any sort of handicap, I feel like it'd be better to have the AI be smart enough to be Hardest Difficulty when on a level playing field, and give it mechanical hindrances when on lower difficulties (rather than the current setup, which is closer to having the AI written to play at Easiest Difficulty and give them unfair advantages to scale up). But the better way to do this option would be to always have an even field in the mechanics and only scale the actual AI, but this is obviously very hard. Machine learning or whatever the current iteration of such is probably the best tool to do this, but I don't know if the game has the budget (both in terms of literal financial cost to develop, and whether it has the "processing budget" to run this during a game on a normal PC without becoming a slog.
Pros: This is how the game currently (sort of) pretends to be and is probably the way a lot of players feel like it should be: like the AI are stand-ins for players and should follow all the same rules.
Cons: It's very very hard and might not be possible. It also leads you to play the game entirely as an adversarial boardgame--you'll never make real alliances with other factions because the goal isn't to roleplay world affairs, the goal is to generate one winner. Players will always play this way by design, but if the AI plays that way too, it completely removes the veneer of the game being about World Congress if every relationship is by necessity adversarial.
Option 2 is to treat AI as a part of the game, obstacles to be overcome and manipulated and used. Their actions and capabilities, and the reasoning behind those actions, should be transparent, knowable, exploitable. And the predictability of AI players is balanced out by cheating: they get free stuff, but you know when they get it. A shoddy example of this would be saying the computer gets a new military unit every "x" turns. You know they can and will output that unit that often, and maybe are even told what they are building and where. But they don't have to dedicate production time to it or build a certain building, it just happens. The AI is no longer pretending to be another player, it's just a mechanic in the game like barbarians or the production queue.
Pros: way, way less overhead to keep it running. Not only because you don't need AI, but you can even stop tracking certain stuff like enemy production queues and buildings. That doesn't mean every single action of the AI is defined that way or that they don't follow any of the player rules, but it still opens up opportunities to arbitrate enemy behavior like a board game Automaton. This also takes away from the Adversarial nature of enemy players and enhances the roleplaying in that way. An enemy nation may be okay with helping you win because it's goal isn't to win, it's goal is to be the Swedenest Sweden that ever Swedened and that is how it will behave. It makes diplomacy, war, trade, and pretty much every inter-faction activity become knowable and gameable and you can make decisions with a fair understanding of what the AI wants to do without having to read about AI quirks on a forum somewhere.
Cons: This is already kind of how barbarians and city-states play. Do people want AI factions to be that way too, or is the adversarial, player-like nature part of what makes both Civilizations and City-States worth having? This is also a bit more like how Total War does things and being more like another game isn't always better. It also means you're playing a different game depending on the percentage of human and AI players. The only time I play with real people is as a team-locked co-op game, so this would work fine for me, but of course there's a big community of people who want to play against real players and probably want their AI opponents to act similarly. And the biggest con is that this is a bigger departure from previous games than Option 1 (I'd argue it's just being more transparent about the way that it is than the prior games, but people would still see it as a big change). This risks alienating a lot of players and having them say (as many will say anyway) that this is the "worst Civ game ever" and go back to the last one.
I think feeling like the other players at least have goals and distinct personalities is better than just having it be like the old warhammer games where its just a bunch of faceless speedbumps.
I’ll note warhammer itself has moved largely in this direction with the last few games, in Warhammer, Troy, Three Kingdoms, and Pharoah, giving the factions distinct leaders with special abilities and personalities that you get attached to, to the point where it gets really disappointing when you’re playing three kingdoms and your rival Liu Bei or Cao Cao dies of old age in the late game somehow to only to be replaced by a random generic leader even if the generic leader largely functions exactly the same and has the same abilities.
I guess there’s a balance between making the AI opponents feel like people and making it optimized to win at all costs then.
I don’t want the AI to be like a high level competetive chess AI that just picks the optimum move every time, that seems about as fun as playing against a quake 2 bot set to 100% accuracy that just railguns you from across the map over and over.
But I also don’t want an AI to just be generic obstacles like barbarians and city states either. I think the effort needs to be towards making them interesting and fun to play against, whatever fudging you need to do to do that.
Whereas in 5 or especially 6 if you survive to have like 4 ranged units the game is over.
It isn’t really that hard to make an AI that can do “combine all your armies into massive doomstacks, make sure they have x% siege, plow them into your enemy.”
Civ 5 and 6 were bad though. I had a game recently where I had literally just archers and immortals and killed a big invasion force of coursers, men at arms, and crossbows because the computer just kept sending them to my city radius in one or two units at a time and let my walled city and units focus fire them down. I did lose some units, but not quicker than I could replace them. In the end the AI ended up giving me a big peace settlement even though by all rights I was completely outclassed and should have at least lost that city if not been defeated outright.
