Civ II game a decade old

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_playing_the_same_game_of_civilization_ii/

by jchrisa • 14 years ago

471 133 14 years ago

Tichy• 14 years ago

Is it possible to run a completely automated Civ game (all players computer players)? Should be a quicker way to simulate the future. Perhaps the AI could learn "War Games" style that nuclear war is not the way to go...

Or maybe it would be a depressing result if the AIs would not nuke around without a human in the mix?

martey• 14 years ago

I remember trying this when I was younger (with the Cheat menu). The primary issue is that while it is quicker, it is difficult to figure out the details of what is happening in the game when there is no pause at the beginning of your turn. Since the AI "personalities" of the different computer players cause some of them to be more aggressive than others, all of the games I tried to simulate in this way ended up with one military aggressive AI player dominating enough of the world that they did not need nuclear weapons.

There was a significant amount of variance among AI personalities and winning strategies in the various versions of Civilization I played, so I suspect that your success would vary depending on which version you were using. For example, if you were using CivNet, the multiplayer version of the original game, the anemic AI in that game might very well lock into some sort of peaceful stalemate, but the contentious resource model in Civilization III would probably produce different results.

kzrdude• 14 years ago

You can do this easily with Freeciv (Civ2-ish clone), unfortunately the AI is not as interesting (what I've seen).

pwaring• 14 years ago

You could do it with Alpha Centauri - I seem to remember an article by Firaxis where they explained putting in this feature so they could tweak a parameter, set the AI off and see what effect it had.

impendia• 14 years ago

I did this, more or less, in the original Civ. I was a player in my own game, I built a city in the Arctic, built a military unit in it, then disbanded the rest of my civilzation. The AI doesn't ever go there.

CoreDumpling• 14 years ago

I wrote a utility a while ago to manipulate human/AI control of civs in Civ III (conquests expansion pack), as a bit of a reverse engineering exercise: https://github.com/CoreDumpling/c3me

</shameless plug>

It's possible to set every player to AI and then just let the game run to observe the results. (You'll still have to dismiss pop-ups about civs getting eliminated or wonders being built, though.) I've done it on several occasions, mostly to test out mods to check if they are properly balanced. In general, I've noticed that AI's that nuke aggressively do tend to win in the long run, but if nukes are disabled or otherwise restricted, huge stalemates can result.

jcurbo• 14 years ago

To be clear, this is a guy that has been playing a single game of Civ II for 10 years. When I first saw this I thought, isn't Civ II older than 10 years? (came out in 1996)

I love Civ and still go back and play Civ II at times. I spent a lot of time with Civ III and IV as well (and a little with V), but it's nice to go back to my first experience with the genre (Civ 1 was before my time, sadly).

sageikosa• 14 years ago

Thanks, I sometimes only read the comments on HN. My first thought was: Civ III is over 10 years old.

CharlieA2• 14 years ago

The 3-way division of the world into "super-continents" and the constant war keeping the populace in a perpetual state of starvation and poverty, with the entire world in disrepair is so incredibly reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 it's scary.

If you haven't read 1984, it's a startlingly bleak view of a potential future (from a historical perspective, but still applicable today, I think) particularly through technology and a loss of privacy. It's the origin of terms like "big brother" and "doublethink" -- worth a read.

One of the most interesting excerpts from this piece IMO: "I wanted to stay a democracy, but the Senate would always over-rule me when I wanted to declare war... ...Anyway, I was forced to do away with democracy roughly a thousand years ago because it was endangering my empire."

Although I don't necessarily think it will be because of war, I can see a potential future where people/persons decide democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process -- democratic process being (more or less) committee-based decision making, which proxies votes through individuals based on what is essentially a popularity contest. That's particularly true here in Australia at the moment (amidst a minority government with a lot of political sniping on both sides and seemingly very little real progress) despite the fact that we have a comparatively strong economy, low inflation, low unemployment and generally nothing really significant (again, comparatively) to complain about.

joshcrews• 14 years ago

I too noticed the 1984 similarities. One difference is that the world of this Civ II game is the utopia state for the inner party of 1984-- perpetual war that only happens at the borders and doesn't really risk the existence of the 3 superpowers. Such a war keeps the people from acquiring wealth and leisure and justifies a totalitarian government.

nathan_long• 14 years ago

>> democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process... seemingly very little real progress... we have... generally nothing really significant ... to complain about.

This mystifies me: people sometimes talk about legislative gridlock as though it's all bad.

Do you measure the quality of a development team by the number of lines of code they produce? Of course not. The development team does not exist to produce code; it exists to produce and maintain the best possible codebase. Refraining from writing bad code is just as important as writing good code.

