
Civ 5 AI battle – All 43 Civs on same map [video] - ReedJessen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOKwIrTWeDo
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n1231231231234
Civ 5, with the add-ons, is one of my favourite games of all times. It's
really well-balanced and thoroughly thought through. Everything is just in
place, game mechanics, city management, unit system, science tree, social
policies, trade, etc. I do turn off espionage, though. And the AI leaves room
for improvement.

Another thing that I also really like about the game is that you can get away
with very little micro-management. However, some some micro-management gives
you slight advantage. I think they struck a nice balance here.

And beating deity was great, it almost felt like playing chess. Sure, you have
to have a bit of luck with your starting position. And you need some luck
later-on when it comes to the distribution of certain resources. But apart
from that, it's in your hands and everything you do has to be near-perfect in
order for you to succeed.

~~~
mattmanser
No it's not. It's a good game but has loads of flaws.

For example, you just spent the last 30 turns building a powerful ancient
wonder. It's ready next turn! Oops, the computer builds that ancient wonder
the turn before you do, you get nothing.

How's that well thought through? It's an extremely bad game mechanic, un-fun
in the worst possible way. You have no visibility of the race. The old games
at least let you switch to your 2nd choice or another building.

Also, generally speaking, the happiness mechanic sucks. It's such an
unintuitive way of stopping people growing too fast. It's supposed to make a
choice between lots of small cities Vs a few big ones, but it's only fun for a
few big ones. So if you enjoy actually expanding and finding new places to put
cities, it's not as good as the old games.

Also the entire city states mechanic is tedious.

As for the chess anecdote, the AI is bad, they give it massive bonuses, so
it's like playing chess where you start with half the pieces of your opponent.
This sucks a lot of the fun out of the game, as you get little opportunity to
make wonders or other things early game as the computer simply brute forces
past you.

~~~
Sommer717
In regards to the wonder mechanic, that's just completely wrong. You get a 1:1
conversion of hammer input to gold if you don't complete the wonder.[1]
Compare this to the usual 1:4 conversion if you just use the city to produce
gold.

[1] [https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/126105/how-to-
cal...](https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/126105/how-to-calculate-
gold-earned-from-a-wonder-if-another-civilization-finishes-firs)

~~~
tgb
Oh wow the game could let you know that, Otherwise yeah it's super
frustrating. Of course I'd much rather have the wonder than the gold since say
the pyramids would give you less than 185 gold and buying even a worker costs
more than that IIRC.

~~~
Redoubts
It does, and has since Civ 4 at least.

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DanAndersen
Unsurprisingly, being near a corner helps one's chance of survival, as you
need to defend on fewer sides with the same amount of resources.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Although I was surprised that the civ in bottom left didn't prevail. They
seemed to be able to expand first.

~~~
craftyguy
What was that civ? I couldn't figure it out with the light background + orange
font for city names, nor did I recognize that color scheme.

~~~
Eupolemos
Assyria

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simonebrunozzi
I love playing these kind of "strategy" games (Civ, Total War, to a lesser
extent DotA 2, etc). I don't have time anymore, as I am a startup founder, and
I simply can't play these for just 1-2 hours a week. I'll play again in a few
years :)

What typically annoys me is the AI in these games: never challenging enough,
or challenging in the right way. Years and years, and the only hope is that
the AI team at Google will figure out a way to apply their ML/DL AI to many
games at once. (they did it for DotA 2, with remarkable results).

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untog
I actually find Civ great to play on a long flight (as long as I have access
to a power outlet, it chews through my laptop battery). Makes a 6-7 hour
flight, er, fly by. But I never finish a game, I just get to somewhere around
the Classic era and have to shut my laptop off. And the next flight I take I'm
never in the mood to resume a game, so I just start again.

Lots of fun, though.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I tried a couple of times over the last several years. Somehow I find it very
uncomfortable to play a videogame on a flight, where a few people can easily
see what I am doing. Not sure why being observed makes me feel awkward.

~~~
untog
I feel the same way sometimes. There's something about planes - if you're in
an aisle seat you can see everything a person in front of you is doing, but
it's next to impossible to know if they're looking.

My preferred solution is to drink a couple of beers while I play, I forget
quickly!

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omot
I recommend watching true start location earth all AI play through. It's
interesting to watch how America is divided if Europe wasn't technologically
ahead.

~~~
omot
Drew Durnil has multiple videos

Start state: [https://youtu.be/NdpX_2OZJZY](https://youtu.be/NdpX_2OZJZY)

End state: [https://youtu.be/xxfCxUB4VMQ](https://youtu.be/xxfCxUB4VMQ)

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Gabrielfair
Now give these players a side channel to communicate and you have a solid
research paper. An example here:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.06960](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.06960)

Plus all of their code is on github

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Sylos
I was surprised at how much time they spent building up their cities,
technologies, religions etc., rather than just doing each others head in.

There's this open-source game, Battle for Wesnoth, which is sort of like
Civilization without the civilization part, so it's pretty much just hexgrid-
and turn-based strategy warfare (and that part much more fleshed out). Would
be interesting to do the same with that.

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Gravityloss
In Civ 5, There are so many things to choose from that give tiny 10% or +1
bonuses here and there. Unit promotions, religious bonuses, civics, buildings.
I get bonus hunting fatigue.

At least in Civ 1, even if there was only a handful of different forms of
government, they had massively different effects. I've played every Civ game
except four and six.

Certain elements in the map in Civ 1 gave good bonuses. Now everything's
watered down. I feel it's a cop out way to balance something by making
everything have a tiny effect.

The automation also leads to you playing by reacting to popups, which is not
fun. Oh, this city state now wants this random thing. Your game totally hangs
on the ability to get them on your side.

It's fun to make plans and try to follow them through. It's fun (and
harrowing) to make interesting decisions. You can't do it with just such
random elements. It's not fun calculating cumulative bonuses. And it's also
not fun even if it's automated. Have less gameplay elements!

Civ V is a game for coupon hunters and bean counters.

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partycoder
The result has a lot to do with:

\- what Civ is next to each other: each civ has unique units, buildings, etc.
this can be decisive during an engagement.

\- resources

\- what alliances form

There is also another factor in play here: you will see that the last
civilizations to lose are the ones that secured the corners. This is because
they have a smaller border to protect. In this sense it's similar to game of
Go, were openings often start with corner enclosures.

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davedx
Soon as I saw the Greeks had riflemen I knew it was all over :D

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bluefreeze
This might be OOT, but I'm just curious how do you train AI on video games? Do
you connect AI to internal API of the game or you let AI parse image data the
from the screen and use external input (like keyboard or mouse) in order to
play the game?

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mtgx
The first option is how "game AI" has been developed by most gaming companies
until recently. The second option is how DeepMind, OpenAI, and a few others
are now building gaming AI. Only the latter is about building a gaming AI that
"learns to play the game like a human does".

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akozak
I'd be interested in some of the math here - e.g. if you wanted to compare civ
fitness - would you need to test every iteration of initial starting
conditions? And then I wonder how that changes if the map is a hexagonal
sphere...

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FollowSteph3
The cpu on that computer must be running quite hot. That would definitely be a
way to do a computer burn in test. Plus it’s more fun ;)

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cgb223
Are there any AI battles with more normal Civ 5 settings?

Like maybe 8 civs, bigger map with varying features etc

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make3
are they classical AI or learned (RL) actual AIs

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yen223
They are classical rule-based AIs

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make3
too bad. I'd really like to see a genuine (learned) Civ ai