Edit: honestly though I have felt for a while that having some kind of AOW style tactical combat would be the best thing for civ.
civ 5/6 have leaned more into the latter than the former, with the AI less an equal adversary than an obstacle the player has to overcome on their way to whatever victory condition. There's probably a lot of ways you could make the single player game feel more like multiplayer (where the optimal/efficient move is definitely the goal), but whether that results in a more fun game experience imo is doubtful
I do wish they could come up with a way to make the endgame more interesting though
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
And for it not to feel so damn opaque in how your progress is going/what you can do to speed it up
I know late game rock bands are how you move the needle but it still feels like
1. Steal underpants
2. ???
3. Win culture victory
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
One thing that's would be humanity-ish that would have been really cool for civ 6 would have been choosing your civ/leader a bit after you start. Civ 6 is so map dependent it would be nice to have a mode where you could see your start and adjust to it.
And yeah Civ 6 victory conditions aside from science or domination and maybe religion are kind of lame to me. Sending a spaceship to another star? Seems like a victory. Conquering the world? Seems like a victory. Converting the world to your religion? I can see that I guess, though I wish converting a civ to your religion had a bit more of a real effect (I don't really get much from conversion other than religion bonuses so it seems a bit arbitrary). But Culture and Diplo seem like just blatant bucket filling.
I would like to see more feedback and progression. Like if I become culturally dominant over a civ maybe I get a portion of their yields or something. Or if the convert to my religion they should be a lot more diplomatically friendly. Or whatever. Because for those victories there doesn't seem like much progress, it's just basically no effect at all and then victory.
Hell bring back vassalage too for domination. That way I get to feel like I really beat a civ rather than taking their capital and then not killing the last city or two because I don't want the grievances, and then the rest of the game that 2 city civ just yells and denounces me over and over like an angry squirrel.
Edit: I should say though I don’t mind so much what you have to actually do to win culture or religion, I just wish there was more a sense of progression than just passing the magic number on culture or converting the last city. Let me feel like I am actually slowly taking over the world with my culture or religion.
Right now tourism doesn’t matter much until you hit that last point. Converting civs doesn’t matter much until you get the last one. When you conquer a civ via domination you feel that, it should feel at least a little like that when you convert a civ or become culturally dominant. Not take them out of the game necessarily but you should feel like you get a tangible, noticeable benefit.
Neighbor AI: "I'm declaring war on you because you violated my secret condition, which you had no real way of knowing or not violating even if you knew."
Me: "Okay I guess, you know I'm an industrial powerhouse and can pump out in army in like 2 turns to kick your ass right?"
Neighbor: "Have at you fiend!"
*Several turns later*
Me: "Okay, I'm bored of looting all your improvements, tell you what, give me your nearest smallest city and we'll call in even."
Literally every other AI: "We all hate you for warmongering now, prepare to die!"
Golgo: "Except me, I hate you for suing for peace so cheaply, like a coward would."
This is functionally every game of Civ 6 I play, which is to say, also right about where I stop playing Civ 6 for 6-9 months before I try again.
IMO it fixed the problem of rerolling for good starts.
I also liked how you can see strategic resources you have not discovered yet, just not what they are. Really helped with the whole "ops you built a university over your only source of Uranium, no Eurka for you."
The main thing I don't like about 6 is that on top of all of Civ's well known AI issues, they added these hardwired tendencies that make games extremely predictable and stale (or on the extreme opposite end, the hidden traits can have a huge impact with no real way to address them at crucial early game junctures)
I am pretty sure Civ 4 and 5 had some baked in traits as well (ghandi nukes meme) but im not sure it was as pervasive or extensive.. but for the most part particularly in 4 it was hard for me to look at the map and predict how things would go. the games were a bit of a mystery and that kept me going
i would really like to see the tendencies system deleted entirely, or have that at least be an option, and have civs more or less play in a straight up traditional way, with their preferences for one victory or another only modestly influenced by their civ, much like how a normal person might play
this is one of those places where "realism" (or maybe, verisimilitude) kinda collides with the AI using the game systems
the AI starts to dislike you when you're beating them (i.e. you generate more faith or whatever), and/or when they think they can successfully attack you. This winds up feeling kinda off to the player because it gives you the idea you're somehow incorrect for doing well, or for having however many units you actually need to defend yourself against the AI as opposed to how many it thinks you need.
they kinda try to account for it by making warmongering penalties expire faster in the early game, but in practice once you've got that warmonger stink on you things kinda snowball (at least in my experience) because everyone starts disliking you
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
1) Getting deity rushed immediately by an adjacent AI, which if I survive and hit back to take their now-undefended cities... I haven't met anyone else to get mad at me bc it was all hands on deck defending the early war.
2) I'm doing a midgame timing attack with a unique unit or some such, at which point I'll have gotten a couple of friendships and your friends don't give a shit how much of a warmonger you are.
4 has really consistent personalities and tech preferences. Most infamously Isabella is an enormous religious zealot. If you have the same religion as her you can basically not defend that border. If you have a different religion, you are 100% going to war. Others just love to spam wonders and go for the culture win (Louis, Gandhi) and there are some who are hyper aggressive losers (Ragnar, Shaka).
