WTH is so special about the AI?

[Moraelin]

If you say so. Last I've heard, the consumer protection laws didn't have any paragraph that says "Computer software is excepted from these proviosions." Basically, if you can buy something at all, you do have certain rights.

And one more curiosity of mine. If being a "whining 9 year old is bad", exactly how is being a flaming 9 year old fanboy any better? No, really. In only _one_ thread, and in less than a day, I see no less that SEVEN posts from you, trying to ridicule or downright insult anyone who's not doing their patriotic duty to brown-nose Firaxis and/or Infogrames. That's only one thread out of many. If you think the "whiners" (a.k.a., people who've bought the game and have a legitimate complaint) should just get over it and do something else... how about fanboys like you? Don't YOU get bored of acting like the Holy Defender of Everything Firaxis? If we should somehow give up on account that these complains have been posted before, hasn't YOUR crap been posted to death before?

Just some food for thought.

[Herder]

Well said Moraelin.

The board is here to discuss, whether fanboy or dissenter. Perhaps some people don't have the time to peruse every thread on the site or perhaps some people don't agree with a poster on all issues and wants their topic to get specific attention.

Whatever the case, its their perogative.

I like Civ III *some* mind you. Early game is great. There are issues with the late game and that indicates to me the game was rushed.

Can we agree the game was rushed? I think that is something that we can all agree on. It is unfinished. Deny that.

Product Rushed = Defective Product.

What part of that equation did you miss? If my TV was missing a knob that would indicate to me that the product is incomplete. And somehow, in some crazy scheme, you think people are whiners. Go go crazed fandom.

This was a spruce up and re-ship civ II project IMO. Too bad they reduced a lot of features.

[Frito]

This is really stupid...If you don't like the game and post your a "whining 9 year old", if you like the game and post your a "brown-nosing fanboy".

Maybe we should have a Civ3 forum for kids??

[Libertarian]

Can we agree the game was rushed? I think that is something that we can all agree on. It is unfinished. Deny that.

Okay, I deny that. It has a couple of bugs. That doesn't mean it's not finished. By your definition, the software we're using to communicate with one another isn't finished. In fact, no effort of man has ever been finished.

That would include your own efforts. I think.

This was a spruce up and re-ship civ II project IMO. Too bad they reduced a lot of features.

That leaves me with the impression that you thoroughly do not understand this game.

Don't YOU get bored of acting like the Holy Defender of Everything Firaxis?

I've posted my complaints as a matter of record. I just didn't post them in every thread and open two threads an hour making sure that every living human saw them.

I don't get bored defending peers who sleep at their desks and work all night writing software that entertains and edifies me, nosiree I don't. Not that they've ever acknowledged or thanked any of us who've supported them. Nor have they responded in kind to the mindless and barbaric attacks on their character and skills from the drooling jackals.

[Green Giant]

Originally posted by Libertarian
Good grief.

No software I've ever seen has been warranteed to be bug-free. Or for that matter, even warranteed to keep your computer from blowing up because you used it. No one can guarantee perfection in any matter whatsoever. And any government that has managed to make such a ridiculous law needs to have in place one hell of a litigation infrastructure.

The fact is that no one is taking legal action because no one has a legal leg to stand on.

The Pick any Two Law: Price, Quality, Speed

I think someone tried to sue Origin a few years ago for the incredibly buggy release of UO. They lost.

I like the AI.

Guess what, building cities in desert and tundra is a good idea. The concept seems to evade a lot of people. There are valuable resources that can be found there in the late game. And then you will complain about how you never get any oil.

The AI is great at expanding and playing to the nationalities strength. Egyptians and French sit back and build, the Zulu are very aggressive.

I would like to see the AI use air units and artillery better with ground units, but I see defensive units paired with offensive units quite frequently. You all must be playing a different game because the AI attacks with large groups in my games. On the defensive the AI is a little weak, it needs to be improved.

I will explain this one more time and if you pessimists just don't get it, YOU ARE HOPELESS:

With the resource system there will be times when you don't have the latest, greatest unit. To prevent an entire empire getting annihlated by three tank units they changed the combat. The modern armor will still win over a spearman 95% of the time. All you are doing is griping over one or two losses. Your gross exageration does not fool me.

All the rules are the same for the AI as for you (with one exception i will speak of later). Face it, you just suck at civ 3.

It seems to me all you are griping over is the name of the unit. Would it be better if the name of the spearman was changed to poorly armed militia at the start of the modern age?



