Editable AI - Firaxis / Soren

[Solver]

DeepO, thanks for your explanations, and let me enlighten you a little bit about the CtP modmakers. Let's speak of CtP 2. The AI of CtP 2 out of the box is much inferior to that of CtP 1, and basically inferior to any other civ game I've seen. I'm not going to dicuss why now. The AI, even at the highest difficulty level, does build lots of units for defense, can not manage terraforming and unconventional units properly. What's worse, the AI does not attack. At all. It will sometimes send smaller stacks your way, but those are easily countered, especially due to the CtP combat system, where you got to attack in large numbers. The AI is a poor researcher, often choosing the wrong research path, and can easily be defeated in just about any way you can think of. 90% of CtP 2 players can beat the highest level at the first attempt, and the other 10% learn to pretty fast.

What the mod community made, though, is a pretty competitive AI, capable of launching attack, among all. The AI isn't as good as that of Civ 3, but at higher levels it can provide certain degree of competition, and it will certainly have you think about defense, for it will attack.

From here we can conclude that yes, Apolyton does have AI progammers, and I believe that, should the AI of Civ 3 be released, within a few months we would see an even stronger AI. Soren did great work, but he was alone. A dozen programmers will do even better additions.

[W4r_Machine]

Originally posted by Solver
AI. Soren did great work, but he was alone. A dozen programmers will do even better additions.

For one man to write all this AI is amzing to say the least. It took 4 patches but an execelent work non the less.

Yes, a dozen heads are greater than one.

[DeepO]

Thanks Solver, it did enlighten me

If there is one thing I agree very much with you, it was your last sentence:

Soren did great work, but he was alone. A dozen programmers will do even better additions.

I'm still looking for a game with a good AI which lets me play with it, to try to improve it. Black & White promised just that, but when it failed to deliver on it's promise to release the source, I lost all interest in the game. It's a good thing Firaxis has made the decision to not release the AI public from the start, or there would be more disappointment. But to quote Trip:

Scripting/AI editing is out of the question for Civ III... I'm sure most of us know that. Firaxis... PLEASE make that available for IV though!

DeepO

[Solver]

Well DeepO, I would strongly suggest you get CtP 2, download either the MedMod or CradleMod, and mess with that AI. It will give you many options to try yourself at, and I highly doubt you'll get anything like that in another game anytime soon.

[DeepO]

Maybe I will... but I still feel CtP was a rip-off, and somehow 'going back' to an older game does not have the same appeal as trying to improve a modern game. Too few possibilities to brag, perhaps

DeepO

[Peter Triggs]

Well DeepO, I would strongly suggest you get CtP 2, download either the MedMod or CradleMod, and mess with that AI. It will give you many options to try yourself at, and I highly doubt you'll get anything like that in another game anytime soon.

DeepO, thanks for the info about blackboarding and I'll second Solver's recommendation. It's tempting to launch into some lengthy sales talk about what you can do with CTP2's AI but I guess CIV3 players wouldn't appreciate that. Suffice it to say that there's a set of GOALS that determine what an AI player does with it's units. (Each GOAL is defined by a number of tweakable parameters, and you can define your own new GOALS.) Every AI player has a tweakable default STRATEGY where its GOALS are prioritized. You can define your own new strategies and get an AI player to use one by defining the game situation in which you want it to be used and then trumping the default priority.

But I have to sympathise with your point about going back to an older game. Worse than that, it's a game that's 'frozen in time': there'll never be another patch. If there were I know we could come up with some very constructive suggestions.

On the other hand, at the moment it's the only Civ type game that has a scripting language and an exposed AI. The Firaxians have said that they're not planning on giving CIV3 scripting functionality, so if you want to play around with a game's AI it's either CTP2, maybe CIV4 in years to come, or (fingers crossed) RoN this coming Spring.

[DeepO]

I'll keep CtP2 in mind. But still, it's a bit strange to learn and play a game only to improve the AI. In Civ3, it took months before I saw flaws, and opportunities in the AI, I don't want to spend that on a game I'm not really interested in. My play time is rather limited...

I'm not looking for a Civ type game with editable AI, I'm looking for a game I like with editable AI. That is a big difference, even if I do like the Civ concept a lot, it is no garantee that I'll love each game in the same spirit. RoN could be good, but as AoE also quickly bored me I'm not sure about it. Having a changeable AI might help, though

DeepO

[Solver]

DeepO,

Let me say there's a huge difference between AoE and RoN and Civ, of course. I understand, of course, that you want a game you like with an editable AI, and you might like CtP 2 with mods. Due to many stupidities in game design, I doubt there are many who like CtP 2 out of the box, but I actually like the modded CtP 2 very much. Simply put, it's a different game. Civ style, CtP substyle, but different game - it's not CtP 2 anymore. Call it Apolyton Civ.

And if you grow to like this game, you'll have fun with modifying.

[David Murray]

Originally posted by W4r_Machine


For one man to write all this AI is amzing to say the least. It took 4 patches but an execelent work non the less.

What makes you think that Soren wrote it all himself? There are quite a few other people listed in the Civ3 credits besides Soren....

[DeepO]

Solver, you are right, I might like the 'Apolyton Civ'. It sounds like you guys did a nice job on modding it. If only I had the time to play everything interesting... but I (sometimes) have to have a life as well

David, why wouldn't it be possilbe that Soren did it all by himself? I thought that, while he was the only AI guy, he also did a lot of other programming for the game. What is more surprising is that he finds the time reading large parts of the Apolyton forums

Could anyone give an idea how many of those goals (or tasks as I called them, not knowing the used term) were in the CtP 2 mods? One of my previous projects consisted of some 4000 rules in a corrosion expert system, which was programmed by 2 guys in about 2 years. Considering that that time also included building a GUI (the inference engine was a commercial one), you might get an idea of what can be done through hard labour.

I think that Soren did a great job, not because of the amount of work, but because he most likely had to develop the rules / goals himself. In my case, most of the rules were gained by interviewing corrosion experts, which then got translated into a working system. That was our biggest challenge: you can't imagine the amount of rubbish you get from experts that don't have any feeling for IT.

DeepO