You just said your country has very little to complain about. What makes you think that a "productive" legislature would make things better and not worse?

I much prefer a system where any law needs broad consensus and relatively few are passed. Dumb as I often think the U.S. government is, at the end of the day, we have police, roads, schools, etc. Not perfect, but good enough that I can live my life in peace.

Of course, a dictatorship would be extremely efficient: the leader snaps his/her fingers and things happen. The question is: efficient at what?

noodle• 14 years ago

simulated war, apparently

CharlieA2• 14 years ago

I take your point, in part, and I don't necessarily disagree with you, because by and large the system does work. But (to use your analogy) when it comes to the law-making branch of government we have this massive sprawling "codebase" and it doesn't necessarily need a lot of new code (laws) putting in place, but rather, there's a lot of cruft and old legacy stuff that maybe needs to be removed or updated, and the time it takes to get things done is just incredibly slow, which can lead to a lot of frustration for a lot of people. While on the whole that may not actually be such a bad thing, as you rightly point out ("...law needs broad consensus and relatively few are passed...") it strikes me that the attitudes of many people (even myself, on occasion) are strikingly similar to the OP's in the excerpt I highlighted wherein due to a perceived inefficiency of government (rightly or wrongly) we may come to the conclusion that the best course of action is to abandon the democratic process in favor of something which addresses these inefficiencies...which in itself leads to...well...that's the scary part... I suppose. In a game of Civilization it's not a big deal. In reality...

My only real problem with the representative system of democracy generally, is the way we have to proxy our voting authority through our political leaders. It just seems archaic and ludicrous for a region of people (sometimes many hundreds of thousands of people) to have to boil down their political ideologies to a single "best fit" candidate. Even ignoring the potential for corruption, personal motivations, hidden biases etc. you've simplified thousands of separate beliefs on an equal number of issues, social, economic, all, into ONE PERSONS' beliefs and worst of all...that person then has a legitimate claim to believe that they're representing the people.

I suppose it's the difference between a politician believing that they're a "representation" of the people of the electorate, OR a "representative" of those voters. I think most politicians consider themselves the former, and I think that's a mistake.

lotharbot2• 14 years ago

One of the reasons the US has a divided Congress is to induce gridlock. This was a design goal.

Remember, government is other people making rules for you. The more efficient they are at changing the rules, the riskier it is for you to do just about anything. The more efficient they are at changing the rules, the more likely they'll take an extreme position on a contentious subject.

Shivetya• 14 years ago

and yet much of science fiction that many us enjoy consistently reflects a much better possible future, as this 2011 article details http://lfs.org/newsletter/029/04/Somin.shtml

If anything technology offered just as many avenues for people to escape a totalitarian world as to succumb to it.

With regards to this guy's game, it probably brings reminders of all the silliness with regards to Civilization game. From melting icecaps to near constant nuclear war its a sign of an AI that that too easily bounces from one extreme to another.

cynest• 14 years ago

> From melting icecaps to near constant nuclear war its a sign of an AI that that too easily bounces from one extreme to another.

Strategy games put the player in the role of the fascist dictator. Your goal is to further your own nation at the expense of everything else. In reality, groups of people have different incentives and act quite a bit differently.

_b8r0• 14 years ago

> If you haven't read 1984...

I'd also recommend that you read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World for a counterpoint. The sad part is that the way the world is going appears to be a mix of the worst elements of the two.

Of course, the perpetual war in 1984 was a big part of the story, but because we only ever see the world from characters living in Airstrip One, for all we know the war could've been over years ago.

pooriaazimi2• 14 years ago

I haven't read anything in this thread yet, but my eye caught 1984 and wanted to second your recommendation. Brave New World is without a doubt, one of the best books I've ever read. Hard to believe it was written 80 years ago.

I like to listen to audiobooks (when commuting), and BNW's audiobook (produced by BBC) was also great: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012QED5Y

zokier4• 14 years ago

Brave New World definately is a good pair for 1984.

http://www.totalitariers.nl/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Brave...

(yes, the message of that image is debatable, but i found it intresting anyways)

fennecfoxen• 14 years ago

As long as we're throwing out reading recommendations, if you're into the dystopian-future sci-fi genre I'll point out C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength as an early prototype of that genre. It documents the fall of a nation into dystopia, specifically; George Orwell himself was fascinated by this, as evidenced by the book review he published. (However, his praise was qualified, it was apparently a bit too much C. S. Lewis for his style in the end. He went on to address the very objections he raised when he wrote 1984 not too very long afterward.)

