42 Artificial Intelligences Are Going Head To Head In "Civilization V" 52
rossgneumann writes The r/Civ subreddit is currently hosting a fascinating "Battle Royale" in the strategy game Civilization V, pitting 42 of the game's built-in, computer-controlled players against each other for world domination. The match is being played on the largest Earth-shaped map the game is capable of, with both civilizations that were included in the retail version of the game and custom, player-created civilizations that were modded into it after release.
news, why? (Score:2, Insightful)
So... someone started a really big Civ V game. This is hardly news, even for nerds.
Re:news, why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Artificial but Intelligence? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:news, why? (Score:4, Informative)
Civ V, a game historically known for its poor programming, rushed schedules and years of repair to get playable. This game still has one of the most artificially stupid AI's in the history of the Civ series, so I fail to see how this is even mildly interesting.
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No, you need to learn more about CiV's AI.
The designers thought it would be "fun" to have AI's their own "personalities". So Shaka would be aggressive and likely to declare war on you, for example.
However, the way it actually ended up in-game, is that all of the AIs appeared to be schitzophrenic - making alliances with you and then 3 turns later breaking them. Or praising you for doing something, and then 1 turn after shunning you for exactly the same thing. The AI's would make decisions based on their pers
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Sounds like real life modern politics / diplomacy.
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Civ V, a game historically known for its poor programming, rushed schedules and years of repair to get playable. This game still has one of the most artificially stupid AI's in the history of the Civ series, so I fail to see how this is even mildly interesting.
For the same reason people prefer to watch 42 meat heads wrestle each other for a ball rather than watch 42 of the brightest minds debate.
I dont mean the suppressed homoerotic desires either.
Given my experience with Civ V, they'll build about 2 cities each and never actually go to war, let alone attack. It will be a paint drying simulator. The incredibly stupid AI was what ultimately forced me back to Civ IV.
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Why do you dictate that anyone with a different opinion to you must leave? Are you so insecure that you cannot stand criticism? BTW, I'm Australian, we play football without helmets and padding.
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Civ V, a game historically known for its poor programming, rushed schedules and years of repair to get playable. This game still has one of the most artificially stupid AI's in the history of the Civ series, so I fail to see how this is even mildly interesting.
The AI may manage to make things interesting against other AI, but against human players...it's easy for human players with a tiny military to essentially be King Leonidas, and win. Particularly egregious if you have a bottleneck, which you can easily defend with one ranged and one melee unit. This is due to the inability to combine military units (which you could've done in Civ IV) and the suicidal aggression employed by the AI.
With that in mind, a bunch of idiot AI's battling it out actually sounds in
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So ... (Score:2)
Someone started a single player game and decided to hand over control of his civilization to the adviser?
Re:So ... (Score:5, Informative)
Someone started a single player game and decided to hand over control of his civilization to the adviser?
Nope, what he did was use the game editor to delete his city at the start and place a nuclear sub underneath the Artic. As such, while technically still being part of the game, the human has no (measurable) effect on the outcome. This is a little off topic, but frankly, I really wish more strategy games had spectator mods. It's really useful for observing the AI, and most games don't implement one, which would allow us to avoid ugly hacks like this...
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You could create and even modify the AI in AOEI and AOEII. There was no documentation for it, but it was simple to figure out. The only problem with the game was that you had low population limits/civilization.
Kind of neat, but.... (Score:3)
I find this rather interesting, personally. Although I imagine that the turn lag time must get huge very, very quickly.
In manner of explanation, apparently it is actually a 43 player single player game, where the human player used a mod to a) reveal the whole map, b) delete their capital city, and c) give themselves a nuclear submarine that they parked under the icecap. That way the human stays alive, but out of the game, and everyone else can play as if they weren't there. I'm not sure how much residual impact simply having an active human player in the game might have.
On the other hand, must be a slow day for news. But then again, Sundays usually are.
AI competition (Score:1)
If everyone had written their own AI, and those AIs were being pitted against each other, that would be interesting news.
Submarine versus Viking longship (Score:2)
Can a Viking Longship still sink a submarine with lucky dice rolls?
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And I could see a longship having a piece break off after getting shot at and having that debris end up in just the right spot to clog the subs engines or torpedo bays or something like that. Sure it's statistically unlikely, and probably not even a 1/1000 chance of actually happening, but for the sake of game play I can accept it.
At that point you're better off imagining the sub had a critical weapons malfunction and blew itself up so the longship wins on walkover. Or that the warrior sneaked into the riflemen's camp and poisoned their water supply.
Already done for civ 4 (Score:4, Informative)
Sullla is one of the best civ 4 players in the world, helped develop the game originally, and is an excellent writer to boot.
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The urheimat of the Slavs was north of the Carpathians towards West Ukraine. By the 5th-6th century, they began to move into the Northern Danubian region. Makes sense to me as the Polish are a Slav race.
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Though I wonder how Europa Universalis would do it.
