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Rob Zacny

Episode 175: Gods and Kings

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The Fall from Heaven 2 mod is fantastic, although maybe a little tricky to get into to start with.

I'm another CivIV fan. The world feels larger and more interesting. And I don't mind stacks of doom: Civ was never a war game, and i prefer the more abstracted combat + the AI is actually capable of attacking. 1 unit per tile is all well and good, IF the AI can use it effectively.

But, I think the new system works against the AI (would love to read an interview with whoever coded up the AI). With stacks of doom, the AI just has to stick all units offensive units into an "army" and then decide where to move that army and what to attack. That's one search tree, and it doesn't take a whole lot of computation. With 1 unit per tile, the AI has to plan orders for each unit one at a time. And worse, it can't consider all the moves independently, as moving one unit impacts on where you move another unit. This surely creates an exponential blow up in the number of possibilities the AI has to search through to find sensible moves. This means a load of constraints need to be used, as otherwise players are going to be waiting far too long between turns. So, forward planning, movement dependencies, etc, are probably cut.

I would LOVE for a proper indepth 3MA show on game AI design. My day job is computer science research in a university, and while I don't work directly on this type of AI, I have a little bit of knowledge.

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I find it really odd that everyone on the show talks about Civ in the context of winning a game. Its not how I ever saw or played the game.

Recently I just finished (in fact brutally beaten by the Japanese) a game of Civ 4 on the 18 civ earth scenario. I played a game as Montezuma and my early game worked out pretty well. The Incas were stuck in South America due to the Andes and I had fought and won a minor war with Washington. Securing much of the Western United States. However when other civilizations finally made contact with our continent things started going south. In an attempt to create an American alliance I started to develop a healthier relationship with Washington, however due to a difference in religion and anger over the war this never happened and instead he declared war on me.

I was hard pressed to make any advance into his territory but finally managed to capture some of his bigger cities around the Gulf. Unfortunately the war bled Washington out and the Arabs were able to capture a city on the eastern seaboard. With this foothold they started to push farther inland. I quickly made a peace agreement with Washington and started donating units to the war effort.

With my factories supporting Washington it looked as if the tide had turned, but then the Japanese (the most powerful civ in the game, and ahead of me by over 1,000 points) pushed down through Alaska. About this time Washington became the puppet of the Arabs and they declared war on me.

Owing to the distances involved in reaching North America from Asia and the Middle East I managed to hold out for nearly 200 years. Unfortunately because all of my production was going into military units my research was unable to keep up and my WW1 era infantry found themselves facing stacks of tanks and eventually helicopters.

This was a really enjoyable game for me, but I never once expected to win. In fact if I was trying to win I would have probably quit around the medieval era as other civilizations started to contact me. Even then it was quite obvious that I was far behind the technological curve in the Old World. I just find it incredibly odd that people play to win civ. It seems, well it just seems wrong (not to malign people for playing the game how they want, I just have a hard time imagining playing a game of civ with that mindset).

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I find it really odd that everyone on the show talks about Civ in the context of winning a game. Its not how I ever saw or played the game.

I think that's one of the interesting (and great) things about Civ -- you can play it to win, or you can play it to play. Like you, I typically play it just to play. In nearly every game I won pre-Civ 5 was via spaceship, since that is the default victory a peacemonger.

It's an interesting point, because the Civ constituencies often talk past each other. I am sure that my points are unintelligible to a multiplayer only guy, as his points make no real sense to me.

Anyways, kudos to Civ for offering such a variety of game experiences.

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I would LOVE for a proper indepth 3MA show on game AI design. My day job is computer science research in a university, and while I don't work directly on this type of AI, I have a little bit of knowledge.

I find it really odd that everyone on the show talks about Civ in the context of winning a game. Its not how I ever saw or played the game.

