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chglcu posted: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. i respect your positions, so dont interpret my challenges as attacks - but why on earth would you look to 4X's for this sort thing? no 4X of any kind can provide any sort of accurate simulation, especially when ANY abstraction they decide on are literally lost elements of simulationist theory. then consider 4x's are typically defined as turn based, 4x's have no relation to, uh, actual history, etc., and i am a lil perplexed as to why this is the thread you seek your love.
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Apr 30, 2022 07:57
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chglcu posted: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. oh boy wait till you find out that some of the most simulationist games literally put enemy AI on one of a handful of predetermined scripts with minimal reactivity
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Apr 30, 2022 07:58
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Lady Radia posted:i respect your positions, so dont interpret my challenges as attacks - but why on earth would you look to 4X's for this sort thing? no 4X of any kind can provide any sort of accurate simulation, especially when ANY abstraction they decide on are literally lost elements of simulationist theory. then consider 4x's are typically defined as turn based, 4x's have no relation to, uh, actual history, etc., and i am a lil perplexed as to why this is the thread you seek your love. Mostly because it’s the closet genre to the “Space Emperor Simulator” I really want. It falls short, but nothing else really even comes close.
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Apr 30, 2022 08:00
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im not after the game style you want, but i definitely sympathize with the forbidden fruit of a game that you know will never exist, and just constantly chasing the dragon. carry on
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Apr 30, 2022 08:01
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chglcu posted:Mostly because it’s the closet genre to the “Space Emperor Simulator” I really want. It falls short, but nothing else really even comes close. Stellar Monarch. The AI doesn't even pretend to play by the same rules, but it is a Space Emperor Simulator. Stellar Monarch 2 is looking even better in that regard, with semi-autonomous nobles.
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Apr 30, 2022 09:17
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chglcu posted:Mostly because it’s the closet genre to the “Space Emperor Simulator” I really want. It falls short, but nothing else really even comes close. my dream game is basically something like stellaris or distant worlds with the inner workings of a crusader kings so i feel you you with this. I came across this game awhile back and I've been keeping an eye on it. Might interest you too https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113400/Alliance_of_the_Sacred_Suns/
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Apr 30, 2022 09:33
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habituallyred posted:Stellar Monarch. The AI doesn't even pretend to play by the same rules, but it is a Space Emperor Simulator. Stellar Monarch 2 is looking even better in that regard, with semi-autonomous nobles. Ooh, that actually looks pretty cool. I’ll have to check it out, thanks.
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Apr 30, 2022 09:34
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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 They are, but then we have Civ5-6 that are such chores to get running in multiplayer, without having to reload every single turn from crashes. Even singleplayer Civ6 crashes every odd turn now, for me. Something about the new launcher making a mess of things, supposedly? The game isn't good enough for me to really troubleshoot it, but it's a shame they can't figure out their AAA game's basic stability.
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Apr 30, 2022 10:55
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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. e: the second half of this post is gone, I posted it too soon and I'm not happy with the quality. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Apr 30, 2022 |
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Apr 30, 2022 15:06
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My issue with most PvP in games, is that it tends to make everything a rush-fest. Gotta clamp down on that win as soon as possible, it's not about having fun anymore - now it's a Lots of genres work fine for this, but something like a 4X? Eeeh.
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Apr 30, 2022 15:12
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THE BAR posted:My issue with most PvP in games, is that it tends to make everything a rush-fest. Gotta clamp down on that win as soon as possible, it's not about having fun anymore - now it's a
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Apr 30, 2022 15:45
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Splicer posted:I think what a lot of people, myself included, want out of 4Xs are actually Management games with faux-human opponents to shoot at. Yeah, that. Management, with the risk of outside powers so it's not entirely about making numbers go up.
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Apr 30, 2022 15:46
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I generally dont like games where the AI doesnt at least pretend to play by the same rules (unless that's the point, like ai wars) . Just gives me a big "why am I even playing this" feel and I usually check out pretty quickly, especially when its stuff like the AI getting infinite supplies or things like that, that end up making certain avenues of attack pointless
The Chad Jihad fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Apr 30, 2022 |
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Apr 30, 2022 15:48
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Having the AI play by the same rules is the easiest way to teach the player how the AI works. AI Wars has to go to great lengths to educate the player about how the AI works. And if you don't know how the AI works, you can't think strategically.
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Apr 30, 2022 16:16
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If you know how build an economy you should also know how to disrupt it. That knowledge should allow you to disrupt a rival's economy. That doesn't work if the AI just blatantly cheats. It's very unsatisfying to learn that something that would have crippled a faction normally doesn't work just because it's the computer controlling it.