It's the end of a trilogy but you can operate it as a standalone book (and if you must start with the other books, Out of the Silent Planet is a cute little homage, but don't let the dense and somewhat-dull Christian allegory in Perelandra get you down and make you skip Hideous.)

kristianc2• 14 years ago

"Although I don't necessarily think it will be because of war, I can see a potential future where people/persons decide democracy is a less effective system"

Its probably worth pointing out just how unlikely it is that it would be because of war. The democratic peace is probably the closest thing to a universal law of international relations that we have. So if democracy does have drawbacks in terms of speed of decision making, it has more than its share of upside too.

TrevorJ• 14 years ago

The early Romans had some good success with temporary emergency dictatorships to cut through the deadlock in times of emergency. This didn't really stop working for them till they faced the threat of Hannibal, and appointed Fabius Maximus who spent a few years studiously avoiding direct conflict with Hannibal, and the Senate got impatient and wrested back control.

philwelch4• 14 years ago

Hmm.... More on the "democratic peace" (it's not so clear cut): http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm

grecy• 14 years ago

cough... Patriot Act... cough

Not to mention the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)

scarmig• 14 years ago

Eh. The democratic peace theory really just relies on a perpetual no-true-Scotsman approach. Either something's not really a democracy or not really a war.

Native American tribes? Well, they had democratic societies, but they're very different from the liberal state that has come to predominate in contemporary times. Franco-Prussian conflict? Prussia's legislatures were dominated by a rich hereditary landowning class. American Civil War? Well, civil wars don't count, and the franchise wasn't universal. World War I? Well, Germany might have had elections and might have had a wider effective franchise than many parts of the USA, but it was a bad guy, so it doesn't count. Various conflicts fostered by the Western liberal democracies (Iran, Chile, etc.)? Well, those were coups and not really wars.

What "democratic peace" really seems to mean is "countries that are under the umbrella of the United States and have highly developed economies don't go to war against each other." Give it 20 years time, and when the newly elected government of China gets into a shooting war with the government of the United States over some stupid shit (poll driven aggression in the strait?) we'll go back to arguing that China isn't a real democracy because it had only had one or two national elections, or the United States isn't a real democracy because all its state apparatus and elections are controlled by an unelected elite.

waterhouse• 14 years ago

> populace in a perpetual state of starvation and poverty, with the entire world in disrepair

This is quite different from my experience. In most of my Civ II games, I produce hordes of engineers, which I use to terraform the hell out of the planet--getting railroads everywhere, irrigation and farmland on all plains and grassland, mining on all hills, turning mountains into hills and swamp and jungle into forest, and eventually turning plains and forest into grassland and hills. (Only terrain with special resources doesn't get leveled like this.) I'd probably have 30-80 engineers at some point, depending on how big the game was. Anyway, with this cleanup crew, even if the ice caps melted or whatever the exact event is (which I think changes maybe about 1 out of every 10 squares), all of the new swamp or whatever wouldn't last more than a couple of turns.

Also, what causes the global warming events is mainly pollution: terrain squares containing pollution. That takes two engineer-turns to clean up per square. I would probably be able to nuke two cities and clean up all the pollution and rebuild the terrain (a nuke generally damages and pollutes the 8 squares around its target) in one turn. Srsly, why does he have any non-terraformed squares at all, let alone pollution?

The obvious--and probably only--answer would be "war -> engineers keep getting killed -> can't maintain and use such a cleanup crew". But even then... SDI Defense defends against missile attacks within three squares of a city, I believe. He mentions spies planting nuclear devices in cities. However, you could simply put units in the 8 squares around the city you want to protect [generally try to do this with all your cities, starting somewhere and expanding outward]. A unit by itself can be bribed by an enemy spy (unless you're a Democracy--oh man), but two or more units stacked are invulnerable to spies, even if those units are not combat capable (spies, for example). Then your only problem might be enemy conventional arms. Assuming this is a problem: Use your engineers, build fortresses in each of those 8 squares, and put veteran mechanized infantry there (6 base defense x 2 from fortress). Now you'll have equal odds against the most powerful ground unit, the veteran howitzer (base attack 12) (computers tend to use tanks, though, which have 10 attack). The last problem is stealth bombers, air units with 14 attack; but I think that if you have (stealth) fighters in the city, they will "scramble" to defend against bombers even in neighboring squares. And if not, then you can still at least retaliate next turn and kill the bombers, and not fall behind in a war of attrition (assuming they don't take the city that turn).

Oh, cheapo strategy as well: Have a (stealth) bomber end its turn in a ground square. No enemy ground units--or sea, or bombers or missiles, for that matter--will be able to attack that square. They will only be able to attack with (stealth) fighters, which have 8 attack; if you also have serious ground defense units in that square [or on a sea square, have AEGIS cruisers, with 8 defense x 2 vs air], and if that square also is foresty/swampy or hilly, or has a fortress like I've been saying you should make, then that square is basically impregnable without much attrition on the enemy's part.

