A plea to Firaxis: AIs able to be modified by user

[DaveV]

Firaxis may already have gone too far down another road, but I want to mention my favorite topic one more time. If they can give the end user any sort of access to the AI rules/algorithms, it will greatly improve the shelf life and appeal of the game. The more access, the better, but I'll take whatever crumbs Firaxis wants to throw my way.

No disrespect meant to the programmers at Firaxis, but they have a limited amount of time and testing. In the case of Civ2, strategies have long since obsoleted the AI code. A few fairly minor tweaks could make the AI much more competitive.

There are a lot of very smart people in the user community, and a lot of people who are interested in playing with the mechanics of a game. Consider CTP2: I haven't played it, but I hear it's not a very good game. Yet there's a dedicated core of people spending a lot of time trying to patch it up into something more playable. And I'm sure the scenario gurus would have a field day with custom AIs.

Allowing multiple AI rulesets in the same game would allow the AIs to show some personality. The user could also determine the difficulty of the game by loading a "hard" or "easy" AI ruleset. If someone doesn't like an AI that sneak attacks him, he could play with a custom ruleset that didn't allow that. An AI-only game could pit different AIs against each other for debugging and evaluation.

Many Civ2 players have simply given up on the single-player version of the game and only play multi-player. As I see it, the glaring AI weaknesses are in three areas: combat, terrain improvement, and city growth and expansion. Improvement of combat abilities would require lots of information about terrain, relative unit strengths, and overall strategy. But the latter two areas could be improved greatly if they were based on some simple lists or static evaluations. For example, a city site could be evaluated by assigning a numeric value to different types of terrain squares. Add up the the values for all the squares in a potential city radius to determine whether a city should be built there. Settlers could have a prioritized list of actions to perform; ideally, these actions would also be selected based on the needs of the city (low on food, shields, trade).

This is turning into a longer post than I intended. In as few words as possible: please, Firaxis, give us the ability to modify the AI!

[VetLegion]

Hmm. This used to be my favourite topic too DaveV...

I admit I am not following closely, but last I checked CtP had only one user-made AI (maybe it wasnt even a complete AI, but a minor tweak)

C2Evolution also boasts modifiable AI, and also as far as I know there is only one extra made, apart from default.

Both games allow user to modify AI to a significant degree, and I am sure that C2E allows you to rewrite AI from scratch.

Freeciv has modifiable AI... ok I checked that a loong time ago, but it was very early in development.

While many people complain about bad civ2 AI, nobody wrote a good AI for c2E, which is basicly the same game as civ2 (with minor gameplay tweaks)

So far the idea that modifiable AI will result in a better AI and longer playability of the game (the holy grale of long-time civ players), proved to be a myth.

I hope the civ3 hype, the civ3 large community, and the large number of programmers in that community are going to change that.

[KrazyHorse]

This would be really nice; even if the AI is smart enough to beat the best players the first time they ever play Civ III (which I sincerely doubt), within a few weeks, those players will have learnt enough about the AI's strategies to be able to routinely defeat the AI, given its static strategy style. The ability to modify the AI would give players to shore up the weaknesses they see when they play against it. The most notable weakness of the AI in Civ II was, of course, its inability to comprehend the need to build a large number of fairly large cities, owing to which it could never compete with the player who'd built forty size twenty-five cities.

[Footie Mad]

And of course it would improve the fun in scenarios if you could instruct the AI to act in a certain way