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Honestly the AI doesn't handle units very well in civ iv either, it's just that its failings are less noticeable (and outplaying the AI on that axis feels like you're skillfully using mechanics to your advantage rather than cheaply exploiting a bad AI).
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Mar 22, 2023 07:15
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Anyway it turns out that even mid-level Go players can pretty reliably beat top AIs by exploiting specific weaknesses in how they evaluate the position. If you tried to machine-learn up your own 4X AI, it would almost certainly have a similar blind spot - and now not only is there a single "optimal" way to play, you as the designer have absolutely no control over what it's going to be.
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Mar 22, 2023 07:27
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Mzbundifund posted:What are these weaknesses? I thought AlphaZero could beat the best Go players in the world every time. https://goattack.far.ai/game-analysis#contents Essentially, the AI misevaluates a situation that is very rare in "normal" play (a group that comes around and loops back on itself), but isn't difficult to set up by an opponent looking to exploit that weakness.
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Mar 22, 2023 08:24
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If your interpretation of how good something is boils down to "did someone put time into creating it", then you seem like a literal caricature that enjoys receiving participation trophies. Sometimes someone spends a lot of time on something that just sucks.
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Apr 5, 2023 02:29
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Lowen posted:Each of these things represents work the developers of Planetfall did that the developers of SMAC did not, like the large variety of units, This is participation-trophy poo poo imo.
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Apr 5, 2023 03:08
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It doesn't actually matter from a "how good is the strategy layer" perspective. It's like Paradox selling you extra ship design packs. To be clear, I'm not going to say it's a bad thing, but it's not a good thing either. It's a neutral thing. This is why I mentioned the participation trophy metaphor - you're judging it as good because they must have spent a lot of time and effort on it, rather than looking at how it actually affects this specific part of the game.
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Apr 5, 2023 04:40
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A lot of that variety is irrelevant from the strategy layer perspective, though. A unit costs X resources and improves your army by Y (increasing the range of opposition that you can get a favourable battle against). A unit upgrade costs Z and improves your army by W. An economic improvement costs Q and doesn't improve your army at all in the short term. That's the essence of the strategy layer - you spend resources to improve your armies, and how much you do that (in order to snowball via military means) vs. investing in economic buildings to snowball via economy is the meat of the game. That variety is absolutely relevant on the tactical layer, for sure. I'm not going to contest that. That's probably one of the reasons the original discussion gave Planetfall's tactical layer a significantly higher score than the strategic layer.
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Apr 5, 2023 04:57
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"more complex" does not mean "more interesting". Omega Chess (10x10 board, adds two new types of piece) is way less strategically interesting than regular chess, even though it's undeniably more complex.
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Apr 5, 2023 06:13
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As a general game design thing, something being more complex means that it's worse. Your goal as a game designer is to ensure that any complexity you're adding is justified, that it brings upsides to the game that you literally couldn't get without bringing in that complexity.
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Apr 5, 2023 06:18
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If you define intelligence as the ability to predict the outcome of actions and use those projections as a basis for decision-making (which I think maps pretty well to a human understanding of "intelligence"), then a neural net is just as non-intelligent as a pre-programmed set of decisions. Both are less intelligent than monte-carlo tree search. Interestingly, it turns out that neural networks alone are pretty mediocre at playing games, even games with very simple rule sets. But using them to pick candidate moves to plug into MCTS, essentially "grafting on" the ability to predict how specific moves will turn out, is what makes them wildly successful.
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Apr 8, 2023 02:48
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GlyphGryph posted:and they acknowledge they misaligned the competition goal with what they were hoping to accomplish, I honestly think it turned out pretty well? Why does it matter that the competition goal doesn't match what the organisers were really hoping for? All the teams knew what the actual, measured goal was, and the goal in question was actually much easier for a NN-based AI to figure out than what an actual human would consider to be "best play". Even with that advantage, NNs still got absolutely crushed by traditional AI, and even the best "NN-based" entries actually mostly used a traditional hand-written AI and only delegated to a NN in specific scenarios. That doesn't seem like it turned out "pretty well" at all if you think that NNs are some sort of magic crutch for producing good AI with way less effort than doing it by hand!
