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Agent355 posted:I already own both games and have played each of them a bit with other friends, first time with the brother tho. I just vaguely remember alot of diehard civ 5 fans and don't now if that attitude is still the norm and if I should start him on 5 rather than 6. Play civ4 beyond the sword. It's the best designed game in the Civ Series and it's mechanics consist of things beyond filling up buckets. Also combat is much more manageable and the AI is actually a challenge. e: Only caveat is to make sure you play on Pangea or POSSIBLY continents, as the Naval AI sometimes bugs out.
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Apr 28, 2022 20:43
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Ghislaine of YOSPOS posted:ok I don't know if dune is actually all that great. i voted for myself as governor and won while I let the game run at 2x speed while I was completely ignoring it. The Smugglers could have given me a run for my money maybe but they never seemed interested in doing so. Yeah, AI in most 4x is disappointing at best. If you want good AI, that's AI War's whole thing. Maybe give it a try?
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Apr 28, 2022 21:45
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Ghislaine of YOSPOS posted:ok I don't know if dune is actually all that great. i voted for myself as governor and won while I let the game run at 2x speed while I was completely ignoring it. The Smugglers could have given me a run for my money maybe but they never seemed interested in doing so. The worst part of modern game design is the idea that a game needs to be beatable by anyone in order to draw in new players/a wider audience. It's exacerbated by being a movie tie-in game to a big budget, very popular movie so of course they need to make it passively winnable so that all the movie-fans who aren't gamers can play it and not have their experience soured by losing. See also: The Jurassic Park park management games that had a home-run of an idea (dinosaur themepark management) but instead the entire game was a mobile game tutorial that told you what to place and where, and forced you into dinosaur rampage action sequences where you shot them with tranq darts from a helicopter every few minutes while characters from the movie read poorly-voice-acted lines to you about "hey, remember the Jurassic Park movies?" and the "sandbox" mode had force-enabled cheats that couldn't be disabled, leaving you no way to play it as an actual park management game, you just placed free dinosaur enclosures then shut down their rampages because fans of the Jurassic Park franchise don't want to play a videogame they just want to watch dinosaurs rampage, right? I don't think any "thinky" type games (management, 4x, strategy) can be good when attached to a major non-gaming IP in the current video game climate because of this. The IP holder is always going to expect that non-gamers can buy the game because of the IP tie-in and have an experience similar to the movie. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Apr 28, 2022 |
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Apr 28, 2022 22:15
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I said this a while back but what I want out of a Jurassic Park management game is a game where I'm incentivized to gently caress up. If the electric fences go down the dinosaurs get out and eat people, but backup generators are so expensive and pre-park waivers are so cheap...
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Apr 28, 2022 22:45
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A Jurassic Park game with insurance policies
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Apr 28, 2022 23:41
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I just want Dino park tycoon from the old computer lab but impressive to me as 30 year old rather than 7
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Apr 29, 2022 00:59
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deep dish peat moss posted:The worst part of modern game design is the idea that a game needs to be beatable by anyone in order to draw in new players/a wider audience. It's exacerbated by being a movie tie-in game to a big budget, very popular movie so of course they need to make it passively winnable so that all the movie-fans who aren't gamers can play it and not have their experience soured by losing. This is a very nutty take irt 4x games. They're not easy on purpose, it's that they tend to be too complex for an AI script to really handle. Too many moving parts. Even the most grognard 4x games tend to have awful AI. You're completely right on the Jurassic World games though but Frontier in general makes super casual games outside of Elite. Mokinokaro fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Apr 29, 2022 |
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Apr 29, 2022 01:25
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toasterwarrior posted:A Jurassic Park game with insurance policies I like the idea of an insurance investigator trying to determine whether the company has to pay out on dinosaur-related claims. Like Jurassic Park+Master Keaton.
