|
That Guy Bob posted:They kept stations shenanigans for Distant Worlds 2? Please tell me they got rid of the construction yard voodoo or mining components having a extremely low cap so it was always a waste putting more than 3(?) mining components on anything, including mining stations. Or my favorite cheese, building a single massive research station on your homeworld and capping your research for the rest of the game. There are limits for that in 2. Labs are large, the starbases only have a few bays large enough to fit labs, etc. Making "manual" mining ships by putting miners and cargo holds on military designs still works though. Hello zentabia glut. 
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 22:35
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 11:12 |
|
|
I found an old copy of SMAC on my computer and copied it to my son's computer, and we've been playing a bunch of it lately, and god drat I forgot how much more fun this is than most of the 4xs I've played since. Playing with my son has been especially fun, since he has some clear rules: Deirdre is always his friend, and if she doesn't want to be he will make her. Yang is always his enemy, no matter what. And he will absolutely stab in me in the back at every opportunity if one opens up, but he will immediately apologize and try to give me tech/money to make up for having done so after a few turns (he's keeping the cities though). One of the best parts about playing SMAC was playing against other leaders who felt like they had personalities, at least a little bit, and my playing with my son is a lot like that, compared to the boringness of most 4x players I've played with trying to optimize everything. Narsham posted:Asymmetric play is one way to break this cycle. I think differing and compatible victory conditions are the other. Have AI sides playing for objectives that aren’t player objectives, and allow for multiple game winners. To touch on this, the absolute best modern 4x experience I had was a game of Stellaris with five other people where we all got to pick from a pool of a few "secret" victory conditions at the beginning of the game. So completely optimal play might let you "win" the game (if anyone wanted to actually play that long) in the traditional way, but for the most part we were just pursuing our own goals and trying to figure out who had compatible goals and who had opposed ones. Whenever we stopped playing, we got points based on how well we accomplished our goals. As an example, my main victory condition was "Spread and Flourish" - I got points for the number of planets my species was on, the total population of my species, and a nice cap off for having more of my species in the galaxy than an other player. Other players didn't know this was my main goal, but it ended up directing pretty much all of my behaviour. I would do things like giving planets to allies or even enemies that made no sense from a classic Stellaris perspective but seemed to make the game much more interesting for everyone else. It meant I got along well surprisingly well with one of the hostile slaver empires who was confused by how readily I worked with them - but then, my race reproduced fast and were useful for colonizing new worlds. There was still plenty of conflict, of course! I was happy to work with anyone to wipe out "purist" species, for example, and break open one of the ancient civs, but honestly working perpendicular to the other folks who were playing was just so much damned fun in so many ways. The competition wasn't direct (scores let you get an idea sort of of how well you did comparatively, but also some goals were clearly much harder than others) but there was always something like my "have the most of your species" by the end of the game that at least let you decide you were a winner or a loser. And since they were secret, and some of them were very much subterfuge based, it was great to just be able to tell bald faced lies about what you were trying to accomplish to get people to trust you. I wish there was an actual 4X game with that stuff built in instead of only being able to be shoehorned in by humans players. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Mar 20, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 23:19
|
|
|
Distant Worlds 1 actually had a similar mechanic with its special racial victory scorea/conditions, but I don't know if that made it into 2.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 23:27
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:I found an old copy of SMAC on my computer and copied it to my son's computer, and we've been playing a bunch of it lately, and god drat I forgot how much more fun this is than most of the 4xs I've played since. This is a great story, thank you for sharing, and it reminds me of being a kid playing MoO2 with friends  I don't think there's game mechanics to accommodate all this "they're in the same room as me, and we want to be friends next week too!" type of metagaming. And I wouldn't expect it out of the the 4X games of the time, either.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 23:41
|
|
|
Are there any 4x’s that let games continue even when players are quit and anyone can drop in to take control of a bot player? I remember civ 4 had public lobbies and the like for that which was nice if you just wanted to play an hour of mindless civ for a bit, but I think they stopped doing it after 4
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2023 23:59