IMO the only thing worth griping about is the air superiority bug. This just ruins the late game. It just blows my mind. You don't even have to do any real searching to find it, you just have to play the game. It will get fixed in a week, hopefully.

[Libertarian]

An excellent and well balanced post, Green Giant. It's clear that you aren't biased either way.

I agree with the Air Superiority bug. I would also add no stack movement and no sentry mode to the list, as well as the annoying order of sprite activation. I would like to see that more sensibly ordered by proximity.

[Raleigh]

Gee I know I am not a deity player but I must really suck because even with 4 nations against the Iroquois we can't seem to destroy him (true he is the largest power but some of us are nearly equal).

Also, I don't understand all the whining behind the 4/32 science rating. I preferred the old system too, but it's not like pouring 90% of a nation's resources into science to eak out that 1 turn diffrence is going to make or break your game, so what is the complaint? Also, that excess trade you would have pumpted into science still equals cash, so it's not like it is wasted.

[Dravin]

I think the AI really should learn to keep it units upgraded better, facing Horsemen and the like when you know they have the upgraded unit and the resources for them seems a little weird.

I think the AI has some quirks, not that it's broken. But then I've only play 4 games (2 Cheiftan/2 Warlord) so it's possible I'm missing something.

[Moraelin]

Originally posted by Frito
This is really stupid...If you don't like the game and post your a "whining 9 year old", if you like the game and post your a "brown-nosing fanboy".

No. If you simply like the game, good for you. Feel free to post what's great about it and us whiners missed. In fact, please do. That was the whole reason why I started this thread. As I've said in the very first paragraph, I'm curious. I did post a list of MY observations of what the AI does wrong, and I'd be happy to see your own list of what it does right, or what items on my list are wrong. That's what a discussion is all about.

What I call a brown-nosing fanboy is the kind of person who makes it his personal crusade to flame and try to suppress anyone who doesn't sing praise to the game. Without posting any useful info. Just for the sake of a jolly good flame.

I mean, really, it's not like I even said that the game is BAD because of that AI. I don't mind winning. Saves me the bother of looking for cheats, really I have completely other reasons to be disappointed in the game, and those I've posted already in other threads. The AI is just a curiosity of mine. I keep hearing "the AI is great because the first time I played I've had my donkey handed to me", but my observations of what the AI actually does... simply don't match that.

And, yes, I know that no game has the AI of a human chess master. Nor even that of an old chess program for the Commodore 64, for that matter. Chess has had lots of people (including mathematicians) over lots of years to develop the algorithms, while games usually just have a couple of designers trying out their quick ideas. I know that very well. But some do actually manage to give an illusion of acting reasonable. You know, at least LOOK like they do something smart. Like for example, from a different genre, the marines from Half-Life didn't really act like an intelligent and highly trained human marine team, but did manage to at least look like they're flanking you and stuff.

[Libertarian]

Actually, even the computer that beat Kasparov is a strategic moron. For chess, computers lack the ability to "see over the horizon". The only way IBM was finally able to beat the world champ was to make a computer that was so fast, it could look at and analyze a bazillion positions per minute. Unlike the human, the computer examines moves even if they are ridiculous and worthless.

So, there's very little "AI" in Big Blue. It's mostly just "BS".

[Moraelin]

Green Giant, you must confuse me with someone else. I don't mind the computer's building lots of cities. Sure, go ahead, colonize that desert. As for national priorities, those are actually based on premade lists of what to do. Just run the editor and you'll see a "build often" list of checkboxes for each nation. It's that primitive. But even that I don't mind too much. Hey, if it at least manages to create an illusion of acting smart, it's ok. Games are all about illusions in the first place.

The point is that the AI doesn't seem to grasp some very basic concepts, like upgrading its units when it already can. Or like at least building 10 tanks instead of 20 archers. Sure, I'll gladly defeat those 20 archers, but it kind of makes me wonder.

Or again, it seems to have zero concept of borders. Yes, even when I'm a super-power sprawled all over the continent and it has 3 cities tucked in a corner. It will cheerfully march all over my lands, as if the borders weren't even there. If I ask it to get those units out, it will. And then it'll come back again the next turn. And again. Asking them to leave is just a waste of time every turn. Some times they'll ask for right of passage, but whether I accept or refuse, it still doesn't matter. I usually accept just to save frustration.