Anyway: defend yourself; make your cities prosperous; accumulate capital (engineers are capital, and so are thoroughly improved cities surrounded by thoroughly terraformed terrain), out-produce your enemy, and don't lose the fruits of your production faster than they do. Eventually you should have a large surplus that you can spend on advancing in their direction. If there is a large no-man's-land between your cities and theirs, you should build little cities in this no-man's-land so you can put SDI Defenses inside them and extend your absolutely-defended area outward (rather like the Zerg creep). If nuking really is a problem, then you might just keep building cities within 3 squares of each other--or 2 squares so that you can put out SDI-guarded unit stacks to block spies. If the crowding bothers you, you can force intermediate cities to disband by buying engineers and stuff.

Eventually you should have almost a direct railroad connection to them, and at the front, fortresses on hills (or at least forest) within 3 squares of an SDI-Defended city, full of mechanized infantry that serve as "rocks for them to crash the waves of their attack against". They'll waste resources on trying to kill your units, and you should be mostly able to do what you like. Then either stack up a bunch of howitzers and kill all their defenses (at least in that city, possibly in others) in one turn, or, if you like, use spies to plant nukes and then capture the cities. When you take a city... If you expect them to nuke you and retake it, then, hmm, I dunno; can they really produce nukes and military units that quickly for long? If they have SDI Defenses, try to take the city with them intact (bribing the city is good if possible); if they don't, then I suppose it doesn't hurt to just nuke them. Or ignore them and keep on with the Zerg creep, perhaps treating "capturing their city" and "building a city in that location" as equivalent.

> democracy

Speaking of which, in Civ II, democracy has the following bad things when it comes to war: a) every unit costs a production shield to support (in monarchy and communism, this is "every unit after the first 3", and in fundamentalism, "every unit after the first 10"); b) as mentioned, your Senate will probably stop you from declaring war or refusing cease fires or peace treaties; and c) every military unit that ends its turn not in a city, or in a fortress within 3 squares of a city, causes 2 unhappiness in its home city that turn. Thus, a democracy is slightly worse off support-wise for a defensive war, and is significantly worse off for an offensive war. (But note that my above strategy can be done without causing any unhappiness at all.)

Democracy is the best government in Civ II for production and prosperity. I believe you get an extra trade unit on every square that produces trade; this translates to large amounts of science research and/or cash. Some of it must be spent on luxuries to prevent civil disorder, but it's usually still a large net benefit.

Btw, one annoying thing when nevertheless conducting an offensive war as a democracy: If you take a city, then enemy partisan units appear around the city, and when your active unit next encounters an enemy unit, they will talk to you, and they will offer a cease fire, and you will be forced to accept it, even if you wanted to continue attacking and maybe take some more cities. This problem can be somewhat mitigated by delaying the capture of a city until you've done all the other attacking you want to do that turn; also, if you are in a position to do a thing like this, you can:

Destroy all defending units in two or more cities. Before capturing a city, surround it--at least put units in the 8 adjacent squares, and ideally units in the full "city radius" of 20 squares. Then, when you take the city, no enemy partisan units will appear, and you will not be forced to listen to the enemy. You can then move up to another empty city and capture that as well (no enemy units, no contact with the enemy); if you have a bunch of maneuverable units (like spies or mech. inf.) and there are roads and mostly railroads everywhere, then you can even use the same 20 units for several enemy cities if you like. Of course, if you can do this, you probably won't have difficulty winning the game in any case.

bstar77• 14 years ago

I'm not really interested in how he could have handled things to have a better outcome... What I do find extremely interesting is that he's in a particular situation that he can't get out of that's just a horrible cycle of death and destruction. And it seems to draw some eery parallels with real life.

jpadkins• 14 years ago

I think it was excellent design that democracy is sub-optimal for defensive war and terrible for offensive war. You wouldn't want the choice best economy with no drawbacks. Otherwise, democracy would be the dominant strategy.

skylan_q• 14 years ago

Played correctly, democracy is the best government in all cases!

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=87937

eta_carinae• 14 years ago

> Although I don't necessarily think it will be because of war, I can see a potential future where people/persons decide democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process

That's something Darth Vader could have said.

Oh, wait, he did :-)

Paul_S• 14 years ago

If you disable the space race as a winning condition the chance of a nuclear holocaust over time approaches 1.

I'm not saying there are any lessons to be had from it. It's only a game.

mertd• 14 years ago

After completing "Future Technology #532", spamming nukes is the only interesting thing left to do in the game.