|
|
|
Lots of innovative ways to handle the tactical ship combat. I'd take a game with quick turn-based ship combat that uses cards to resolve them: different systems give you attack, special, or defensive cards that you can play on your turn, and combat takes a few rounds maximum. Or build a more granular strategic layer combat system. When you attack an enemy system, there's a round of combat against their long-range deep-space ships which shoot and flee, then a round against system defenders and long-range defenses, then a round against surviving system defenders and planetary defenses. Or use RPG mechanics and have each fleet be the equivalent of one character with stats and abilities generated from the ships and their equipment.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 00:42
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:
Isn't that basically Solium Infernum.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 00:52
|
|
|
V for Vegas posted:Isn't that basically Solium Infernum. I never played it, but nothing I read about it lead me to believe it had any of those elements, no. The new one doesn't seem like it will have any of those elements either?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 01:00
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:I found an old copy of SMAC on my computer and copied it to my son's computer, and we've been playing a bunch of it lately, and god drat I forgot how much more fun this is than most of the 4xs I've played since. I did the exact same thing with Deidre and Yang. That balding motherfucker was always a gigantic rear end in a top hat, and usually holed up in some pisshole of Planet with a handful of impoverished hovels just begging to be steamrolled. Diedre, on the other hand, was usually both powerful and willing to be friendly since I usually played Zakharov, Santiago or Lal (or Deidre herself). The only person who was even more hateful than Yang was Godwinson, who without fail would be gigantic. I never understood how since every time I played Believers they felt like a dogshit faction.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 04:33
|
|
|
I agree with your description of Yang, but doesn't the same apply to Miriam? She spams a lot of colonies that are worthless 3-pop shitholes, but she can park a unit that can bombard in there and be an absolute nuisance. I honestly don't think the Believers were meant to feel like a fun faction to play, but they're an excellent antagonist, because sci-fi 4X fans generally don't like evangelizing nut-jobs, and she is written as a horrifying example of one. Yang's version of... Communism? is weird, but at least you can play as them sort of OK. Now, Deirdre is a problem because she takes over half the planet and you have to do something about that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 04:43
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 04:45
|
|
|
This seems like planet buster time I know that fucks you up royally with the rest, but what are you supposed to do with that?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 04:49
|
|
|
FrancisFukyomama posted:Are there any 4x’s that let games continue even when players are quit and anyone can drop in to take control of a bot player? I remember civ 4 had public lobbies and the like for that which was nice if you just wanted to play an hour of mindless civ for a bit, but I think they stopped doing it after 4 I think that’s standard for newer Paradox games like Stellaris.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 05:05
|
|
|
orangelex44 posted:I did the exact same thing with Deidre and Yang. That balding motherfucker was always a gigantic rear end in a top hat, and usually holed up in some pisshole of Planet with a handful of impoverished hovels just begging to be steamrolled. Diedre, on the other hand, was usually both powerful and willing to be friendly since I usually played Zakharov, Santiago or Lal (or Deidre herself). The only person who was even more hateful than Yang was Godwinson, who without fail would be gigantic. I never understood how since every time I played Believers they felt like a dogshit faction. Not probing enough.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 05:31
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:I honestly don't think the Believers were meant to feel like a fun faction to play, but they're an excellent antagonist, because sci-fi 4X fans generally don't like evangelizing nut-jobs, and she is written as a horrifying example of one. I actually enjoy playing as Miriam. She's very good at probes and different types of growth, and if you can get a decent economy going there's lots of fun to be had by just ignoring the whole "research" bit of the game and letting everyone else handle that while you focus on living life the best you can! Probably my second favorite faction to play. I also see her as kinda sympathetic. She's no luddite - her quotes about how it was never the streets that were evil, and there's a lot of stuff where she genuinely feels like she comes down on the right side of things in terms of "hey maybe we shouldn't turn over all of society to be run by machines". My son exclusively plays Spartans (Although he names them the Spartan Runaways and imagines them as defectors from the original, now destroyed Spartan faction he played in the tutorial). He doesn't seem to have any opinion on Miriam, not yet anyway.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 05:50