Or by mid-game it seems to enter a phase when some people will be itching to go to war, at all cost. I've had civilizations with 3 cities declaring war on my super-power with 30 cities. How do they get THAT idea?

I guess one day the Zulu advisors go to their king and go "sire, our economy is in ruins, our army can't even afford an upgrade from spearmen, and we have one library in the whole empire. I propose we declare war to the Americans. Then they'll have to conquer us, and we'll get to live well, like they do." Or?

And again, they'll seem to cheerfully accept an alliance with anyone against anyone, as long as they do get to go to war. I usually actually depend on that. When someone declares war on me, if I act before they get everyone else joins in on their side, I can send half the continent's armies on them to keep them busy. I don't even have to contact everyone myself. I just contact someone, say, the English and pay them to join me against the Zulu. Then the English bring the Romans, the Romans bring the Russians (which are still also fighting me), the Russians bring the Greeks, and the Greeks bring the French. And then everyone is cheerfully fighting everyone, and I pick the weakened nations one by one.

[Barchan]

Originally posted by Moraelin


In fact, I don't know about your neck of the woods, but HERE the law says that you can't renounce your legal rights in a contract, even if you actually wanted to. E.g., you can't sell yourself into slavery, no matter if that was your lifetime dream, if the law says you should have more rights than that. Likewise, you can't renounce your customer rights, regardless of what kind of contract or license aggreement you've had to sign/click/whatever.

Uhh, I'm not sure what area of the woods *you* live in either, Moraelin, but in the United States at least (where the EULA was written, BTW) you can and actually do renounce legal rights all the time in a contract. Frankly, the whole concept of a contract is that you agree to limit and/or renounce your legal rights. For example, if I sign a contract with Firm A as an exclusive supplier of my widgets, I have renounced my legal right to supply Firm B with my widgets as well. Standard clauses in many consumer contracts involve giving up the legal right to sue the manufacturer/supplier for certain damages and the right to choose your legal forum; many contracts either specify that if you do sue the other party to the contract it must be in such-and-such state or, if in your own state, shall use a particular state's laws. Also, many employment contracts forbid you from disclosing a firm's confidential information to other firms once your employment is over. Heaven forefend! You just signed away your First Amendment right to speak freely to another person! Quick, call the United Nations!

True, there are some contracts that are void ab initio, such as the slavery example you mentioned. But I hardly believe that anyone feels, regardless of how bad or buggy they think CivIII might be, that they've entered into anything tantamount to a slavery contract with Infogrames by purchasing a $50 computer game.

[Dis]

everyone on this thread is wrong. felt better saying that

funny how you guys say civ2 ai was better. When was the last time you played civ2? Civ2 Ai blew donkey balls. Civ3 isn't much better. All of those are valid points. But the ai is slightly improved. It needs a lot of work though .

[kailhun]

Originally posted by Libertarian
Agreed. I cannot for the life of me comprehend why those dolts at Firaxis have been unable to replicate a human brain, a genius one, with computer subroutines. After all, Microsoft has done it routinely. As evidence, I offer the Word companion and wizard, Mr. Paper Clip.

True, true. Microsoft has indeed succeded in replicating a human brain in Windows 95 etc. A pity it seems to have been the brain of a moron with epileptic fits.

Robert

[LaRusso]

Originally posted by Venger
Moraelin has some very good points - the AI is not only eminently beatable, but in many ways less of a challenge than the Civ2 AI.

do you actually believe the above quoted sentence or is it the fact that you were only 9 back in 1996 and the AI looked comparably more difficult?

[Dis]

I'm so tired of people say comapanies shouldn't release a game in this state. Well I agree. But complaining will accomplish nothing.

Boycott Firaxis people!!!!!! b!tching about Firaxis yet buying their game is just plain stupid. How do you like that? I called you stupid for buying a game. Haven't you people learned from SMAC. SMAC was the same exact thing. The game was unfinished and required several major patches. And that did not correct the problem.

If you want to buy a game that is finished when it hits stores, do not buy a Firaxis game. The solution is so simple. I can't figure out why no one else can figure it out. If no one buys their games, they might have the incentive to fix it.

So I no longer give a sh!t about how much money you had to spend on a game. It serves you right for buying the game opening week before any reviews are out. Maybe next time you will get a clue.

You all deserve a buggy game, because you are gullible enough to buy a new game the first 2 weeks of release.