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Apr 30, 2022 16:42
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Antigravitas posted:If you know how build an economy you should also know how to disrupt it. That knowledge should allow you to disrupt a rival's economy. That doesn't work if the AI just blatantly cheats. It's very unsatisfying to learn that something that would have crippled a faction normally doesn't work just because it's the computer controlling it. Yeah, but that's currently the case in the vast majority of 4X games because those crazy cheats are the only thing keeping a somewhat experienced player from completely rolling the game against a rudimentary and overtaxed AI. Using Total War Warhammer as an example, it's an infamous meme that they keep giving factions ways to force attrition on enemy armies in various ways and it doesn't matter and is completely useless because the AI on higher difficulties takes almost no damage from attrition because in the game's early days the AI would literally blunder around and let its armies melt in high attrition areas.
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Apr 30, 2022 16:58
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Antigravitas posted:If you know how build an economy you should also know how to disrupt it. That knowledge should allow you to disrupt a rival's economy. That doesn't work if the AI just blatantly cheats. It's very unsatisfying to learn that something that would have crippled a faction normally doesn't work just because it's the computer controlling it.
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Apr 30, 2022 17:13
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Splicer posted:So a well designed game would base things around the granularity accessible by the player. If the lowest level a player interacts with enemy territory is on a province level, then what makes up that province can be abstracted. The player provinces can be fun little minigames where building placement and stacking bonuses can lead to huge advances, while the AI provinces can be simply labelled "mining province" or "research province" with stacking bonuses based on progression. Denying these provinces will have the same disruptive effect without requiring the AI to actually be playing the player-facing little minigame. Yeah I've often thought of this as a solution, but it gets weird when the player then takes the province and the wave function has to collapse into something the player can work with. Also I feel like I remember reading some developer somewhere saying that crunching numbers is what AI does naturally well anyways so abstracting those out doesn't always help
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Apr 30, 2022 17:47
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chglcu posted: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. You need a set of rules that's reliably mathematically solvable but not in a way that's too easy for a human to figure out, and then make a script that's just bad enough at this thing computers are innately immeasurably better than you at that it still barely works rather than annihilating you every time. It's skating uphill in every aspect of what makes a game and the end result is usually an extremely restricted, formulaic design (because there's one or two proven approaches that don't require you to reinvent everything from scratch) and an AI that blatantly cheats anyway (cause that still doesn't work very well). The NPC nobility in Crusader Kings obviously aren't playing quite the same game you are and they never could be (would you have one AI player programmed to try to paint the map and one programmed to make the ultimate horse spymaster?), letting the bots do their asymmetrical game as background environment rather than simulated rival players is what makes a game like CK possible. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Apr 30, 2022 |
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Apr 30, 2022 17:53
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Agean90 posted: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 From what I remember about 4x-programming, sadly it's not as easy as taking a "good" AI and putting into another game. A GalCiv2 would be fundamentally incapable of controlling e.g. Stellaris, as the decision trees are too different. Making the GalCiv2-AI work in Stellaris (or really, any other 4x), would mean rewriting it from the ground up. And to stay at this example, if the work is done by the same devs, they could just delete the GalCiv2-AI and copy over their own work and claim they'd done the rewrite. The end result would probably be better than actually attempting to make the other AI fit. It also doesn't help that over time, 4x games became ever more convoluted and complex, making it harder to create an AI that works for your game. An additional problem is that a 4x game is a product like any others, with a finite life cycle. There's therefore an only finite amount of time and resources a developer can put into a game's AI before that game is dead and gone from the market. And the next generation of games is filled up with even more gizmos and greebles, or too much of the old AI was tuned to an engine that's now obsolete and gets thrown out, etc. Woops, suddenly the devs start from square 1 again. Ironically, if we ever manage to make a genuine, general-purpose AI, the very first thing 4x-developers will do is trying to copy them into their games to have less work to do.  But that's not how 4x-AI works at all right now, so we're basically hosed. Edit: Essentially, I agree with Kanos
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Apr 30, 2022 18:15
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How long until we can just use machine learning to develop AI for every game?
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Apr 30, 2022 19:39
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The genre needs more games like Sid Meier's Colonization, and less that are just retreads of Civ or MOO. Not that I want a remake per se of Colonization, but the concept should be explored more: a game where the player has a more defined goal than just "blob forever", combined with logical restrictions and an endgame boss. Everyone acknowledges that the early parts of 4x are fun while the endgame is poo poo; you'd think after thirty years of trying someone would have figured out that the logical answer isn't to keep failing at making a good endgame, but to change things so that there isn't a "classical" 4x endgame.