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:I actually enjoy playing as Miriam. She's very good at probes and different types of growth, and if you can get a decent economy going there's lots of fun to be had by just ignoring the whole "research" bit of the game and letting everyone else handle that while you focus on living life the best you can! Probably my second favorite faction to play. There's a video floating around youtube of all the projects back to back and if you take them with the tech quotes early on you see a lot of Miriam, but then she disappears midway or so through it and then re-appears near some endgame stuff like the self-aware colony (We Must Dissent) and the teleportation gate wondering if it remembers to transfer the soul as well. Just all around great writing that really made a ton of SMAC work despite the faults, technical restrictions, and gameplay weirdnesses. I also love one early game quote that says "Einstein said that God does not play dice." and then a much later quote says "Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." Ardryn fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 06:00
|
|
|
Yeah! It really is surprisingly good writing. I also love the Planet-voice and how it changes. A 4x with character development for both the leaders and the world you play on, it really is impressive. Are there any decent, like "local-sized" 4x games out there? Something played out over maybe a city level, or something? I feel like I played one decent web game like that once, but it's always felt a bit weird to me because it seems like it would be fertile ground for expanding the basic 4x formula in interesting ways while still building off familiar mechanics.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 06:57
|
|
|
Libluini posted:As a huge weirdo who really, really likes tinkering around in extensive ship designers, my favorite is still Space Empires V. I honestly don't think it's possible to get that drat game working on modern windows, and the ai was just utterly busted on release and never got better It's sad, space empires 4 was legit fun and insanely easy to mod. But definitely looks dated in this day and age
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 07:22
|
|
|
SMAC is easily the best 4x game ever made. it really hits a great sweet spot in terms of complexity; making the factions based on ideology was inspired, uses it's time to tell a really cool story and really build a world. Yeah, it's got bad AI and a bunch of OP poo poo, but all of these games do and SMAC actually does everything else so much better. Unpopular 4X Opinion: Stacks of Doom are better than 1UPT Competition in 4x revolves around economies, and your military is economic power made manifest. Trying to add tactical depth by forcing armies to spread out muddies the water, and wastes everyone's time.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 07:41
|
|
|
Stacks of doom are better than 1upt, The AI can play stacks of doom, but 1upt Crushes AI and favors the human so much because of it. However, Stuff like 6upt works best i find. doesn't break the AI so much, and has more depth for humans, but 6upt kinda sucks for dev time
ssmagus fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 07:58
|
|
|
Infidelicious posted:Competition in 4x revolves around economies, and your military is economic power made manifest. Trying to add tactical depth by forcing armies to spread out muddies the water, and wastes everyone's time. This x 1000 If you want to play a tactical war game, go play a tactical war game. Playing a tactical war game clumsily grafted onto a 4X is almost always getting the worst of both worlds.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 07:59
|
|
|
UCS Hellmaker posted:I honestly don't think it's possible to get that drat game working on modern windows, and the ai was just utterly busted on release and never got better Uh... Space Empires V is on GOG and Steam and works perfectly fine on my PC. I even got the SE-collection on GOG, which includes all five games.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 08:15
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:I never played it, but nothing I read about it lead me to believe it had any of those elements, no. The new one doesn't seem like it will have any of those elements either? There are a few different ways to win, ranging from winning an election to just plain old military take over of the counting house. But the secret objective part is basically the "power behind the throne" perk or whatever it was called. Basically there was an option to become another player's vassal and settle for second place. But if you had that perk you would actually win the game. I think there was also a perk where you just designated a player, and if they would have won you win instead. But I might be thinking of the Dune board game there.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 09:02
|
|
|
Solium Infernum also had a thing where you could spend resources to gain secret objectives during the game, completion of which would award VPs unknown to other players. Between that and the 'Kingmaker' trait....who is actually winning can be extremely murky. Not only is the ostensible leader making themselves a huge target, but they might not even be the actual leader. Only those players spending resources on Prophetic rituals might know. And of course it might all be subverted by a surprise military attack on the Conclave...