[kailhun]

Originally posted by benjy
oh, and this happened on the opposite end of the continent to the roman border. i like to see the AI aggressvely pushing moving its borders, colonising open land, but sending a ship around the coast to bypass 25 Greek cities and building a city a 1000 miles from its nearest town is stupid.... i really hope they tone that down a bit.

Actually, building colonies like that was quite normal say 2000-3000 years ago. If you look at a map of the Meditaranian (sp?) of that period you will see empires which consists of a lot of single cities spread around the coast of the med. Sometimes a greek, roman, carthaginian, syrian etc. city would be build away from the main empire with another empire in between. But as no-one really controlled the land in between in didn't really matter. The age when empires actually control all the land that they coloured pink, red or green on their maps is fairly recent. I doubt most of the 19th/20th European empires did that when it came to their overseas territories.

Robert

[kailhun]

Originally posted by Dissident
everyone on this thread is wrong. felt better saying that

funny how you guys say civ2 ai was better. When was the last time you played civ2? Civ2 Ai blew donkey balls. Civ3 isn't much better. All of those are valid points. But the ai is slightly improved. It needs a lot of work though .

Lucky donkey.

Speaking of which:

Toby the donkey is standing in standing in a field, when a spaceship lands nearby. An alien comes out and walks over to Toby. 'Listen, Toby. I've got a joke that'll blow your balls off.', he says.
'I've already heard that one.', Toby replies.

Robert

[Dis]

now I got that off my chest

I just don't think it is possible to build a good ai, and include the depth of a civilization game.

[Dev]

Originally posted by Green Giant


I think someone tried to sue Origin a few years ago for the incredibly buggy release of UO. They lost.

They settled.

/dev

[Skanky Burns]

Civ 3 AI actually uses boats to invade other landmasses.
They protect their troop ships with military ships.
They bombard improvements around the cities to cause your empire damage.
They can launch well-organised strikes against your weakest city.

Yes, the AI isnt perfect. It isnt even great once you get to know it. However, it wipes the floor with the Civ 2 AI, which is about the best you can ask for.

Until someone writes an AI that learns and adapts, we just wont have an AI that can stand up to a human player. No point knocking this (very good) attempt by Soren.

Just saying this again, the Civ 3 AI wipes the floor with the Civ 2 AI.

[LaRusso]

amen to that

[Moraelin]

I never said that it's WORSE than the Civ 2 AI, since OK, the Civ 2 AI was atrocious. Its only saving grace was that it cheated like a little piggy. Half the rules didn't even apply to the AI at all, and the other half were bent according to the difficulty level.

I'm just not sure it's much of an improvement in Civ 3. The rules are still bent to give a dumb AI a survival chance. In fact, my own observations seem to indicate that now even combat has the difficulty setting factored in. That would explain why some people defeat tanks with archers regularly, and others have their tanks routinely defeated by archers.

In all fairness, it seems to be slightly more fair this time, since at least the research rules now work both ways. They also give the player a small boost if he's fallen far behind the AI. And generally I don't mind the idea that it's cheaper to research something that's already been discovered by everyone else. In fact, I actually like it. (I don't like the hardcoded 32 and 4 turn caps, though, or any other hardcoded caps.)

But again, it looks to me like it wasn't so much of an actual improvement to the AI, as some clever tweaking at how the rules are bent.

[benjy]

kailhun - i take youre point. if thats true, i think this is one of the times id like to see fun gameplay win out over realism. it just isnt fun to have a land mass with 25 cities on it, then for some civ to come along and build a city on a tiny piece of land in the artificial area between 2 cultural borders. it forces you to make war with them, because even if they defect, its placement will impeed your city growth.

plus, i just dont think this is the way the border thing is intended to work.

'course i dont wanna be a whiner and ill live with it.... cant wait for the patch!!

[Kolyana]

Actually, building colonies like that was quite normal say 2000-3000 years ago.

Yeah, if there was a reason for it. You can bet your sweet eggs that Rome didn't ship troops, materials and people half way around the world ... just because a lump of grassland was going up for grabs. Resources drove this sort of colonization, and from that point of view and in that context I have no problems with the AI's odd behavior.

*HOWEVER*, the AI is obviously driven by different rules ... and it's so obvious that it detracts from the game.

If the AI went all out to build cities next to strategic resources, we'd be congratulating it on a job well done.

However, what we're talking about here is the AI building cities in the most useless places on the map, just because it's spare land.

I've been in the situation when I have dominated and grabbed and entire southern continent ... when years into the game the AI nations started sailing past south. Their destinations? Small 1 square unclaimed land masses on the coastlines and southern tips.