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Apr 29, 2022 01:33
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If the trex jaw mold doesnt fit, you must acquit
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Apr 29, 2022 01:35
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I think 4x game AI has actually gotten worse on average over time. The Civ 4 AI was mediocre at war and couldn’t really handle naval engagements, but it was certainly very possible to lose a war even to a peer country if you were caught totally unprepared. In contrast, there have been quite a few games recently where the computer players just cannot prosecute wars of conquest. I still regularly get owned by the OTC high-level (cheaty) AIs though. I guess the real conclusion is that Soren Johnson is good.
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Apr 29, 2022 08:20
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I like Civ V with the Vox Populi mod, and I think the AI does a decent job. It has slowly replaced Civ IV as my favourite in the series. The late game content with monopolies and corporations is quite decent, and I think it's quite balanced. Couldn't care less on VI.
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Apr 29, 2022 08:36
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Ghislaine of YOSPOS posted:I just want Dino park tycoon from the old computer lab but impressive to me as 30 year old rather than 7 This, but without the super expensive funkosaurus or whatever being a tease you can't actually buy. 
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Apr 29, 2022 09:31
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A buddy played the dune 4x, and his opinion is that the harkonen and the fremen are significantly stronger than the other two. With the right councilor combo, the fremen come swinging right out of the gate with their fighters who can 1v3 indies with a bit of micro (walk up to the ranged guys so they start trying to club you, but focus on fighting the melee guys) to loot and expand, and get absolutely insane spice income in addition to being able to just ruin someone's spice mining operations with multiple simultaneous devastating deep strikes. Harkonen can grab feyd and raban and just explode their economy, while being almost invulnerable on the defense. The +200% resource bonus from opressing villages is insane, it gets better the more militia you have there, and if they're stupid enough to rebel, you can farm them for enormous amounts of influence, letting you beat the atreides at their own game in the landsraad. Unlike booming strats in most 4x games, there is a direct feedback loop between your military power and your economic power without any conflict. You don't have to take any risks to do this, your militia will easily handle any raids, and you will be causing the risk of rebelions deliberately, so you can make sure to have a pair of soldiers close enough to act. Just don't neglect your manpower buildup, and the game will be way too easy. In general, with all factions, use no less than 2 and no more than 3 ornitopters to scout not counting any temporary free ones you find, and don't bother scanning villages until you've found spice and scan the village in that area (it's on the rocks). After that, again, don't scan villages unless you want to take a province, scan the other stuff there to learn where the goodies are at. You want your first conquest to be a spice province. After that, figure out which province is going to be your central hub for AoE buildings like the maintenance depot, spice silo, and military base, ideally next to your HQ and between 2 spice fields, and expand into it and around it. Use your neighboring provinces in the opposite direction as sack towns if your troops are ever idle. Influence is a major bottleneck in the game, but the 5% penalty for expanding to a village right next to your HQ is trivial even if repeated a bunch of times, and the gold you can use to pay merchants to spread propaganda about you for way more influence. Amateurs will tell you that the most important resources on Arakis are water and spice. They are wrong. It's space concrete. Make space concrete everywhere. You can never have enough space concrete, you make every building with space concrete, you can get more building slots with space concrete, and the AI buys loving truckloads of space concrete. All hail space concrete, may it cover Arakis in its glory.
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Apr 29, 2022 09:39
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It's true. Who controls the concrete controls the Universe.
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Apr 29, 2022 10:41
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nrook posted:I guess the real conclusion is that Soren Johnson is good. Hopefully more than like 200 people buy Old World this time when it hits Steam/GOG next month. It is indeed very very good. It even has a decent-for-a-4x AI, imo.
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Apr 29, 2022 12:17
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Oh poo poo, that game wasn't a complete Epic exclusive? That's good to know.