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 12:58
|
|
|
Infidelicious posted:SMAC is easily the best 4x game ever made. it really hits a great sweet spot in terms of complexity; making the factions based on ideology was inspired, uses it's time to tell a really cool story and really build a world. I find these two opinions in the same post pretty drat amusing, considering how harshly SMAC punishes stacks of doom in multiple ways and how much it rewards you for spreading out your units intelligently and fighting in ways that aren't just "throw a bunch of guys in a stack at the enemy". It's a game that very effectively added tactical depth to its combat by forcing players to spread out their units. (1UPT is still far worse, of course, but the idea that it's in any way more tactical than a system like SMAC that lets you stack but has tactical considerations for doing so is kind of absurd) GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 13:46
|
|
|
Demiurge4 posted:Coming in to play the black sheep because I picked up Distant Worlds 2 the other day and I hate that I can't micro hard enough! You can switch auto-upgrades/refits off globally but unfortunately DW is a perfect example of a badly implemented unit designer, the entire tech tree is just dozens and dozens of incremental upgrades to bullshit like fuel tanks or crew quarters and you will cripple your fleet by forgetting to apply one but also the AI ship designer makes bafflingly terrible decisions all the time and if you leave auto-refit on your ships will do nothing but sit in the shipyard choking up the construction bays getting refurbished over and over so you're strongly incentivised to switch it all off A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 14:10
|
|
|
I’ve heard 1upt just chokes AIs to death and yeah it’s certainly been my experience that they suck at it without extreme cheating but I’ve never really heard an explanation for why. Chess computers are completely unbeatable, and it’s not like the military units in Civilization have particularly complex movements or abilities. Is it the addition of terrain? The uncertainty of starting positions?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 16:20
|
|
|
Mzbundifund posted:I’ve heard 1upt just chokes AIs to death and yeah it’s certainly been my experience that they suck at it without extreme cheating but I’ve never really heard an explanation for why. Chess computers are completely unbeatable, and it’s not like the military units in Civilization have particularly complex movements or abilities. Is it the addition of terrain? The uncertainty of starting positions? Chess is a static game that has had comical amounts of research thrown at it for decades. Go, similarly. 4X games have a couple of years to develop, more factors involved, a vastly smaller budget and programming team, and they're a moving target during and after because lol patches and balance changes and whoops that was a bug. Also, you have to have examples of optimal play before you can really aim to emulate and beat them. Which, again, the game isn't fully functional when the majority of resources are being expended on it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 16:34
|
|
|
Chess is a fixed, known situation with a very limited number of potential moves from the opponent. In Civilization, or any other computer game, the board changes every game, the pieces change every game, and the player's moves are effectively infinite at any given time. Further, in Chess, you alternate moving pieces, so the computer has the ability to react to everything you do, while in Civ or pretty much any other computer game, you move all your pieces before the computer can react. Basically, the complexity is many orders of magnitude higher.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 16:38
|
|
|
Also, chess is extremely simple, you just crush decision trees and call it a day, making a good AI for chess isn't complex and doesn't require special consideration, it's a project you can shove onto a year 2 or 3 CS student, give a week while regular courses are ongoing, and expect something decent, after that, it's all about having a big enough computer to solve it entirely.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 16:42
|
|
|
Most games with a limited number of unit types and terrain/modifier varieties are totally mathematically reducible to at least a much more optimized playstyle than you'll ever actually see, your viable moves in Civ aren't 'effectively infinite at any given time' lmao. But how many people do you suppose are going to buy a 4X that pumped its budget into refining a really challenging singleplayer over the one that invested that money in pretty graphics and lots of little random widgets to play with, or the one that all their friends are playing because it reminds them of the crappily designed games of their childhood? Hell, who even plays them competitively against other people the way people do games like Starcraft? Again outside the 4X space there's games with similar constraints where the AI is legitimately very good at playing, Frozen Synapse comes to mind. But that's a tactical game where the whole point is high-tension combat puzzle-solving, not noodling around the map making a little country without having to worry that if you waste some moves doing something silly the computer is going to eat you alive A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 17:07