One claimed a tundra square with mountains all around it, another claimed the same 2 squares over ... so these two were now perched in the most stupid manner on the brink of my kingdom.

It doesn't matter that x-amount of years later I managed to drag them into my kingdom through culture, if anything this is yet another reason why the AI shouldn't do it.

I ended up parking troops on each square at the tips of my land ... not vast swarthes of land, mind you, just 1 square islands on the tips of the continent.

[Antonin]

Hey all you whiners!

Ever heard of E-bay? If you hate the game so much, sell it and move on.

[Barchan]

Hmm. I think this AI land grab "problem" really helps illustrate the limitations of artificial intelligence. Here, as I see it, is the problem in a nutshell:

The AI is programmed to expand. Some say at all costs, and that's as may be, but it's still driven to expand. The drive to expand, in and of itself, is not unreasonable. Frankly, it's essential to success. Strategically speaking, if you don' t take the land someone else will.

The AI can best be described as "hopelessly optimistic" in its view of the success of these niche cities. Sure, the terrain may suck. It may be surrounded by other Civs. It may in fact have no reasonable expectation of long-term survival. But for the price of a settler and a spearman, the AI is making a bet that there will be coal or oil or something good under the soil, or that your civilization will crumble and its city will be the oldest, most cultured city left standing (or only one left standing!). You may be laughing at this, but people waste good money on impossible odds every day. Have you ever bought a lottery ticket or put a quarter into a slot machine?

Due to this “hopeless optimism”, the AI cannot fully calculate the actual inevitability of the failure of its little niche towns. It has to assume that if there’s land, there’s a chance for success. I can’t imagine the algorithms the AI would have to run to make the same decisions a human player does regarding the placement of cities. We calculate many different factors: terrain, proximity to own/enemy cities, current relations, future expansion plans, emergency changes to plans based on current events and etc. I think it’s all beyond what we can ask computers to do at this time. Sure, we could trim the expansion back, but then you’d have the opposite problem of an AI that expands too slowly or methodically. For example, if the AI were forced to expand in a tethered manner (i.e. no more than five spaces between cities, the human player could race ahead, plant a few cities and cut the AI expansion off at the roots, later backfilling all that tasty real estate left behind. And how would you program the AI to look for strategic locations like choke points or “Panama Canals” and the like?

Anyway, I just couldn’t help thinking (and then writing) about this. Everyone seems to be cursing the AI as being stupid for setting up cities doomed to long-term failure, but I don’t see it as being so stupid. Overly optimistic, yes. But in several games I’ve taken cities from the AI that I wouldn’t have built in a million years that wound up being quite productive indeed. Had their empires expanded to link up with those cities instead of mine, the AI’s decisions might not have looked quite as foolish.

[kailhun]

I must agree that I'm not sure if this landgrabbing is smart or stupid. You often deprive a larger culture of a couple of squares of his land because any beginning city seems to have the 3x3 grid.
Many of these hopeless cities hang around a long time. If you weren't the human player the surrounding civ might fall and the motherciv could use the hopless cities as fallout bases. I had cities on the other side/middle of civs as well (part of a negotiated peace) and with the cultural strength of my motherciv these proved to be a nice way to nibble at the larger empires.
Although it was really annoying when the romans build a city right on top of the road I had build through the jungle connecting my original egyptian cities to the conquered greek/russian part.

Robert

[Th0mas]

Originally posted by Venger
Moraelin has some very good points - the AI is not only eminently beatable, but in many ways less of a challenge than the Civ2 AI. I don't know how much you guys have played the game, but the AI blows...an utter inability to defend itself, an inability to recognize it's own self interest, an inability to trade properly, ad infinitum.

I consider the Civ3 AI at almost an alpha level release level - there are too many substantive problems to consider it beta level...

Venger

Then your going to have fun with CTP2..

[benjy]

i think the AI is generally very good.

the issue i was discussing is not an AI problem. its a problem, no not a problem maybe thats too strong, its a result of the implementation of the border system; it allows gaps to appear between city borders which in the real world wouldnt happen (obviously in "real life" influence and borders are not calculated by reference to points and terrain squares!!)

im not a game desgner, and i dont if its possible to get around this, its just my 2 cents worth.....

would it be possible to have a set border around say 4 cities built a certain distance from each other i.e. the terrain in between those 4 cities automatically "belongs" to that civ, regardless of culture???