Tycho• 14 years ago

I can remember my Civ II campaigns in more detail than I can recall about actual historic events.

radical_cut3• 14 years ago

Well that gave me goosebumps. Bleak future indeed, I immediately thought of the Doomsday Clock.

I like the idea of a new subreddit spawned by this: http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar. It could be interresting to see if anybody finds a way to save the world from hell.

Maybe it's time to relive good old memories of times spend with old Civ games. :)

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

It would be interesting if he exported the game state, so other people could try resolving the conflict.

timwoj• 14 years ago

The top post of the top thread in r/theeternalwar say he's working on exporting it for everyone.

mynameishere2• 14 years ago

The game is easy and boring in the end. He's purposely letting it go on and on.

radical_cut3• 14 years ago

That's one of the main points of the new subreddit I've linked to. From the original thread:

  >> We just need the savegame...
  > (original author) I'll upload it this evening when I get home

So we just have to wait.

kodablah• 14 years ago

Is there a reverse-engineered Civ II api (i.e. akin to bwapi)?

zokier4• 14 years ago

I have played very little Civ2 (my Civ career began with Civ3), but doesn't FreeCiv have a ruleset that aligns with Civ2 very closely?

danso• 14 years ago

I love Civ 2, but how is it that the OP can't win against two AIs? They weren't geniuses, AFAIK. And though the AI was vicious early on, it never seemed competent at the end. And even if it were, it's hard to imagine that the AI could adapt to a focused, determined attack by a human player (taking one city at a time).

lars_francke• 14 years ago

If you read the linked thread you'll find out why.

First of all the game was technically won thousands of years back but he kept playing. And now they are in a stalemate that no one can break.

His thread is basically all about asking for help (and fresh ideas) to end this.

dupe1232• 14 years ago

i think by "win" he means break the stalemate. the ai in that game sucked and only stayed competitive by cheating. he should have been able to wipe out the opposing civs after 10 years of playing. especially since the op said he was only playing at prince/king difficulty.

damon_c• 14 years ago

On the higher levels, specifically Deity, it seems that there are some variables set in the AI's favor that go beyond normal game play manipulations... Or maybe I am just misdiagnosing my own failures :(

Quarrelsome• 14 years ago

Yes.

Civ games have never been known for their stellar AI. The way they keep the AI competitive at higher levels is to brutally cheat by getting free techs and units at the start and a beneficial modifier to their production and research.

Considering how quick the AI needs to run (you don't want "end turn" taking forever) and how complex the game is I can appreciate its simplicity, it is disappointing though.

I have examined the sources for the Civ IV AI and must say that it isn't very pretty (hardly any comments too!). One thing it doesn't seem to do that often though is cheat by examining what other players are doing (such as not building wonders it wont get) which is something at least.

But still.... can anyone point me towards a game where the devs actually spent a significant amount of time (relatively speaking) on the AI? It always seems like such an afterthought. Mods seem to always be a better bet. Although perhaps that's because the most efficient ways to play a game are always developed long after the game is actually released.

Toenex• 14 years ago

I'm not suggesting that civ is anyway up to the task but in all seriousness does any government systematically simulate policy decisions? I can't even remember a UK policy decision that even acknowledge the possibility it might not be a complete success let alone suggested criteria by which it should be ultimately evaluated.

kijin• 14 years ago

I like the idea that a piece of legislation should come with concrete criteria for its own evaluation. That would be like falsifying scientific theories: "This theory will be falsified if such-and-such a phenomenon is observed." "This law will be repealed in X years if it turns out to have such-and-such an effect on the economy."

Unfortunately, laws can rarely be evaluated in isolation, but only against a wide range of other laws and actual circumstances that constantly shift. It's hard enough to come up with definite criteria for falsifying an advanced scientific theory. It will be nearly impossible to do that with laws, not to mention it's too easy to dispute whether the criteria have been met.

doktrin• 14 years ago

This was interesting as a simulation cum case study, but rather miserable as far as gaming goes.

There is no way a game of Civ II isn't eminently beatable - militarily or otherwise.

For one thing, there's no excuse to not operate as a Fundamentalism (0 population unrest) late game. Virtually all other forms of government, particularly Democracy, are an annoying cavalcade of civil unrest late game.

I enjoyed the read. It really brought me back in time to playing this game with fervent addiction in middle school.

dupe1232• 14 years ago

i'm glad someone said it. i enjoyed the story but wondered how someone could suck that bad at civ after playing it for 10 years.

creamyhorror• 14 years ago

>>> "There is technically no way to tell. The game officially ended years ago and I've had to transfer the save file from computer to computer over the years. Computers that don't have the original hall of fame to reference. That said, I usually played on Prince or King. As I recall, anything beyond that was virtually unplayable in Civ II."