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Apr 29, 2022 12:42
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Mokinokaro posted:This is a very nutty take irt 4x games. They're not easy on purpose, it's that they tend to be too complex for an AI script to really handle. Too many moving parts. Even the most grognard 4x games tend to have awful AI. Complexity is only part of it - although there's certain concepts/best-practices you can use when implementing AI, you'll always need a brand new bespoke AI implementation for your game, there isn't some form of middleware that will help to a level comparable to something like Unity/UE. Even on the level of a Civ 5 -> Civ 6 style sequel, a large number of mechanics changed enough that you'd probably throw away half of what you had previously. That and whoever's working on the AI for a game often has to play catch up with the gameplay designers, since mechanics are constantly being refined and can often change wildly over time. edit: And as a simpler reason, it's also not a feature that sells so it will always receive less resources. Would be nice if it wasn't the case but 
Falcorum fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Apr 29, 2022 |
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Apr 29, 2022 13:38
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"Can we make the AI use this" is a step I think should be more emphasised when designing 4x mechanics. The answer doesn't have to be yes to include the mechanic for players but it means you need to account for this deficit. I wish more games accepted that it's perfectly fine for an AI to "cheat" in ways other than getting perfect knowledge or raw resource boosts.
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Apr 29, 2022 13:56
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The GalCiv2 AI was outstanding, but it's been 16 years so I really don't know if it would STILL be good today or if that was just the standards of the time.
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Apr 29, 2022 14:51
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Gal civ 2 ai was good, it was capable of doing things like realizing that your going for culture wins then declaring forever war or managing to actually compete with the player will still having personality quirks for each race shame about the rest of the game
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Apr 29, 2022 14:53
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Squiggle posted:The GalCiv2 AI was outstanding, but it's been 16 years so I really don't know if it would STILL be good today or if that was just the standards of the time. I could never get it to agree on anything trade-wise, and even though it would recognise you mobilising on its border, it didn't really seem to respond to it mechanically... yet it's still one of the better 4X AIs out there, maybe even the best.
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Apr 29, 2022 18:41
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GC2's AI was good by virtue of the game being so numbers-oriented and shallow. Can't gently caress up when there's barely anything to gently caress up. I think people should aspire to something more complex than GC2's gameplay, personally.
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Apr 29, 2022 21:17
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toasterwarrior posted:GC2's AI was good by virtue of the game being so numbers-oriented and shallow. Can't gently caress up when there's barely anything to gently caress up. I think people should aspire to something more complex than GC2's gameplay, personally. Meh, i dont agree. Games arent that fun when the opposition is too trash to present the illusion of challenge or has to very blatantly cheat imo. Besides, unless you're talking about Distant Worlds or Shadow Empires I dont think GC2 was actually that shallow when compared to most 4x games out there.
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Apr 29, 2022 21:25
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OperaMouse posted:I like Civ V with the Vox Populi mod, and I think the AI does a decent job. It has slowly replaced Civ IV as my favourite in the series. The late game content with monopolies and corporations is quite decent, and I think it's quite balanced. Couldn't care less on VI. vox populi really does add a lot to civ V. i wish there were a fall from heaven equivalent
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Apr 29, 2022 23:51
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There was an attempt at something FFH-esque in Éa, but it never got close to a 1.0 release unfortunately.
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Apr 29, 2022 23:56
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OctaMurk posted:Meh, i dont agree. Games arent that fun when the opposition is too trash to present the illusion of challenge or has to very blatantly cheat imo. The problem is that the majority of 4x players are casual players who just want to built their cities in peace until they decide to go to war for fun. People looking for a challenge are a minority, and dev time is budgeted accordingly.
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Apr 30, 2022 00:28
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Clarste posted:The problem is that the majority of 4x players are casual players who just want to built their cities in peace until they decide to go to war for fun. People looking for a challenge are a minority, and dev time is budgeted accordingly. Yes. I remember long time ago I went to a conference for devs and they said it's very easy to kill or nearly kill the player but most players don't want that. They want to turtle or rush and have that work.
