Strength of AI vs. Number of Civs

[Telamon]

I have heard several people mention that they would rather have 8 civs with a good AI than 32 civs with a bad AI. The number of civs in a game is personal preferance. I myself would prefer to play against 32. However, the precieved tradeoff in AI quality and number of civs is nonexistant. Anyone that thinks the number of civs has any bearing on how well they play doesn't know what they are talking about. All civs will be using the same game logic. Playing with 32 civs will definately take more time than with 8, but the quality of their play will be the same. Activision just didn't feel like giving the player the option of playing with greater than 8 civs. If the game was coded well, this could be changed very easily. I do not understand why CTP2 will not have an in-game menu to set the number of civs to at least 32, if not 64. If they do not allow play with greater numbers of civs by text-editting, we know they reserved this functionality to make more money on a patch. I am a programmer myself and I will tell you that this is a very easy thing to do.

As a side note, I hear that CTP2's AI is much improved. I certainly hope so. The critical question is: Doe the AI cheat? It has in all past civ games and that the AI had an advantage always bothered me. If Activision can create a computer player that does well and doesn't cheat than that will be a major accomplishment. If they "improved" the AI by allowing it to cheat more, well, I could have done that myself.

[MarkG]

you would be right, if the ai had unlimited time
but it doesnt. in ctp1(and i guess in ctp2 too) there is a time limit for each ai to complete his "thinking" and for all the ai's together.
if you add more civs, without increasing these limits, you are practically sharing the same time to more ai's....

[Ralf]

quote: Originally posted by Telamon on 11-02-2000 05:55 PM However, the precieved tradeoff in AI quality and number of civs is nonexistant. Anyone that thinks the number of civs has any bearing on how well they play doesn't know what they are talking about. All civs will be using the same game logic. Playing with 32 civs will definately take more time than with 8, but the quality of their play will be the same.

I agree with MarkG:s objection, but i would add the following:

The argument that "all civs using the same logic" (more or less) is irrelevant. The problem is theres so many totally unknown and unforseeable factors in games like Civ/Ctp, from an AI programmings point of view. Adding more civs, more units, more diplomacy-interconnections on much bigger maps would quickly add salt to injury.

I suggest you read the following thread on the issue:
http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum6/HTML/001531.html?39

Im not sure if you really are that interested in AI-problematics, Telamon. I dont believe that players and developers who is really interested in these AI-problems, so generally and superficially can totally dismiss the objections of increased bugs-, programmings- and hardware-related problems, like you do.

[This message has been edited by Ralf (edited November 03, 2000).]

[Big Dave]

This really has a simple solution, Markos. On the little tag with the system requirements you state "System requirements for playing with 8 Civilizations"

Unfortunatly, not simple enough for a marketting weenie to figure out.

quote: Originally posted by MarkG on 11-02-2000 07:25 PM you would be right, if the ai had unlimited time but it doesnt. in ctp1(and i guess in ctp2 too) there is a time limit for each ai to complete his "thinking" and for all the ai's together. if you add more civs, without increasing these limits, you are practically sharing the same time to more ai's....

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Big Dave

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me!

[Monkey]

Ok time to put my computer science knowledge to practice here.

Because the diplomacy of CTP2 has been enchanced, each civ might have to take into account the current state of every other civ in the playing field. Clearly this problem has the complexity of O(N^2) meaning the amount of total processing time is proportional to the squared of the number of civs present in the game. Anyone who knows anything about programming will know that as N increases the amount of processing time will be increasing at a much faster rate. So for a 32 civ game to happen we could be looking at the kind of computational power that current generations of computers just dont have. So for anyone saying it is just a simple #define problem... errr.. nuff said.

[Daniel Frappier]

All that talked about CPU requirement is irrelevant.

The fact is that giving the opportunity to someone to play with 32 Civ will not make the game slower for others who prefer to play with 8 Civ.

I have played CTP I with 16 Civ on my old P166 and was very happy about it. Not everibody gets bored because the AI takes more than 5 seconds in between turns.

Beside i got to find something to do next year with my new 1.5Gh Sledghammer (new AMD 64bit much faster than Athlon processor)

[MarkG]

quote: Originally posted by Big Dave on 11-04-2000 01:55 PM This really has a simple solution, Markos. On the little tag with the system requirements you state "System requirements for playing with 8 Civilizations" Unfortunatly, not simple enough for a marketting weenie to figure out.

somehow i tend to think that there would be players and/or reviewers who would consider it very bad that the game doesnt not play well with 16 civs on the minimum requirement, whatever disclaimer there was....

[Pyaray]

quote: Originally posted by Monkey on 11-04-2000 02:04 PM Ok time to put my computer science knowledge to practice here. Because the diplomacy of CTP2 has been enchanced, each civ might have to take into account the current state of every other civ in the playing field. Clearly this problem has the complexity of O(N^2) meaning the amount of total processing time is proportional to the squared of the number of civs present in the game. Anyone who knows anything about programming will know that as N increases the amount of processing time will be increasing at a much faster rate. So for a 32 civ game to happen we could be looking at the kind of computational power that current generations of computers just dont have. So for anyone saying it is just a simple #define problem... errr.. nuff said.