I'm going to drop this link because I think it might interest both of you guys, while it may not be exactly be as in depth as riadsala might want Soren Johnson's

talk is pretty fascinating look at his thoughts about designing the Civ AI and how it wasn't purely designed to win.

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Civ5 is a ridiculously hard game to write AI for, especially compared to civ4. If I were to program it, I'd say civ5 would take 10 times as much time, and still not be as good.

  • there's no clear objective. AI's aren't intelligent. they just try to maximize stuff, and when it isn't clear what to maximize, the AI is lost. in civ4 simply growing each city to its local happiness limit isn't too far from an optimal strategy.
  • turns need to be fast. with AI programming, the challenge is always that there isn't enough time to think. combat has too much dependency and non-determinism. you need to see what happened with unit 1's attack before you can decide what to do with unit 2. this leaves very little processing budget for thinking. Stacks can just move in unison. Which specific units live or die isn't as important.
  • turns are sequential instead of simultaneous. doing some planning during your turn and making final decisions between turns is a mess to program and manage. humans probably spend several minutes making turns. the AI needs to do it in a second or two.
  • 1 unit per tile restrictions make movement harder to plan, and much slower to calculate.
  • hexes make things much slower to calculate
  • the game has lots of randomness/blindness. the AI cannot make many assumptions, so it's hard to assess its own strength. civ4 graphed out things like food/power/gold. the AI could at least know if it was ahead or behind. there's a simple decision tree there that results in at least some semi-intelligent behavior. in civ5, an AI has no clue whatsoever about what to focus on.
  • planning is so important in civ5, and it's really hard to program and manage for an AI. things like civics are very AI-friendly. social policies are all about long-term planning. even stuff like which tiles to improve or build roads on or buy culture for are these hard decisions in civ5, but so much easier in civ4.

basically everything makes gameplay more strategic makes AI programming that much harder. The strategy genre has been set behind so far because so many people confuse AI and difficulty. Figuring out how to have fun against cheating computers is game design, not AI design.

Interviews/talks are full of nonsense where developers complain about how a good AI would be no fun to play against. An unbeatable opponent would be no fun to play against, but we are nowhere close to the point where improvements to the AI will make a game worse. Handicapping a good AI and making it play a role will almost always result in a better game than making a bad AI cheat.

It also doesn't help that there's this misconception that all the online players are really enthusiastic about the multiplayer. A lot of them only play it because there's no AI, but they hate all the baggage that comes with multiplayer gaming.

It's sad how I have to make a game myself just to play a good 4X ...

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A tale of CiV........

My name is Haile Selassie and it was I who lead my people from the desert and propelled them to greatness. I built a civilisation the likes of which the world will never see again, to the glory of God and my nation that will live through the annuls of history until the world turns back into the dust from wence it came.

For countless generations my ancestors roamed the desert, wandering where there was water and food, never settling in one place for long, the voices in the wind calling them ever on. Until one day we created the brow of a hill and saw before us a valley and a river, the sun glinting off the sea behind. Here was food, shelter, a respite from the fierce heat of the desert, finally we had found a place to call home.

With a new found sense of security, we built permanent dwellings by that river and raised a monument to the gods for guiding us to this place. We least to farm crops and mine hills, where we found large deposits of a glimmering metal from which our most skilled artisans could create beautiful jewellery the likes of which had not been seen before. Silver we called it, and it became the lifeblood of our people and the catalyst to everything we have built since we settled by that shimmering sea. Our bravest warriors were sent to scout the land around us, past the desert of our ancestors and to the jungles beyond. They encountered many brutish tribes who answered our call to civilisation wih weapons and violence, and crushed them all. And yet they also met others attempting to raise themselves beyond their humble beginnings, and we knew we were not the only people longing for more. The Chinese them called themselves, haughty yet beautiful, and the Americans, brash yet far sighted. As our warriors explore this great land we would take, my people settled into the toil of life but never lost their reverence for the desert spirits that lead us to this place. Desert worshippers we were, and desert worshippers we thought we would remain.

The years turned and so our city grew. We learned to trade our silver for fine fabrics from the Chinese, which they called silk, and from Washington he gave us little disks of a burnished yellow metal they called gold, and many of them. As we grew old the elders recognised that the knowledge of the desert and our wanderings were being lost by the younger generations, and so a gear library of our accumulated wisdom was built by the shores of the sea to save everything we had ever known so that it might never be lost. The other nations learn of our feat and grew jealous, and soon we heard tales of their own great works, though forever in imitation of our own. As the city grew the elders gathered to discuss the overcrowding which would soon blight the happiness of the people, and the first great exodus took place, with those who wished leaving to found a new great city to the western edge of the desert, where stone, incense and cotton fields had been spied by our warriors years before. There they settled and found a great wonder, a mountain so filled with gems it sparkled in the sun, a source of wealth for our nation and further proof of the providence of the desert spirits. To the South the other exodus left, to a cooler land of grass wheat and rolling hills. There they found grapes of the slopes of those hills and made fine wines and

And so came a man amongst us who's words were like fire on dry parchment. He spoke of the one true God who crated this world of plenty, guided our people to the foundations of our nation and would guide is forever more. The more people listened, the more they believed and Itter truth of his words became evident. The first great, and only true religion of the world was born in the founding city of Addis Abbaba that year, and everything my people built from that day forward was the glory of the lord.

Alight with the word of god my people threw themselves into a orgy of creativity, building cathedrals to God, great building that were wonders of the world, and the fame and sophistication of our empire became the envy of all the other tribes. We heard of the rise of false prophets and false gods, and scorned those nations who listened to the testimony of hollow and imaginary Gods. To the North of the vast land we inhabited our warriors met the nations of Persia and the ottomans before the land ran out and one again there was the sea, stretching off into the infinity beyond the horizon. We me other cities, and befriended them, their interest in art and culture matching our own and the glory of our nation grew again.

But the word of the true God cannot be stifled by the sea, and so my people learnt to build the wooden boats and gain the skills to see what leaves beyond the horizon and onward to the uttermost ends of the world. Here our sailors found the other great land of our world, and fatefully, we met the Azetcs, friends, betrayers and nearly the downfall of our world.

With a vast empire that took our scouts many, many years to explore, word was returned in hushed and awed tones. They carried back word of great cities and momentus buildings, of a beatiful and bountiful land. However the foul deeds of these Aztecs and their rituals and sacrifices were also told, and we were sorely troubled by those we had called friend. We met the Songians, and the Dutch, and heard the tales of the aggression of their great neighbour, and dark clouds grew to cover the earth.

Washington had grown weary of our exhortations to follow the true world of god, and where the ottomans and Persians had recognised the truth both the Amercians and Chinese only heard to poison whispers of their false gods. No longer were we friends and growig armies could be seen in the lands beyond our borders. With heavily hearts my people looked to their defenses and the warrior ways of our ancestors were quietly revived. Our scientists look deep into the workings of the world and new and terrible weapons were devised should we need to defend ourselves, for having heard of the horrors of war from those victims of the Aztecs my people had no desire to inflict them themselves. Still they looked ever toward the glory of god and the dram of building a utopia were all would be welcome, no war would exist and all would live in peace and harmony, and in those dark days that dream seemed more distant than ever. Reluctantly we promised our American and Chinese neighbours that we would stop preaching the true word to them, and in private we prayed for their souls when the reckoning came.

And so the world, teetering on the brink, passed it's moment of crisis and the great peace that was all our nation had ever know remained. Yet we were not naive, and we had learnt not to trust those we had called friend. In secret and silence, we found those mej to guard our secrets and learn those of the other nations. Fouls deeds were committed, great scientists were found murdered, their ideas stolen and more than one nation were turned back from war, their plans discovers and whispered into the ears of their rivals.