|
|
|
Has anyone tried making a learning AI try to play Civ, or any other 4X? If the AIs can master Breakout, surely... Out of the two examples I've been yammering about, the AIs in MoO2 and SMAC are pretty simplistic. It spams new colonies, tries to play relatively aggressively when it comes to warfare but with crap units (there's that unit designer again!), and AIs don't seem very good at min-maxing their economy. It's usually awful playing a war of conquest in MoO2 when you invade the AI's planets and they're all undeveloped hellholes. And then of course on higher difficulties the AI just plain cheats with bonuses the player can't get, they get extra points in the race designer and stuff like that. This feels more like a game development issue, the dev cycle simply doesn't have time or money for someone to make a gee-whiz AI when they're still trying to get the game itself together. 4X games have a lot of randomness baked in, as pointed out above, and the "terrain hazards" in SMAC in the form of mind worms etc. and especially the Antarans in MoO2 can just delete colonies and unit stacks out of the blue. The AI would have to be pretty reactive to work around all that, and at the same time manage all the relative complexity of the game economy system itself. edit A Wizard of Goatse posted:Again outside the 4X space there's games that do combat quite well in comparable circumstances, Frozen Synapse comes to mind. But that's a tactical game where the whole point is high-tension combat puzzle-solving, not noodling around the map making a little country without having to worry that if you waste some moves doing something silly the computer is going to eat you alive Chess-like games like Into the Breach have an AI that simply chooses the sub-optimal move every now and then, at least on lower difficulties, to give the player a better chance. Though that game feels more like a puzzle game than a combat game in its execution. Rappaport fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 17:13
|
|
|
Mzbundifund posted:I’ve heard 1upt just chokes AIs to death and yeah it’s certainly been my experience that they suck at it without extreme cheating but I’ve never really heard an explanation for why. Chess computers are completely unbeatable, and it’s not like the military units in Civilization have particularly complex movements or abilities. Is it the addition of terrain? The uncertainty of starting positions? The change 1upt makes that screws over the AI is that it adds a strong concept of *sequencing* to unit moves. Without 1upt, each unit can basically move individually. An unit in a particular spot can look around to see what's nearby and if there's anything that is worth attacking and then go attack there. Just loop this logic over all your units and you can't go very wrong. With 1upt, the moves of each unit cannot be considered in isolation. An unit might "want" to go to a particular tile, but by doing so this will block another unit with a much more important job. It might be in fact a good idea for an unit to sacrifice what it wants and move away attacking so another unit can go in. The AI has to consider all the different orders in which its units can move, which explodes combinatorially with more units on the map. Chess computers are smart, but chess computers spend a number of seconds to move a single unit out of up to 16 a single move on a 8x8 grid. For a 4x turn they have to move potentially dozens of units on a massively larger grid. Turns would take minutes, maybe even hours. EDIT: ^^^ Into the Breach "AI" is just random. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 17:23
|
|
|
4x games genuinely are too complex for machine learning. This is for several reasons, but one of the bigger ones is that 4x games take a while to play. It takes a lot of repetitions for machine learning to not suck at like, mario brothers; but you can repeat runs of mario brothers extremely quickly, and you are running against a fixed scenario. Running a 4x game takes longer, especially considering for the machine learning to perform usefully you need to either have a human player in the loop to provide an opponent or to already have an AI programmed (lol)- either of which drastically slows down your ability to run the game quickly. Otherwise the only thing the ai will learn to do is to spam cities like mad and have the bare minimum military to fight off barbarians. if its a simulationist game like distant worlds forget it, you will never repeat the game enough times to work. Sims already chew cpu like crazy. Then you make a balance patch and the AI literally breaks and you have to redo it all from the start. TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 17:24
|
|
|
Fangz posted:EDIT: ^^^ Into the Breach "AI" is just random. Aww, well egg on my face then 
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 17:31
|
|
|
