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Ai
AI
If you want to see a particulary good job at AI, play SSI's Imperialism I & II. The AI has to live with the same rules you play by and you choose any advantages the AI gets. Your score modifier is directly proportional to the advantages you give the AI or yourself.
Since I rarely have the opportunity to play a mulitplayer game, my primary opponant is the the AI. For this reason it is particulary important to me that the AI be a 'person' in its behavior and goals. There is a noticable difference between making play more difficult and making the better at achiving it's goals. It should do things that advance its cause rather than simply to make the players life miserable. It should act within the same constraints so that play is meaningful.
If I simply want harder and harder conditions there are plenty of arcade games out there that just pump out more fighters and blasters for each new level, you don't have to worry about strategy because everything is gunning for you and your only strategy is shoot back faster. Obviously the program can always simply out produce the player because the program controls the world.
I hate it when the AI has information that it should not have. When I trade for world maps the AI always knows the value of my map. I don't know the value of the AI map so I never know what I am bargaining for.
What is needed it a more advanced method of specifing game difficulty. This already exists in Imperialism, there is no reason it could not be available for Civilization. I really want to know that the AI limited to the same rules as I am, and I should be able to specify what advantages to give or not give.
In the trading screen the AI does unreasonable things, wanting too much or giving too much. I get the impression that the AI acts on how hard to make a deal rather than what is in the best interests of the AI's civilization. For example, the AI needs my dyes and I need the AI's furs. Since there is no difference in the effect of these commodities their relative values are the same. If the AI already has some luxuries, my dyes are even more valuable to it if it has markets in its cities. But rather consistantly the AI pays a pittance for my goods and demands impossible payments for its own. As a result I rarely trade with the AIs. My Trade advisor sees that England has x number of excess goods and tells me they would love to trade, but this is simply not the case.
The AI should have needs to fulfill and not distinguish between Player and other AI civilizations.
The AI and my military (for lack of a better word) advisor only look at the numbers of units and totally neglects the quality of those units when making evaluations. In other words, as far as the program is concerned ten units of archers are of the same value as ten units of Mech Infantry. Which probably explains why the AI is so slow to upgrade its units in the later ages. Of course since archers can defeat Panzers regularly, there does seem to be some basis for the current practice.
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