Ability of the AI

[drake]

We all can agree that the AI in Civ2 is funny, to say the least but that didn't prevent us from playing it for thousands of hours, right?

Yes

After the first 500 hours of not being challenged and watching the AI implement their same dumb strategies over and over, saying the same thing over and over, I decided to find some real opponents.

After awhile one has to find out if they are good at learning the Ais dumb patterns, or if they are a good player who can adapt to the un-predicted.......

Least thats what I did

[Steve Clark]

...and besides playing against real opponents, playing one of the newer custom scenarios or playing a challenge game (like OCC or others) added to the hours of fun. I have predicted a few times that 90% of the Civ3 games I will play will be scenarios, not only because I find them more fun, but I feel that the AI in regular game of Civ3 will be just as predictable (in a different way though).

[art_vandelai]

The AI should present a tougher challenge in CIV 3

With all the added complexity in the game, you'd think that the AI would not be as good. However, due to the evidence we have collected that many unbalanced strategies that are focussed on a single point of AI weakness will no longer work (e.g. ICS, war being a hinderance, stealing technologies in the end game). The only singular strategy that haven't been tested much is cultural domination, which (without having played the game) seems like it may be very effective.

If the cultural domination strategy is not a cakewalk, the players will now be forced to take a more pure, balanced approach to win the game. Even in CIV II, I found that balanced approach (which is how I play) gives mixed results, and on Deity makes it possible to survive, but not win outright.

While the players who spend every minute of their day analyzing every move in minute detail should easily be able to beat Deity, I think it will be a fairly balanced and competitive game with the AI's 'cheats' vs. the player's ability to conduct long-term strategy.

[Blake]

I just really hope there is a few options for modifying the AI's, *especially* how much it values particular units, facilities and terrain improvments. This is not much to ask for, but makes it much easier to update or tweak the AI. It would also have applications in scenerio or mod design, traditionally the only way to stop the AI building a particular unit was removing the unit from the tech tree!

If such a system had been included in SMAC, using the same basic code for unit movement, invasions etc, the AI could have been made a lot better, by encouraging it to build facilities, units, and terraforming conductive to particular strategies.

The Civ3 enviroment should be a lot more AI friendly than SMAC's, with pre-set units, flat terrain (less terraforming choices), goverment instead of SE, fewer easily abused features (Crawlers, pop-boom, 'plonking' down wonders) and overall less general complexity. Culture is about the only *new* complexity, oh, and the trade system, that could cause a headache for the AI....

If they can make a slight improvment in the general AI code over SMAC's and add a bit of customization ability in the rules editor I think the AI should do very well.