A Wizard of Goatse posted:your viable moves in Civ aren't 'effectively infinite at any given time' lmao Sure they are. You have dozens of cities, each of which have dozens of things they can do, including canceling the thing they were already doing to do something else. You have dozens of military units, each of which can move and attack in dozens of different ways on any given turn. Just the permutations on those with different sequencing is best expressed in scientific notation. That's without counting things like governments, techs, workers, etc. Unlike Chess, the Civ AI absolutely cannot crunch through every possible reaction to its moves. There simply is no way to do it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 17:31
|
|
|
Fangz posted:The change 1upt makes that screws over the AI is that it adds a strong concept of *sequencing* to unit moves. again, Frozen Synapse, where the AI routinely manages to not only not accidentally delete its little red dudes with friendly fire but effectively coordinate them in flanking maneuvers, in seconds, on a randomly generated map unconstrained by a grid system or movements of set distance. otoh half of this thread is about Civilization, a franchise that over the past thirty years has if anything gotten worse at doing anything with its units but bumrushing straight at the nearest opponent in a random gaggle, but now it has parks and religions and stuff. Zurai posted:Sure they are. You have dozens of cities, each of which have dozens of things they can do, including canceling the thing they were already doing to do something else. You have dozens of military units, each of which can move and attack in dozens of different ways on any given turn. Just the permutations on those with different sequencing is best expressed in scientific notation. That's without counting things like governments, techs, workers, etc. you can disband all your units and set your cities to only produce money until they're overrun but that's not really a possibility the AI needs special coding to work around vs. you doing the same thing save for one unit on the far side of the map, etc., it can just determine that there's few enough defending units in reach that it can make it to your capitol with [x] force and carry on. Deep Blue wasn't some LLM brute-force bullshit giving exactly equal weight to literally every possibility, a computer programmed by actual humans to deal in the relative handful of actually effective strategies and counters is plenty good enough to mop the floor with everyone who isn't a world-class grandmaster. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 17:32
|
|
|
Regular RTS AI is less taxing than 1upt AI because it doesn't require the AI to engage with the higher number of positions, the fuzyness at player scale allows it to just gently caress about and ignore most of that. Interlocking is mostly negated by halfway decent map design that can be demanded from the random generator's parameters. Civ5 AI for example doesn't have the option of being good, at all, it's just shoved into a tarpit that requires a fundamentally different approach, and that different approach wasn't used.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 17:58
|
|
|
A Wizard of Goatse posted:you can disband all your units and set your cities to only produce money until they're overrun but that's not really a possibility the AI needs special coding to work around Nice straw man. Try actually addressing the point I was making instead of making up a different point I never mentioned. EDIT: Seriously, the permutations for 12 units, each of which can make 12 different possible moves/attacks, is half a billion possible sequences of moves (and sequencing matters in 1UPT). Most Civilization game states past the very early game are much more complicated than that. Zurai fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 17:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 11:12 |
|
|
TheDeadlyShoe posted:4x games genuinely are too complex for machine learning. Hey, something I'm actually knowledgeable about! Machine learning is very very good at the sort of complexity you're describing, and no you don't need a human opponent or an existing AI to train them. 4x games would be a remarkably easy problem for adversarial networks to solve in fairly robust ways with modern design approaches. It doesn't even matter that games are particularly long (and they wouldn't be all that long for an AI) because any decent training network isn't going to be playing full games anyway. Absolutely no one developing 4xs right now is likely to have the skill to do any of that, nor do they have any real incentive to gain or develop or them, because that involves a lot of work and technical know-how, but it wouldn't be particularly difficult to train an AI to play a 4x game well enough to completely outshine any human player, since they are complex enough you don't need to get anywhere near "optimal" play, you just need heuristics slightly better than the ones human use. But who actually wants that? Do players care enough to make it worth the money to hire the talent or buy the hardware needed? Hell no, and most players would complain about the AI "cheating" if you bothered. This is video game development! If you can take a shortcut to avoid doing work the player can't see, that's what you're gonna do! Also, good luck getting someone who knows anything meaningful about machine learning to work at a game company at all in the current environment, hah. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Mar 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2023 18:03
|
|