I think he probably kept it going even after achieving victory, as a sort of weird experiment that got weirder the longer he went on with it. I can't really imagine being that singleminded/obsessive with respect to a single savegame, but I applaud him for it.

-- edit: confirmation

>>> What happened to the space race? Did you ever get that far?

>>> "Yes. But I didn't participate. When I play civ I usually go for the Diplomatic victory. I did complete it at some point. Probably before the war. But the game was already officially won."

Andytizer• 14 years ago

For those who are revisiting Civilization II after so many years (or playing it for the very first time), remember to visit this page of bugs, fixes and workarounds for getting it working on modern operating systems: http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Civilization_II - if you discover a new fix, please add it in (no account required).

jonnathanson3• 14 years ago

Fascinating, and wonderful to see others are out there who are weird like me, and who will actually attempt to extend Civilization games over extremely long periods. I have a Civ4 game that I've been playing for about 4 straight years now, and admittedly the file has gotten so big that it periodically taxes my system resources to their limits (Unfortunately, Civ4 suffers from poor memory management and is fairly leaky. Especially w/ mods).

The problem with Civ4 is that the AI is so hyper-aggressive that long-term stability is all but impossible, unless I become a dominant superpower and take on the role of "world police," intervening in every war of aggression on the side of the underdog. But after awhile, there's really no fun in that. So I have tried to cultivate a game in which a few superpowers are at least my equals, if not my superiors. Since I'm always going to war to defend whoever's about to get wiped out, unfortunately, I'm switching sides constantly, and diplomacy is basically out of the question. (None of the AI players will even return my calls, so to speak. We've all nuked each other so many times over that we won't even speak to each other now).

The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict. No, when it declares war, it won't cease until either it's beaten or it totally annihilates its enemy. It's like a Terminator. It becomes quickly apparent that the Nash Equilibrium in a game of Civ4 is one nation standing, while all others have ceased to exist. The game drives ineluctably toward this conclusion, unless the human player puts aside his own nation's interests in pursuit of global stability and game longevity. (And, ironically, being the sole force for stability renders him a political pariah among all the other nations). It's sort of like trying to play one sport, when all the other players in the game have been programmed to play another.

Sometimes I wish the AI were more sophisticated, and/or that it could be incentivized to prefer economic growth and interests over nonstop warmaking. Or that one possible victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind (i.e., "Global Victory," instead of just one nation's domination of all others by X or Y measure, or else its complete extirpation of all other peoples on the planet). I realize that's not the game that 99.99% of Civ players want to play, but it's refreshing to hear that I'm not the only one.

drzaiusapelord• 14 years ago

>The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict.

This is why I don't play civ. Total war AIs are a bizarre choice in a strategy game. I dislike it when games are setup in a way where I'm the only one thinking strategy and the AI opponents are there to give me a sense of action. Total war in the real world is rare.

>Or that one possibly victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind

When I was a kid I played a strategy game on the original Mac. I think it was called Balance of Power. The game punished you when war broke out. It didn't encourage it. The game ended if you and the Soviets got into a nuclear conflict. Why can't more games have rational goals instead of just being a more advanced form of Pacman?

jonnathanson3• 14 years ago

"This is why I don't play civ. Total war AIs are a bizarre choice in a strategy game. I dislike it when games are setup in a way where I'm the only one thinking strategy and the AI opponents are there to give me a sense of action. Total war in the real world is rare."

Agreed 100%. To me, it seems silly -- not to mention cynical and fatalistic -- that the sole purpose of diplomacy in Civilization games is to add a strategic dimension to warmaking. That's what it is. The game is basically in a constant state of war, and peace only exists if something is going wrong: i.e., the powers are (momentarily) too evenly balanced to attack one another, or someone's just biding time to sneak-attack someone else, or everyone's spending a few years recovering from World War XXIV before gearing up for World War XXV.

That said, Civlization can still be an immensely fun and rewarding game. It's not the game I want it to be, but I enjoy trying to squeeze every last ounce of emergent gameplay from it.

"Why can't more games have rational goals instead of just being a more advanced form of Pacman?"

I suspect because there just isn't a big enough market for games of that nature. Maybe there is a handful of us out there. Maybe a relatively small handful, but one that's willing to pay a fair amount for a really great, truly strategic global power game. I dunno. Maybe it's worth organizing, or Kickstarting, or what have you. If any game devs out there are reading this and are interested, know that there's a niche crossing its fingers for you.

DanBC• 14 years ago

Balance of Power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game))

The game for PC shipped with a MS Windows runtime environment, for an early version of Windows. (2.x?)

I remember it being really hard.