My guess is that Russia would form and Kebab would start gobbling up the Balkans. A fractured mess of power would persist in the HRE while Castile inherits Burgundy. England would sit around and not do much except colonize, sip tea, and munch on carpets I mean crumpets. Consequently, Poland would do jack and shit and remain split from Lithuania.
Meanwhile Ming explodes like usual and in an uncommon strange turn of events Japan fails to unite and instead you only see the Tosokawas.
I have not kept up (Score:2)
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42 artificial intelligences = 42 instances of same AI.
It is opposite of having a car race where 42 people would drive same kind of car to see who is the best. It is a car race, where 42 clones of same person drive different cars starting in different race tracks under different weather conditions.
So will it finish successfully without crashing? (Score:2)
I know that sounds a little snarky .... but that's been one of my issues with the Civ games for quite some time. It seems like as you get into the "thick" of the game, with a lot of units occupying more and more space -- the system resources taken get pretty large. It often leads to slowdowns and a freeze-up or crash before the game can be completed.
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So will it finish successfully without crashing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines [wikipedia.org]
AI is a bit of a stretch (Score:3)
The AI in these games are morons. The only ones that are even remotely threatening cheat like crazy.
In video games, the AIs that will rip your lungs out, make bag pipes of them, and play El Degüello on them tend to never miss, see through the fog of war/through walls, and often as not have access to infinite resources, higher health, and do more damage for no reason.
And... THAT is why they're a threat. Not because the little idiots are actually any good at tactics or strategy.
I honestly can't think of a single RTS game where the AI wasn't a joke. Yes, you have to know how to play the game and you might need to learn how the AI thinks a bit. But that's really easy to figure out. In strategy games, winning against AIs typically requires that you just be quick about doing things. Against humans this is important as well, but humans are sneaky.
The AI for example in Homeworld only uses hyperspace jumps to run away and they only bother with critical shipyard facilities. Human players will mass a fleet, dock their fighter craft into their hyperspace capable craft, bait an attack by making it look like their capital ships are unsupported, and then when you move your forces out of position, they'll jump their forces into point blank range, spew out their whole forces, and annihilate you. Humans are also the only ones that will use cloaking fields properly or defense field frigates... etc. And that's the same for Starcraft or CnC or any of it. And in the FPS games the only thing the AIs ever have going for them is that they're damn accurate with their shots because they have auto aim... and they can frequently see through walls so they always know where you are.
What the Civ devs are talking about is not AI but behavior profiles. They do this a lot in strategy games. They'll try to mix it up by giving some of the idiot AIs a preference for air units or a preference for sea units or a preference for building fortresses or something. And that's supposed to be a different AI. But it isn't really. Its just the same AI with a different priority list.
As evidence, the only AI's of this type that tend to be dangerous are the ones that try to rush you really early. Its a high risk high reward tactic that can end you before the game really begins. Those AIs force you to build some defenses really early. I find in any of these games, if you survive that attack... there really isn't anything the AIs can do to stop you. They're so dumb you can kill them at 10 to 1 ratios in practically any game.
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This does beg an interesting question: what if someone actually used modern, advanced learning algorithms to develop truly smart game AI? e.g. do what they did with chess and get something to "watch" lots of games and learn from them. I saw a headline recently about Google setting a learning machine against a bunch of old-school arcade games - I wonder what would happen if you applied that sort of thing to an RTS? I also wonder which would be the cheaper to develop - a set of rules to watch lots of beta
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As to something that shifts between various preprogrammed responses and something that invents them on the fly or learns new strategies entirely on its own. Iâ(TM)d argue that the former already exists and those are the ones that are so easy to beat.
A big difference between chess and an RTS is that there are so many more moves to make. In chess you get ONE move per turn and the amount you can move and in which directions is highly finite. In an RTS game imagine a chess board a billion times larger, wit
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Actually, on that note, I am hard pressed to think of any RTS game where I've seen a computer player populate more than one island, or build a second base.
Empire Earth (not sure which version, if not the original). The AI was told to understand that space empire will have two starting islands, and you are to conquer the foreign island, and they'd invade and build up (with local production), if you locked yourself in a small corner defensively.
My first encounter with "stupid AI" was Dune 2, where you could work out which direction the attacks were coming from (usually, a straight line from their production facility to your most valuable structure), and build a "catcher's glove" of turrets or strong tanks and wipe out everything coming at you with minimal (or sometimes no) losses.
Age of empires. The AI would build multiple home bases (town centers), so is smart for that, based on your measure, but dumber than a 2 year old in so many other ways.
They'd build walls up to (but around) trees. When
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hmmm... While I agree there should be an easy mode in most games so that people can learn how to play you are going to want a harder difficulty maintain replayability.
The best games are the ones you can play over and over and over and over again. And those games are only fun because you're either playing against human beings that in a dynamic framework that permits creativity OR if the AI/game mechanics can be made progressively harder.
In most games, the first playthrough, I'll play through it on normal or