You stick with that CS thing, cause you nailed it. Also, it's really not cool to make a game where the minimum spec system can't play the "full game". And I'll add on to it what you said to explain the problem in even further detail. There is a concern with the AI comparing the other civs, and that is exponential. With 8 civs, each AI has to evaluate 7 other civs, so it's 7^2=49, with 9 civs it's 8^2=64, and 10 civs it's 9^2=81. So you can see, by increasing the number of civs by 2 we have nearly doubled the amount of work that needs to be done. Just for the record, 32 civs would be 961 comparison's each turn. Almost 20 times that of 8 civs.

Now consider units, and how the AI's look at each unit they can see. Let's assume later in the game where you can see nearly the whole map (if not the whole thing). And let's say each civ has 100 units. In this case, the AI must evaluate it's own units as well. So for each AI player they have to evaluate 8*100=800 units. Now do that for each AI and we have 6400 units being evaluated for a complete turn. Let's increase that to 10 civs, 10*100=1000, for each AI is 10,000 units to be evaluated each turn. Once again, nearly doubling for only 2 more civs.

I do understand your points of "well if we want to go ahead and let it take a long time, then we should have that choice". But, we can't release a game that we haven't tested everything in. If we were to increase the number of civs by 2, it would nearly double our testing time, and that's something we can't afford to do. There are already a ton of people (whom I fundamentally disagree with) that say we don't test enough. This would just add to the problem. Would you all really want us to add a completely untested feature?

On the other hand, that setting is still stored in an TXT file. But if you're looking for some kind of official sanction that we support that, you're not going to get it. We didn't test the game for every possible combination of things that users can set by modifying the settings files. Nor would we, or could we, there are just too many variables.

/soapbox

Pyaray

P.S. I wasn't really going to address this anymore, but this does appear to be one of the topics that just won't die. I hope this is an acceptable answer to everyone as to why we didn't do it.

[MarkG]

thanks for the thorough explanation Pyaray. we're not little kids playing tomb raider, we are civers and we like these kind of responses

[Pyaray]

quote: Originally posted by MarkG on 11-04-2000 07:37 PM thanks for the thorough explanation Pyaray. we're not little kids playing tomb raider, we are civers and we like these kind of responses

I realize that, I just don't like to write them.

The problem with giving really long technical responses like this is that they are most definately incomplete, or inaccurate for the sake of simplicity. What will then generally happen is someone with technical knowledge (like a programmer or software engineer) comes along and starts to shoot holes in it, claiming that we're lying about this stuff. We're not "lying" as it were, but I did leave out a lot of the finer details due to brevity, trying to make the average consumer understand, and not saying what we consider "internal information".

But we shall see what happens with this response. Perhaps if it's not riddled with bullets after a few days I'll be more relaxed about giving these kinds of responses in the future. No guarantees one way or the other though.

Pyaray

[Monkey]

Thanks for the clear up Pyaray. I figured it would be something like that. What amazes me about some people is that they start shooting off their mouths like they know everything about the game and even propose technical solutions to fix it... all this without seeing or having touched the source code! Amazing! Then there are the people who complain that this feature is not in, that feature is not in... I'm boycotting the game!!!! Sigh... it's only a game, if you don't like it, don't buy it. US$40 is not a lot of money for what you are getting, plus if you are worried about buying a game that you don't like, wait for the reviews or buy it from a place you can return to.

The thing to realize here is that Activision cannot please everyone and nor should they even try to. By trying to please everyone you end up pleasing noone. I remember reading posts in the AOK Heaven forum about how AOK sux because it is missing such and such feature and Sandyman(an ES representative) would just say "if you don't like it then don't buy it"

If you do happen to buy it and was displeased but there was nothing you could do about it then just move on. No need to start a crusade discouraging people to buy it, just politely offer your views and people can make that choice for themselves. For everyone that disliked CTP, there must be at least one that liked it.

Everyone just lighten up, the game hasn't been released yet. Let the game come out first and we'll make the decision on the final verdict for CTP2. Sorry for the rant, but I had to get it off my chest.

[Daniel Frappier]

Thank you for the answer Pyaray.

Scroll bars on the diplomacy screen would have been nice since the game can run and will run with more than 8 Civ on many computers.

[joseph1944]

Pyaray & Monkey

Thank you for the information on how the computer works. I'm not a programer, so your posts help me understand what is happening a lot better.

Now the real question, when will Activision release it so I can start playing it.

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[meriadoc]

Thank you for the explanation Pyaray. I myself am content with 8 civs in the game, but explanations like this are, in my opinion, always worth reading since they give a person a better understanding of how the game works. It is this understanding that allows us to present informed opinions. Unfortunately, some people aren't as well informed as others.

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The Electronic Hobbit

[Lancer]

Hmmm, that was a great answer, but it still leaves me wanting more Civs, just very willing to pay for them. I wonder if you could release an add on...2 more civs kinda thing. That way, though it takes twice the time for the comp whiz's at Activision, we as gamers get what we want while Activision gets to expand it's product line without having to vastly alter the CTP system, yes? Then perhaps there could be a chart describing common computer systems and how many Civs can be run on each one. For example, if I have a Pentium 200, I get to run 9 Civs.

Anyway, regarding an add on, what might it cost per additional Civ?

W/ the altered diplomacy I wonder if going into the program and changing the # of Civs will still work, and still allow the great new diplomacy aspects.