(http://pc.ign.com/articles/090/090970p1.html)

Such a game made today could be brilliant.

ralfd2• 14 years ago

In Civ 4 the different leaders have personality. Ghandi is peaceful and will never backstab a weak player, Montezuma is batshit insane and lusts for blood, Isabella from Spain is a religious fanatic, Mansa Musa will quickly forget past wars and is happy to make peace to trade techs. A player can also befriend and ally a KI and win jointly.

There is a Google Tech Talk from the formet Civ lead programmer about this "Fun AI". In Civ 4 the Vanilla AI doesnt focus that much on winning. ManyAI Mods implement a more total War style and brutal min-max-gaming with huge armies to challenge experienced players. Also Civ 5 abandoned the Civ 4 style of diplomacy and replaced it with "hidden box" and a "Hard AI" which plays to win. It was at release date a huge disappointment of many veteran Civ players.

Impossible• 14 years ago

Fate of the World (http://fateoftheworld.net/) is an interesting indie strategy game. You play as a world organization and your goal in the main scenario is to prevent global warming. The problem is, as interesting as the theme is, the base game had serious issues with balance and simply understanding cause and effect, so it was difficult and not always fun (kind of like trying to solve global warming in real life! :)) I still suggest that everyone looking for an interesting take on 4x strategy games check it out.

In general board games tend to have much more varied themes and goals than video games, and often have limited direct conflict between players or none at all.

Paradox Games (www.paradoxplaza.com) are supposed to be historically accurate, if your main concern is realism. In practice they don't always achieve this goal but they do a better job at it than Civ.

throw_away• 14 years ago

In the board game Twilight Struggle, a game about the Cold War (& #1 on boardgamegeek.com), you lose if you escalate matters to defcon 1 and cause a nuclear war. A big part of the strategy, though, is knowing how to cause your opponent to inadvertently trigger defcon 1 (http://twilightstrategy.com/2011/12/12/general-strategy-defc...).

danielweber2• 14 years ago

I don't know Civ4's AI routines, but it might be such that after a certain year passes, it decides that the only way to stop the human player is total war. Before that it can be less aggressive.

I have a game of Civ1 somewhere where it takes about a half-hour to get through each turn because each city demands attention. I'd love to modify the ROM to skip the animations.

jonnathanson3• 14 years ago

"I don't know Civ4's AI routines, but it might be such that after a certain year passes, it decides that the only way to stop the human player is total war. Before that it can be less aggressive."

What seems more likely, at least in my experience, is that the AI is always trying to pursue a single goal: beating everyone else. It will select whatever means it deems possible at any point in time. It will make calculations, each turn, about the relative strength of its military versus the strength of its intended target, or else the combined strength of its allies' militaries against the strength of an opposing alliance's militaries. That's about it. It's always looking for an excuse to attack somebody. The only thing that holds it back is any sort of power imbalance sufficiently not in its favor.

There are some AI "personalities" and leader traits in the game that will favor more aggressive styles than others. But generally speaking, a more aggressive AI personality is simply an AI personality that has a lower threshold for declaring war. It will go to war with slightly riskier odds than a less aggressive personality will. But they'll all go to total war if the odds are sufficiently stacked in their favor. The "aggressive" trait is really just a sliding scale of risk tolerance.

Evbn• 14 years ago

There is an option to turn off animations.

NickPollard• 14 years ago

Fun fact: The original Civilization actually had it hardcoded into the AI that if the player was in the lead when the year 1900 was reached, all the AI would declare war on her.

It's slightly less obvious in the later games, but there are definitely still diplomatic penalties for the human player such that the AI are less likely to make deals with them and more likely to declare war.

Anyone interested should read Soren Johnson's blog (http://www.designer-notes.com/). Soren was lead game designer and AI programmer on Civilization IV, and he actually designed the ruleset and the AI hand-in-hand, so that they would have a game the AI could actually play well.

Florin_Andrei• 14 years ago

Well, there's 3 diplomacy phases: Phase 1, when everyone ignores you. Phase 2, when everyone is friendly. Phase 3, total war. You go through #1 and #2 quickly, then all that remains is #3.

hythloday• 14 years ago

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"?

tetha• 14 years ago

This is why the master of orion 1 AI fascinates me, especially considering how old it is. Usually, it doesn't even care to declare war. it might just expand straight through you. It might declare war for exactly 3 systems and stop. It might go on a total war. It might just start shooting your ships without even being in an actual war. It's just weird how different it feels from many modern AIs.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

You may well enjoy this lecture at google from one of the civ5 devs talking about the AI design, and game AI design in general.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcuQQ1eWWI

wtallis• 14 years ago

I recently started playing Civ V, and was surprised at how the AI approached the first war I had started against me: the AI made a really lucrative offer in exchange for right of passage through my territory, then moved a bunch of units in and declared war on me. After losing the initial wave of units and the second invading wave without any territory changing hands, the AI asked for a cease-fire. When I declined, the AI came back in a few turns and sued for peace, offering me most of his treasury and a few other perks to get me to agree to the cease-fire. I wasn't too impressed by the initial decision to take me on, but the rest of the process seemed quite a bit more complex than anything from previous Civ games.

blindhippo• 14 years ago

I'm in a game of Civ V now and experienced the exact same thing you described.

