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Firaxis may already have gone too far down another road, but I want to mention my favorite topic one more time. If they can give the end user any sort of access to the AI rules/algorithms, it will greatly improve the shelf life and appeal of the game. The more access, the better, but I'll take whatever crumbs Firaxis wants to throw my way.
No disrespect meant to the programmers at Firaxis, but they have a limited amount of time and testing. In the case of Civ2, strategies have long since obsoleted the AI code. A few fairly minor tweaks could make the AI much more competitive.
There are a lot of very smart people in the user community, and a lot of people who are interested in playing with the mechanics of a game. Consider CTP2: I haven't played it, but I hear it's not a very good game. Yet there's a dedicated core of people spending a lot of time trying to patch it up into something more playable. And I'm sure the scenario gurus would have a field day with custom AIs.
Allowing multiple AI rulesets in the same game would allow the AIs to show some personality. The user could also determine the difficulty of the game by loading a "hard" or "easy" AI ruleset. If someone doesn't like an AI that sneak attacks him, he could play with a custom ruleset that didn't allow that. An AI-only game could pit different AIs against each other for debugging and evaluation.
Many Civ2 players have simply given up on the single-player version of the game and only play multi-player. As I see it, the glaring AI weaknesses are in three areas: combat, terrain improvement, and city growth and expansion. Improvement of combat abilities would require lots of information about terrain, relative unit strengths, and overall strategy. But the latter two areas could be improved greatly if they were based on some simple lists or static evaluations. For example, a city site could be evaluated by assigning a numeric value to different types of terrain squares. Add up the the values for all the squares in a potential city radius to determine whether a city should be built there. Settlers could have a prioritized list of actions to perform; ideally, these actions would also be selected based on the needs of the city (low on food, shields, trade).
This is turning into a longer post than I intended. In as few words as possible: please, Firaxis, give us the ability to modify the AI!
No disrespect meant to the programmers at Firaxis, but they have a limited amount of time and testing. In the case of Civ2, strategies have long since obsoleted the AI code. A few fairly minor tweaks could make the AI much more competitive.
There are a lot of very smart people in the user community, and a lot of people who are interested in playing with the mechanics of a game. Consider CTP2: I haven't played it, but I hear it's not a very good game. Yet there's a dedicated core of people spending a lot of time trying to patch it up into something more playable. And I'm sure the scenario gurus would have a field day with custom AIs.
Allowing multiple AI rulesets in the same game would allow the AIs to show some personality. The user could also determine the difficulty of the game by loading a "hard" or "easy" AI ruleset. If someone doesn't like an AI that sneak attacks him, he could play with a custom ruleset that didn't allow that. An AI-only game could pit different AIs against each other for debugging and evaluation.
Many Civ2 players have simply given up on the single-player version of the game and only play multi-player. As I see it, the glaring AI weaknesses are in three areas: combat, terrain improvement, and city growth and expansion. Improvement of combat abilities would require lots of information about terrain, relative unit strengths, and overall strategy. But the latter two areas could be improved greatly if they were based on some simple lists or static evaluations. For example, a city site could be evaluated by assigning a numeric value to different types of terrain squares. Add up the the values for all the squares in a potential city radius to determine whether a city should be built there. Settlers could have a prioritized list of actions to perform; ideally, these actions would also be selected based on the needs of the city (low on food, shields, trade).
This is turning into a longer post than I intended. In as few words as possible: please, Firaxis, give us the ability to modify the AI!
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