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Apr 30, 2022 02:30
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I've never really understood the prevailing desire that the AI needs to be playing the same game as the player. A lot of the times the AI simply can't juggle all of the systems the player has to in any meaningful way and ends up breaking down completely unless you assign it insane levels of cheats. It feels like a much easier solution to simply remove the AI having to deal with that crap altogether. An example that comes to mind is a pretty obscure Gundam-based grand strategy game called Gihren's Greed. In that game, the player has an extremely complex technology tree, an incredibly involved event tree, and multiple resources to juggle to afford military production. The AI simply doesn't give a crap about research and just upgrades their stuff over time automatically, and they don't actually generate resources, they just produce a quota of production per in-game turn based on how much territory they're holding. They even sidestep the "pathetic steamroll" phase of the game by giving the AI a one-time super boost in their monthly production quota when you reduce them to a couple of remaining territories, ensuring that you get at least one big climactic battle before wiping an opponent out rather than the common "I actually won the game and beat the AI 50 turns ago but they haven't stopped twitching yet" problem that occurs in so many games. It's not a perfect solution but I think designing along those kinds of lines is a way better approach from a singleplayer experience perspective than "How do I get the AI to not suicidally march their troops in circles in an area that inflicts attrition on their army" type stuff. Kanos fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Apr 30, 2022 |
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Apr 30, 2022 02:38
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that's a good idea in abstract but it ignores that a lot of 4x's are theoretically also designed for multiplayer, and have tools and abiltiies designed at sabotaging player facing elements like research and production. If you can't use those in singleplayer against AIs then for a lot of players they may as well not exist. Maybe that's more of an issue of 'why are all of these games designed for multiplayer if that is so rare" though
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Apr 30, 2022 02:45
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Impermanent posted:that's a good idea in abstract but it ignores that a lot of 4x's are theoretically also designed for multiplayer, and have tools and abiltiies designed at sabotaging player facing elements like research and production. If you can't use those in singleplayer against AIs then for a lot of players they may as well not exist. Maybe that's more of an issue of 'why are all of these games designed for multiplayer if that is so rare" though The funny thing is that those kinds of mechanics often go basically unused against the AI by the vast majority of players even when they're included.
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Apr 30, 2022 03:17
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Impermanent posted:that's a good idea in abstract but it ignores that a lot of 4x's are theoretically also designed for multiplayer, and have tools and abiltiies designed at sabotaging player facing elements like research and production. If you can't use those in singleplayer against AIs then for a lot of players they may as well not exist. Maybe that's more of an issue of 'why are all of these games designed for multiplayer if that is so rare" though All those tools are usually left unused against the AI because the AI cheats so massively.
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Apr 30, 2022 03:20
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Kanos posted:I've never really understood the prevailing desire that the AI needs to be playing the same game as the player. A lot of the times the AI simply can't juggle all of the systems the player has to in any meaningful way and ends up breaking down completely unless you assign it insane levels of cheats. It feels like a much easier solution to simply remove the AI having to deal with that crap altogether. This would bug the poo poo out of me if I knew it was happening. AI empires should have to play by the exact same rules as humans. It needing cheats to do that competitively is bad enough, playing by different rules altogether is completely unacceptable to me.
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Apr 30, 2022 03:33
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Maybe it's just me, but I will literally never sabotage the AI's production or whatever when I can steal tech or something instead. The fact that they're cheating doesn't even come up in my thought process, it's just that I value having something concrete that I know exactly how it will affect me more than I value a vague sense of slowing the enemy down in some abstract way.
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Apr 30, 2022 03:36
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chglcu posted:This would bug the poo poo out of me if I knew it was happening. AI empires should have to play by the exact same rules as humans. It needing cheats to do that competitively is bad enough, playing by different rules altogether is completely unacceptable to me. The thing is it's not cheating, it's just the game. No one playing an RPG asks how all the random monsters conveniently manage to keep up with the players as you go further in the game, they just are that level because they were made that way. TBH I don't think most players think of 4x games as a fair board game like you seem to.
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Apr 30, 2022 03:39
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Clarste posted:The thing is it's not cheating, it's just the game. No one playing an RPG asks how all the random monsters conveniently manage to keep up with the players as you go further in the game, they just are that level because they were made that way. TBH I don't think most players think of 4x games as a fair board game like you seem to. It’s cheating if you’re wanting more of a sandbox simulator type experience and less of a game-y one. I very much want the simulator over a game most of the time.