To the point where there's a guy on the internet that does an annual AI only tournament and he and his readers are pretty good at predicting who's going to win, when, and how. But enough random nonsense happens that it's interesting. Huayna Capac is consistently the best AI leader (terraces OP), if you were wondering.
Another thing they could borrow from board games is the idea that getting VPs is the way to win, but has a "downside" that makes you have to think about whether you want to go for it right now. Like how province cards in Dominion screw up your draws, or some games where actions to get VPs are less efficient than other actions. Or even better, when getting VPs helps your opponents.
So building a Wonder gives you VPs, which you want at all stages in the game because eventually it will be how you win. But building the Wonder also gives its mechanical bonus to everyone. People adopting your cultural or religious tenets gives you VP but gives them whatever benefit the tenet provides. That sort of thing.
I feel like that might be a good mechanic for a “Diplomatic” victory. You are helping improve the world, but at a potential cost to your own personal strength.
Like you pass a “fair trade” initiative that gives VPs but also gives econ bonuses to the most behind civs, that sort of thing.
I think mostly what I would like to see though is some sense of progression with the non-domination or non-science victories. In domination as you progress towards victory you feel a change. You have less opponents and less credible opponents. In science as you proceed towards victory you get lots of toys. New units, buildings, etc.
I know people will say “you get toys with culture too” and government cards are nice but don’t feel quite as neat as building a new powerplant or tank. Most of the actual stuff you can build from culture is just stuff to help you get a culture or religion victory. I feel like as I do a religious or cultural victory I am doing cool stuff - spreading religion and building cathedrals or building museums and natural parks, etc. But I just don’t feel like that has a huge impact on the game until I hit that magic number point where you get a win. There’s never a point where I become dominant in tourism over a civ or religiously convert a civ and say “oh thats awesome, I really beat that guy” the way I do when I conquer a civs capital.
And you don’t get that with science, but you do get a lot of cool stuff that makes everything about your civ better, not just science, and makes you feel like you are progressing towards a zenith point that you don’t really get the same feel from in culture.
Edit: and for the kind of things you could give culture or religion- there is a point where your civ becomes “dominant” over another in both victories, I feel like that should do something. Culture/tourism should be more impactful than religion because if is harder to acheive, but there should be consequences for both. Right now also as a player you can just ignore both unless someone is about to win, which is bad too.
I was thinking something like:
Religion: a civ converts state religion to a religion you founded.
Due to your religious dominance you get:
20% of any faith or gold surplus they generate (religious pilgrimages, etc)
Civ cannot declare surprise wars on you, as canada ability (formal wars allowed)
You get a moderate opinion boost with the civ and they ignore third party grievances against you.
Tourism dominance: a civ has totally converted to your way of life. They listen to your music, read your books, learn your language, and visit your beaches and national parks. You get:
30% of any gold surplus they generate (tourism spending cash) and a bonus to your science if they are ahead of you.
Civs cannot declare surprise OR formal wars on you (legitimate CB or emergency wars are allowed)
You get a large diplomatic opinion boost with the civ and they ignore third party grievances against you.
“Blessed with new, loyal workers” is one hell of a euphemism for “enslave enemy units”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Thats probably fine honestly. I don’t know if we need a more direct depiction in a game with cartoon Ghandi.
If we are tackling touchy subjects though I’d really like to get my early iron age era Hebrews civ.
So if a coal plant is useful in the short term but could literally result in losing part of your empire to sea rise, that's a good way to not shy away from the dark side of empire building while still offering incentive to do things better. Slavery could easily be handled similarly, providing massive production gains with social repercussions and the knowledge that abolition will come at some point and upend your economy if you haven't shared it up with other avenues.
There is very little reason to avoid industrializing in Civ, just like reality sadly. If you don't and your neighbors do you are now behind and suffering from floods.
Anyways, back to Civ 7 wish list I would like to see a way to make grabbing land more worth it. Like I don't want to go back to infinite city spam where building cities all over the place was THE play, but the game feels odd in that while so much of it mirrors human history there is rarely a reason to start grabbing land in the late game. Cities take a while to pay off the investment, and its always been strange to me that this is not mid-to-late game colonization race like there was IRL. getting deep sea sailing and taking unclaimed land should be a huge boon, but its sometimes just isn't.
Really, I guess I'd just like a way to get the nice ocean resources like oil and pearls off those one or two tile island without feeling like its a waste of resources.
finding and claiming a big island in the ocean should feel amazing but to me it feels like a struggle
Anyway, I am playing a genuinely hard Civ4 game (I'm back to Civ4) where I got stuck on 5 cities because everyone was right on top of me. As arguably the worst leader in the game (Sitting Bull). Also no iron, so literally no attacking units until maces. And Shaka/Monty/Toku are on my border. Do have some nice river valleys. Basically went heavy specialist economy and am slooooooowly taking cities off the border, but those three assholes are allied and keep intervening. So I keep having to turn around because I just don't have the production queues to fight on two fronts. I'm up to 10 cities, but more importantly almost at rifling. Also somewhere off in the distance I've got a financial civ (Wang Kon) teching like mad.
Civ4 is still the best one.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat