A Better AI.

[Arrian]

Just looking at the screenshots and your descriptions, Blake, here are my thoughts:

1) changes to reduce starts close to another civ
2) changes to reduce massive seafood clustering
3) "Greenland Effect"

Grassland Furs... yikes. Sorta like the fabled grassland gems start (that I've still never seen).

Could you force it to go ice -> tundra and tundra -> plains? Like maybe forbid tundra -> grassland? Or limit it somehow?

Anyway, futzing with it to balance it properly is probably required, but generally I like the changes

-Arrian

[Adagio]

I just installed the newest AI, and I must say I'm impressed. The AIs has been a lot more successful at attacking, not only did they take one of my heavy protected cities, but they've also managed to take a lot of AI cities. India quickly became a vassal of the Vikings, but now a few hundred years later India is the master of China (with the help of another average Civ)

Never thought I'd see that happen

Originally posted by Blake
[holding down ALT when mousing over the active player will show "=== Better AI ==="

Could also add a version number?

[DrSpike]

Not sure what strikes me more - admiration of what Blake has achieved/is achieving with his tweaks or annoyance that he can seemingly at will make major improvements.

Firaxis - just hire Mr B. You don't have to pay him much as he'll do it for free anyway, and he's better at it than you are.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Arrian
Just looking at the screenshots and your descriptions, Blake, here are my thoughts:

1) changes to reduce starts close to another civ
2) changes to reduce massive seafood clustering
3) "Greenland Effect"
-Arrian

I agree with this entirely. Not sure how much testing has been done on the greenland effect change but it seems to me to be something that should be betaed before going into the main version.

[Diadem]

Grassland furs are not *that* good. Still significantly less good than grassland gems, for example. Even less good than plains cows.

I like the greeland effect, but it should be a bit stronger imho. Those screenshots you've shown, they still look like pretty amazingly crappy start locations. The green zone should be bigger still. Especially now that you limited the one redeeming feature of such starts - massive amounts of seafood.

Another thing: Is it possible to make is so that 'sea' starts always get an open route to see? In that screenshot of yours, we have an ocean start that is entirely blocked by ice. That removes one of the biggest bonusses of a sea start - the option to quickly build ships and explore the world. If you removed some ice to open a sea route to the world, that'd be good.

[Fosse]

I like that the greening effect is still relativly mild. A crappy start shouldn't be turned into a good one, after all. It's just made less crappy.

[Solver]

I'd like to add my thoughts about starting position rebalancing. I would prefer for it to be minimal, or not at all included. I find that having some starts in fantastic positions and others in poor positions is a large part of the fun in Civ4 for me.

Then again, sounds like you're only tweaking the position generator slightly, and not a whole deal.

[Krill]

HEY. Fosse, long time no see. How are you man?

[Willem]

Originally posted by Solver
I'd like to add my thoughts about starting position rebalancing. I would prefer for it to be minimal, or not at all included.

Boo, hiss, heathen! I get so annoyed having to restart the game over and over again because the start position is so crappy. And I'm really not fond of starting near the ocean so many times. I'd like to see a better balance between inland and ocean starts. Especially if the civ I'm playing doesn't start out with Fishing.

[Solver]

I start inland plenty. But I never restart due to a bad starting position - although sometimes it does lead to me losing.

I understand, though, that Blake must make those adjustments anyway, since AI evaluation code is linked to generation code, so in order for the AI to evaluate its position better, the start generator needs a tweak.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Solver
I start inland plenty.

Not me. I find that at least 75% of my starts puts me on or very near the coast, I rarely start out with a inland location. Maybe this has to do with playing Fractal maps, but it gets rather annoying after awhile.

[Jaybe]

What civ(s) do you play, Willem? My huge/fractal starts as Rome are mostly inland (Warlords 208).

[MikeH]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Firaxis - just hire Mr B. You don't have to pay him much as he'll do it for free anyway, and he's better at it than you are.

They did release the SDK including all the AI code for exactly this reason, that expert players could improve the game once they've spent time mastering the finished product. So Firaxis as well as Blake

[Blake]

I just love how everyone has a unique opinion on the start point stuff, makes decision making so easy .
Diadem, I can indeed write some code to clear a water route, it would probably be more reasonable, I'll see how it goes/looks.

Someone asked about upgrading ice to tundra... unfortunately it's hard to distinguish between "Ice" (0-0-0) and "Desert" (0-0-0) since the normalizer looks at yields (as to work with mods and stuff), so when I tried to have Ice -> Tundra, I ended up with patches of tundra in desert... hrmmm... so I canned that idea.

[Solver]

Well Blake, I guess one of the problems here is that you have people with vastly different expectations. I, like a bunch of other people, want simply a "better AI" mod gives a much better AI but doesn't do any other gameplay changes. I'll possibly want to play with modded rules two or three years from now, but for now, I like Civ4 just the way it is, and would prefer not to have any changes unrelated to the AI.

Good luck deciding .