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Apr 10, 2023 00:16
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Sometimes people choose to target a large audience because bringing joy to a lot of people (by creating something that they enjoy) is a good goal in itself. Especially when there's more than one person involved in creating something and they aren't necessarily going to have the same preferences for every single decision.
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May 1, 2023 16:21
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Generally speaking if you're just looking to use a single mod it's pretty easy, it's when you want to use more than one that things start to get a bit hairy. This applies to most moddable games, actually.
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Jun 18, 2023 03:07
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One of the X's is "explore" - which usually means that the player is not supposed to know the lay of the land to begin with. It's totally doable if you have a large-enough pool of designed scenarios, but random generation is usually the easiest way to achieve it.
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Sep 3, 2023 07:16
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Libluini posted:True, that's why alternate victory conditions became a thing. Even beyond that, games like Stellaris award you point victories even if you're really determined to roleplay Tyranids. (In Space Empires V for an older example, you can graciously allow the AI to completely surrender, which it will do if it feels it's too weak to do anything anymore.) Of course, sometimes you get self-sabotaging players that just turn off the alternate victory conditions... (Similar to the players that always choose the largest allowed map size and number of opponents, even when the game is better with a smaller scale)
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Oct 28, 2023 18:03
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IV's focus on doomstacks also meant that losing a big stack to a bad confrontation was war-deciding - losing a full army is more of a moderate setback when it only represents a tenth of your military power overall.
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Feb 12, 2024 11:27
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Ages are basically the tech leader getting to dictate the rules for every other player. (Or being forced to stall out and let other players catch up to their tech lead, if they're locked into a crisis age that they really don't want).
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Feb 23, 2024 00:44
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I imagine you could trigger age of blood by finding the tech leader and force-feeding them six of your own units, yeah?
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Feb 23, 2024 01:42
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Comstar posted:Sold. How do you put them into the resource pool though? There's basically two different production-related resources. One of them is for how fast the city builds buildings and units, the other is how much it contributes to the global pool that you use for building tile improvements. A lot of production-related things give you both, a few give you just one or the other. (At least as far as I remember from the demo). Mostly the amount you get just scales up as you scale up your city production.
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Feb 23, 2024 12:12
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THE BAR posted:You don't have workers at all. You accumulate points in a construction pool, that can be spent on tile improvements by just clicking the tile in question and picking a thing. Oh is that what outposts are for? I never figured that out lol
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Feb 23, 2024 12:14
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A ship designer is basically the definition of "sounds cool but results in bad gameplay". Either the AI understands it and makes perfectly good designs, in which case it's a complicated system that doesn't really add much to the game. Or the AI understands it and makes perfectly good designs, but the player isn't allowed to use that and has to make all their designs manually, in which case it's tedious busywork. Or the AI doesn't really understand it and the player can get a huge edge over them by doing a bunch of tedious busywork. Master of Orion's ship designer was bad too, but it largely gets a pass because it's from an era where nearly every game had some tedious bad gameplay somewhere in it.
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Mar 25, 2024 23:26
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Even in games where that does happen to some extent, the problem with most ship designers is that the number of meaningful decisions you need to make is very low compared to the total number of decisions you're forced to make. Constructing improvements has a similar problem - the macro-scale decisions you're making are "how much of my output should I reinvest in getting more output" and occasionally "what should I focus on getting more of" - but to accomplish that you need to make a bunch of not-very-meaningful decisions about "what improvement do I build next". There's a reason people want to automate that poo poo in the late-game, and then get frustrated by how the automation doesn't do as good a job as they would of aligning it with their strategic goals.
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Mar 26, 2024 00:32
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Lowen posted:All that matters to my point is: For a given person, out of all the 4X games someone's enjoyed, how many of those 4X games had a unit designer? No, out of all the 4x games I've enjoyed that had a unit designer, it's generally been in spite of the unit designer rather than because of it. Sword of the Stars is about the closest it's gotten to being a worthwhile inclusion, since the technology system causes the things you have access to to vary significantly from game-to-game, and you have to simultaneously design for tactical effectiveness and strategic usability, but the actual process of designing ships was still a bit of a drag.
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Mar 26, 2024 09:45
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