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Apr 30, 2022 03:42
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chglcu posted:This would bug the poo poo out of me if I knew it was happening. AI empires should have to play by the exact same rules as humans. It needing cheats to do that competitively is bad enough, playing by different rules altogether is completely unacceptable to me. Why, exactly? Almost every other video game genre in the world has the AI playing by different rules than the player because the goal of video game design is to provide the player with an engaging play experience rather than a fair and balanced game of equals(which was never remotely equal in the first place because the player is automatically guaranteed to be vastly smarter and better at dealing with a multitude of systems and changing game scenarios than a rudimentary game AI). Kanos fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Apr 30, 2022 |
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Apr 30, 2022 03:43
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Kanos posted:Why, exactly? Almost every other video game genre in the world has the AI playing by different rules than the player because the goal of video game design is to provide the player with an engaging play experience rather than a fair and balanced game of equals(which was never remotely equal in the first place because the player is automatically guaranteed to be vastly smarter and better at dealing with a multitude of systems and changing game scenarios than a rudimentary game AI). I think my reply immediately above this sort of addresses this question, but I think it’s probably a position I can’t logically defend. I definitely hate it when I can tell the game isn’t playing by the same rules as me, though. And the AI thing is probably a solvable problem with enough effort.
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Apr 30, 2022 03:49
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I really don't think it's "solvable with enough effort". It's extremely involved to write a competent AI for even fixed games with stable sets of rules and relatively small amounts of variables, nevermind an average 4X game where you're making hundreds of little decisions on a constant basis. Think about even something as seemingly simple to the player as the opener to a game of Civ - you're spawned in at a completely random spot on a randomly generated map and have to make a series of decisions about what resources you have available, what the terrain looks like, how long you're willing to explore before founding a city and how far you're willing to lower your standards to accept a spot, plus having to filter all of that through things like what victory conditions you have enabled, how big the map is, how many opponents are there, what civilization are you, what civilization are the enemies, is the map a naval map or a pangaea or continental, etc. You're already spawning dozens and dozens of decision trees for an AI to have to deal with before it even starts playing the game proper, and that complexity is going to expand by several orders of magnitude as the game's mechanics open up and become available and factions begin rubbing up against each other. Decision trees are also incredibly vulnerable to game balance flaws; if you intended for a spear unit to be the counter to cavalry units, but it turns out that cavalry can easily beat spears when deployed properly, but the AI doesn't know that and sees "enemy is building cavalry so I will build spears", well... It's also an eternal problem that would need to be solved for every single game on an individual basis, because every 4X has enormously different mechanics. Hell, even within the same franchise, sequels frequently massively adjust game balance and core game systems between entries so what is a good series of decisions in one game is now an awful disaster in the next. Hell, even if you managed to actually "solve" the problem, that solution would look less like "The AI is playing a game on even ground with a player" and more "The AI is programmed with a series of extremely effective build/research orders that we know for a fact are extremely effective in this iteration of the game". Kanos fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Apr 30, 2022 |
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Apr 30, 2022 04:00
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Clarste posted:The thing is it's not cheating, it's just the game. No one playing an RPG asks how all the random monsters conveniently manage to keep up with the players as you go further in the game, they just are that level because they were made that way. TBH I don't think most players think of 4x games as a fair board game like you seem to. 4x games were originally literally derived from board games (particularly Civilization), so that's probably part of the reason they're designed that way, for better or worse.
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Apr 30, 2022 04:40
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It's insane to me that 4 games into the series, GalCiv never had a good ship arsenal. Ever since 2, it's just been the rock-paper-scissors of kinetics-missiles-lasers. Literally all they are is just different flavors of damage with different armors to counter them. Are lasers weaker but more accurate? No. Can missiles be loaded with different payloads for certain effects? No. Can railguns be used to rapidly fire at small clouds of fighters or whatever? Haha yeah right, that might make the game too interesting.
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