Good AI?

[Sirp]

I was wondering, are there any projects to create a Civ-like game with a truly good AI? I'm talking about something which uses fairly advanced techniques to make an AI that is superior to any of the AIs in the commercially released versions of Civ. It would be able to do all sorts of advanced negotiations and interactions with human players, as well as being very challenging to play against on human terms.

I have an interest in working on writing such an AI...do any of the current Alternative Civ projects have a particular focus on the AI? Would any be interested in a developer who wants to write one? Would anyone be interested in starting a new project which has a focus on developing a great ai?

[tishco]

civ-evo is good, it plays by exactly the same rules as the player, now that is very differnt from sid civ games, yes, i'm looking at you at the back civ3!

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Sirp:

The Clash of Civilizations project is aiming for a very ambitious AI. I've done a little bit of AI professionally, and am currently leading our efforts in that area. But I would happily share it with someone else that could devote more time to it and had the right skills! If you follow the link to the Clash web site below, you can see our overall approach to AI by following the link to "AI" at left. Also, please check out the "Map AI" link, since getting the AI to understand geography is a critical issue in improving the AI in 4x games. For more recent discussion, you should see AI -- the Thread. The only AI code we have to date is the pathfinding and a demo of the map AI We have been focusing on getting the game playable at least at a crude level before putting major effort into AI programming. But I think we will soon be able to code up the spec that appears near the end of "AI -- the Thread". We've already had the job assigned to 1 programmer who showed up, but I haven't seen anything out of him, so I expect were back to "soon" as the milestone .

Please let me know by posting on the Clash website if you have any questions or are interested in tentatively committing your efforts to the project!

Cya,

Mark

[Per]

Freeciv has a very good server-side military AI (the code is a mess but it is being rapidly improved) and support is being written for client side AIs. There are several active AI developers on the project and a lot of exciting work is being done.

I'd encourage interested AI developers to join our AI development mail list. See www.freeciv.org