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Apr 30, 2022 19:50
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orangelex44 posted:The genre needs more games like Sid Meier's Colonization, and less that are just retreads of Civ or MOO. Not that I want a remake per se of Colonization, but the concept should be explored more: a game where the player has a more defined goal than just "blob forever", combined with logical restrictions and an endgame boss. Everyone acknowledges that the early parts of 4x are fun while the endgame is poo poo; you'd think after thirty years of trying someone would have figured out that the logical answer isn't to keep failing at making a good endgame, but to change things so that there isn't a "classical" 4x endgame. I think for the most part devs have moved on to management games where this isn't as much of an issue. "Pure" 4x's seem to be on a steep decline, while a new management game comes out like every day.
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Apr 30, 2022 22:28
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I completely agree. And the new 4Xs coming out seem to all be tributes/remakes to the "golden age" rather than trying new 4X stuff.
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Apr 30, 2022 22:33
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is new galciv bad
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Apr 30, 2022 23:33
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Antigravitas posted:If you know how build an economy you should also know how to disrupt it. That knowledge should allow you to disrupt a rival's economy. That doesn't work if the AI just blatantly cheats. It's very unsatisfying to learn that something that would have crippled a faction normally doesn't work just because it's the computer controlling it. The disruption should be even greater than against a player, since it won't be as visible.
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Apr 30, 2022 23:38
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Worf posted:is new galciv bad yes
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Apr 30, 2022 23:43
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orangelex44 posted:The genre needs more games like Sid Meier's Colonization, and less that are just retreads of Civ or MOO. Not that I want a remake per se of Colonization, but the concept should be explored more: a game where the player has a more defined goal than just "blob forever", combined with logical restrictions and an endgame boss. Everyone acknowledges that the early parts of 4x are fun while the endgame is poo poo; you'd think after thirty years of trying someone would have figured out that the logical answer isn't to keep failing at making a good endgame, but to change things so that there isn't a "classical" 4x endgame. I've missed out on the original Colonization, but the remake made me think "I wish this didn't have the other players". I think there is an unfilled demand for, like, Tropico/Anno, but turn-based.
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Apr 30, 2022 23:45
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orangelex44 posted:The genre needs more games like Sid Meier's Colonization, and less that are just retreads of Civ or MOO. Not that I want a remake per se of Colonization, but the concept should be explored more: a game where the player has a more defined goal than just "blob forever", combined with logical restrictions and an endgame boss. Everyone acknowledges that the early parts of 4x are fun while the endgame is poo poo; you'd think after thirty years of trying someone would have figured out that the logical answer isn't to keep failing at making a good endgame, but to change things so that there isn't a "classical" 4x endgame. Colonization IN SPACEEEEEE would probably kick rear end especially if you could get weird with the planet(s) generation and tech tree. A proper showdown with a full punishment expedition would also be neat and avoid the "Grind away at the AI empire numbs to finish things off".
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Apr 30, 2022 23:51
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PerniciousKnid posted:How long until we can just use machine learning to develop AI for every game? Probably a long time: it takes special programming or whatever to even make it possible and its apparently super expensive
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Apr 30, 2022 23:54
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orangelex44 posted:The genre needs more games like Sid Meier's Colonization, and less that are just retreads of Civ or MOO. Not that I want a remake per se of Colonization, but the concept should be explored more: a game where the player has a more defined goal than just "blob forever", combined with logical restrictions and an endgame boss. Everyone acknowledges that the early parts of 4x are fun while the endgame is poo poo; you'd think after thirty years of trying someone would have figured out that the logical answer isn't to keep failing at making a good endgame, but to change things so that there isn't a "classical" 4x endgame. I find it slightly funny that you'd call out Sid Meier's Colonization as an example of something to try to reproduce...because there was a remake of Colonization in the ?Civ 4? engine, and the mechanics were just slightly off enough from the original that it really just fell flat. Also something about the way the graphics for the original (while DOS graphics) seemed to fit whereas the graphics/UI for the remake just made it lose the tone entirely. When you've got a clearly-defined end-goal besides just 'paint the map' it seems like 4x'es starts crossing genres into something closer to puzzle games; less about developing a world in the manner you want and more about min-maxing to reach the goal.
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Apr 30, 2022 23:55
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Lawman 0 posted:Colonization IN SPACEEEEEE would probably kick rear end especially if you could get weird with the planet(s) generation and tech tree. A proper showdown with a full punishment expedition would also be neat and avoid the "Grind away at the AI empire numbs to finish things off". I never realized I wanted this game until now. Soren, please!
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May 1, 2022 00:31
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orangelex44 posted:The genre needs more games like Sid Meier's Colonization, and less that are just retreads of Civ or MOO. Not that I want a remake per se of Colonization, but the concept should be explored more: a game where the player has a more defined goal than just "blob forever", combined with logical restrictions and an endgame boss. Everyone acknowledges that the early parts of 4x are fun while the endgame is poo poo; you'd think after thirty years of trying someone would have figured out that the logical answer isn't to keep failing at making a good endgame, but to change things so that there isn't a "classical" 4x endgame.