Playing as India and going for a few big cities and a mass cultural strategy, but I keep getting dragged into a war with the civ to the south. Keeps backstabbing me, attacking, losing most of his units, giving me the bank for peace and 5 turns later repeating the whole thing.

Problem is, I just can't support a military large enough to defeat the civ outright - so I'm now just building a line of forts along my border and leaving my army there. Waste of money, but I have no other choice.

Frustrating, but I appreciate that I'm being forced into do something I don't want to do rather then blindly following my preferred strategy to an easy victory.

orbitingpluto• 14 years ago

This post illustrates why turn based games rule for richness and complexity. There is nothing so satisfying as finding stable points in gameplay.

This one Reddit post will probably waste thousands of what could be productive hours... I am sorely tempted to play Civ3 or GalCivII:TotA today.

shriphani• 14 years ago

I have sunk several hours of my life into Civ5 (and played very few multiplayer games).

The thing about the series is that I can sit, build a large empire and take my time. In every non-turn based game (AOE) etc, everyone rushkills and shoots for metrics like FC (fastest castle) etc. without building a lasting empire. The civ series allows me to truly enjoy this aspect of the game.

OTOH, in Civ5 I have found the battles sorely lacking (the AI is not clever and artillery can do some very solid damage) so I feel cheated a bit. I still haven't found a game that combines the elements of Civ5 I like and also demands a good battle strategy.

renegadedev• 14 years ago

We look ahead at 3991 AD and find it to be depressing. I've always wondered how past civilizations (Greeks, Egyptians, etc) would find our modern day civilization.

Retric• 14 years ago

I think they would most flip out over the number of fat people walking around. EX: Here is a pile of grain 1/8th as tall as the great pyramid of Giza.

http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/09harvest.html

cpeterso• 14 years ago

And looking forward, I wonder what future civilizations think about their future. What kind of science fiction do people on Star Trek read? It's a convenient cop-out that everyone on the Enterprise is a fan of mid-20th century pop culture or Shakespeare.

Andrew_Quentin• 14 years ago

Its because we have had peace for so long, we fear we might loose it, so the dominant emotion is not hope of getting better, though that exists, but fear of getting worse.

Past civilizations mainly were in war with each other, so their dominant emotion was probably hope that things will get better, thus they dreamed.

We dream too, but fear a bit also. ha

sid05• 14 years ago

I'm not familiar with Civilization resources so how would it be possible to perpetually build Nukes ? Wouldn't there be an energy cap or is there some sort of tech to cotinually generate the needed resources.

stusmall• 14 years ago

In the game each tile gives some type of resource. If I remember right, you had food, shields (productivity) and trade (money). A farm land would produce a lot of food but little trade but a mine would produce lots of gold but no food. You gather this amount of resource each turn but it doesn't tax the land at all. Nukes just cost a certain amount of productivity so as long as you hold land you can keep building them. The game isn't really meant to last much past modern times so the model kind of breaks down in a game like OPs. Its worth noting that in later games special resources were added to help make it a little more realistic. Like you had to have a uranium mind somewhere to produce nukes. It lead to really cool strategies, like wars for oil or iron.

The reason why he had world resources dwindling at all is because its possible for global warming to cause sea levels to rise and take away bits of land and in the parts of land that don't sink their type can change (plains can become deserts, jungles to forests).

rangibaby• 14 years ago

I really enjoyed Civ2; even once you've figured out how to game the AI (it's predictable hostility and cheating are actually it's biggest weaknesses), there are still challenges, such as limiting yourself to one city (!) or finishing before a certain year.

Just one thing set off my pedant alarm: Civ2 didn't come out until 1996. I still remember getting the collector's box with the huge strategy guide ;-)

fts89• 14 years ago

My plan to defeat the other armies is: 1. Get the game: http://www.amazon.com/Sid-Meiers-Civilization-II-Pc/dp/B0000... 2. Defeat the other armies

radical_cut3• 14 years ago

In case anybody else is interested, here's a post with link to the save file: http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uyswv/here_it...

Time to fire up Civ II and try to save the world!

vog• 14 years ago

I'd love to see a similar report about a long-played FreeCiv game. (http://freeciv.org)

Civ II game a decade old

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