And so the years turned, the world revolved and while the great project to the glory of God gathered pace in our nation, so the size and power of the Aztecs grew. Here it is we lost our way, so enraptured were we in our elevation to the word of the Lord that we lost out sight and did not see our doom until it was nearly upon us.

The Aztecs called us. "we want your riches" they said. "We want your cities. And your people. And all you have ever built or we will crush your nation and return it to the sand from where you came."

(To be continued) Sorry about spelling and weird ass auto-correct oddities.

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We panicked. We cried out in fear and terror that we would lose all we have achieved. But in the depths of our despair so the Word was heard once more. "faith" it said. "and courage".

So we turned to war. Pleas to our shortsighted neighbours fell on deaf ears. Could they not see that if we failed the would be next? Work on the great project halted as we looked to violence and death to protect all we held so dear. First ships were built, using all our knowledge and inenguity of our engineers, they were made of steel and cut the waters like sharks hunting their prey. 3 were all we could manage given our desperation, but more would be built. Our young were conscripted, given the finest weapons we could prepare and set to the coast to look for Montezuma's invasion fleet.

It was our fleet that found them. A mighty army on the waves. Yet protected only by a few old wooden sailing ships. Relief flowed through the fleet for here was a for that would easily be dealt with. All that fear and worry over this?! And so relief turned to anger and anger into vengeance, and the Aztecs learnt the folly of making threats that could not be backed up. Like the wrath of God the fleet fell upon the Aztecs, gun barrels blazing, wooden ships bursting asunder, and the unprotected soldiers drowned in their thousands due to the stupidity of their master. The few that made it back to land we dispatched with impunity, shells fired from a distance they could not reach. A single Aztec city was looted and burned tithe ground by that fleet, to teach Montezuma the lesson he sorely needed, but it was a lesson he spurned. For another 100 years he sent his brightest and best to a watery grave with a stubbornness we could not comprehend. Sickened we left the fleet patrolling the sea, and recalled our conscripted youths and so work on the great Utopia began once more.

And then it came. Two final projects and our utopia would be born. while our scientist learnt to harness the power of the sun, so our artists and religious leaders and other peoples gathered to create heaven on Earth. With the holy fire sent to sweep Montezuma from the land we liberated the Dutch and Songians from their slavery, and burnt the memory of The Aztecs from the world. We called to all peoples of the world to join our celebration of God's holy word, and saw that in the fullness of time our blessed Utopia would reach all corners of the world and finally, my work had been completed.

OK so it wasn't the most interesting game of Civ I've played, but cultural victories tend to be clickfests at best when going well. Montezuma's DoW was the only one against me the entire game, despite a lot of posturing from Washington and me and Monty running away with the points lead. Nuking him at the end was deeply satisfying despite the diplomatic penalties, but I was only 15 turns off the end and was well able to fend off an other foolish DoWs. All I need to do now is learn to pay on a level above prince!

I also recommend you never type out something this long on an iPhone.

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It's sad how I have to make a game myself just to play a good 4X ...

I haven't sunk enough time into Endless Space to give it a real and true thumbs up yet, but if it continues on the path it's on, I will recommend it in the future.

<snark>Yes, despite the fact that "star fleets" are really just those gauche Stacks of Doom</snark>

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I finally got around to trying the Gods & Kings expansion. I basically have a similar view as the cast, it added a little more replay value for Civ 5, but didn't ultimately do anything to radically change my opinion of the game. My problem is that for all the improvements that have been made since the game's release for the A.I. the diplomacy still feels completely schizophrenic to me, and that is arguably as serious a flaw as a Civilization game can have because it interferes with my ability to enjoy the game as either a strategy game to be mastered, or as a role-playing type experience by either subverting my need to have a rational type opponent or else breaking the suspension of disbelief.

It's a shame because while Civ 4's stacks of doom never bothered me, I do really love Civ 5's elegant UI, so I really miss that whenever I load up Civ 4.

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