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May 1, 2022 00:44
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Splicer posted:Stellaris and Planetfall have the criseses, which is nice. Stellaris otherwise falls into a lot of the standard AI traps though. I haven't picked up Stellaris in a few expansions, but reading through the DLCs it at least appears like they've been trying out new stuff for the lategame and late-midgame. Of course, it's still a Paradox game so the mere concept of a "victory" barely applies in the first place, but at least they're trying. Planetfall, for all the praise I have for it, does not really attempt anything interesting to solve the endgame issue IMO. My love for the game has always been for multiplayer and/or it's tactical combat. It's like the Total War series, where the game is good despite the strategic side, not because of it. Half-wit posted:When you've got a clearly-defined end-goal besides just 'paint the map' it seems like 4x'es starts crossing genres into something closer to puzzle games; less about developing a world in the manner you want and more about min-maxing to reach the goal. Perhaps, but it's at least a novel approach to an endgame... and one that I think has been severely underexplored. It seems like it'd be easier to "fix" the puzzle-game aspect than it would be to make an AI capable of keeping up with a powergaming player. Mayveena posted:I think for the most part devs have moved on to management games where this isn't as much of an issue. "Pure" 4x's seem to be on a steep decline, while a new management game comes out like every day. I think it's a combination of things. 1) it's just extremely hard to match the quality of the old titans of the genre - or, perhaps, to keep up with the perception of quality they have. A lot of people have rose-colored goggles when it comes to Civ, MOO, or even Alpha Centauri. 2) making decent AI is very difficult, and seeing as your average indie studio on Steam today is literally one or two people in an apartment there's a lot simpler genres to attempt in your first major foray at development. Even if you are the type that would accept the challenge, you probably aren't able to handle the graphic demands of a 4x as opposed to, say, a management game or roguelike. 3) as opposed to the indie devs doing it for the enjoyment/experience, the biggest companies are doing it for the money... and if you're doing it for the money, you either need to be a mobile game, a subscription service, or a Skinner box. 4x games don't lend themselves to any of these very easily. 4) between 2 and 3 above, you're basically left with the mid-size legacy devs - Firaxis, Triumph, Stardock, etc. Most of them already have established franchises they're working off of, without much incentive to push the bounds of the genre. Amplitude stands out as a major exception here, and to their credit they did do some neat things with their first couple Endless games... but, after those first couple titles, they've also started getting gun-shy about steering too far away from what they've done in the past. I can't blame these guys very much though, because for the smallish studios you really can't afford to take a loss on any of your titles or else your company might stop existing at all.
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May 1, 2022 01:27
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Which of these games has the best star trek and or star wars mods thatd probably be more fun than galciv anyway
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May 1, 2022 01:46
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Worf posted:Which of these games has the best star trek and or star wars mods Stellaris has some incredibly high effort Star Trek and Star Wars mods. They're a bit of work to get into and game performance is not great, but the overall experience is pretty on point.
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May 1, 2022 02:06
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Complications posted:Stellaris has some incredibly high effort Star Trek and Star Wars mods. They're a bit of work to get into and game performance is not great, but the overall experience is pretty on point. The Star Trek mod at least has ways around this with a bunch of options to reduce minors, or outright play on maps that are only one or two quadrants of the galaxy and have notable "invasions" use spawning factions or crises.
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May 1, 2022 02:19
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PerniciousKnid posted:How long until we can just use machine learning to develop AI for every game? Machine learning is extremely powerful and effective but how long it takes and how processing power intensive it is both increase dramatically the more complex the situation you're telling your AI to learn how to solve. It's easy to teach a computer to play, say, Tic Tac Toe or Connect Four through machine learning. It's enormously harder to teach it to play Civ, because Civ has several orders of magnitude more possible scenarios, more ways to react to those scenarios, and less defined rules to restrict the player's reaction choice. Then, even if you managed to devote sufficient time/processing power to allow the AI to crunch the quadrillions of Civ scenarios required to build an organic decision tree, your final hurdles are making sure that this AI doesn't balloon the system requirements of the game and also to make sure that it's actually fun to play against and doesn't just play completely flawlessly every game and mash 99% of players into paste. And then you get to redo the entire process every time you release an expansion with new mechanics or push out some new faction DLC or do a big balance patch.
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May 1, 2022 02:29
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The updates on this machine learning project are really interesting. https://www.general-staff.com/
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May 1, 2022 03:29
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The Chad Jihad posted:Yeah I've often thought of this as a solution, but it gets weird when the player then takes the province and the wave function has to collapse into something the player can work with. Also I feel like I remember reading some developer somewhere saying that crunching numbers is what AI does naturally well anyways so abstracting those out doesn't always help
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May 1, 2022 17:05
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