Fascinating, and wonderful to see others are out there who are weird like me, and who will actually attempt to extend Civilization games over extremely long periods. I have a Civ4 game that I've been playing for about 4 straight years now, and admittedly the file has gotten so big that it periodically taxes my system resources to their limits (Unfortunately, Civ4 suffers from poor memory management and is fairly leaky. Especially w/ mods).
The problem with Civ4 is that the AI is so hyper-aggressive that long-term stability is all but impossible, unless I become a dominant superpower and take on the role of "world police," intervening in every war of aggression on the side of the underdog. But after awhile, there's really no fun in that. So I have tried to cultivate a game in which a few superpowers are at least my equals, if not my superiors. Since I'm always going to war to defend whoever's about to get wiped out, unfortunately, I'm switching sides constantly, and diplomacy is basically out of the question. (None of the AI players will even return my calls, so to speak. We've all nuked each other so many times over that we won't even speak to each other now).
The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict. No, when it declares war, it won't cease until either it's beaten or it totally annihilates its enemy. It's like a Terminator. It becomes quickly apparent that the Nash Equilibrium in a game of Civ4 is one nation standing, while all others have ceased to exist. The game drives ineluctably toward this conclusion, unless the human player puts aside his own nation's interests in pursuit of global stability and game longevity. (And, ironically, being the sole force for stability renders him a political pariah among all the other nations). It's sort of like trying to play one sport, when all the other players in the game have been programmed to play another.
Sometimes I wish the AI were more sophisticated, and/or that it could be incentivized to prefer economic growth and interests over nonstop warmaking. Or that one possible victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind (i.e., "Global Victory," instead of just one nation's domination of all others by X or Y measure, or else its complete extirpation of all other peoples on the planet). I realize that's not the game that 99.99% of Civ players want to play, but it's refreshing to hear that I'm not the only one.
>The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict.
This is why I don't play civ. Total war AIs are a bizarre choice in a strategy game. I dislike it when games are setup in a way where I'm the only one thinking strategy and the AI opponents are there to give me a sense of action. Total war in the real world is rare.
>Or that one possibly victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind
When I was a kid I played a strategy game on the original Mac. I think it was called Balance of Power. The game punished you when war broke out. It didn't encourage it. The game ended if you and the Soviets got into a nuclear conflict. Why can't more games have rational goals instead of just being a more advanced form of Pacman?
"This is why I don't play civ. Total war AIs are a bizarre choice in a strategy game. I dislike it when games are setup in a way where I'm the only one thinking strategy and the AI opponents are there to give me a sense of action. Total war in the real world is rare."
Agreed 100%. To me, it seems silly -- not to mention cynical and fatalistic -- that the sole purpose of diplomacy in Civilization games is to add a strategic dimension to warmaking. That's what it is. The game is basically in a constant state of war, and peace only exists if something is going wrong: i.e., the powers are (momentarily) too evenly balanced to attack one another, or someone's just biding time to sneak-attack someone else, or everyone's spending a few years recovering from World War XXIV before gearing up for World War XXV.
That said, Civlization can still be an immensely fun and rewarding game. It's not the game I want it to be, but I enjoy trying to squeeze every last ounce of emergent gameplay from it.
"Why can't more games have rational goals instead of just being a more advanced form of Pacman?"
I suspect because there just isn't a big enough market for games of that nature. Maybe there is a handful of us out there. Maybe a relatively small handful, but one that's willing to pay a fair amount for a really great, truly strategic global power game. I dunno. Maybe it's worth organizing, or Kickstarting, or what have you. If any game devs out there are reading this and are interested, know that there's a niche crossing its fingers for you.
> I suspect because there just isn't a big enough market for games
> of that nature. Maybe there is a handful of us out there. Maybe a
> relatively small handful, but one that's willing to pay a fair
> amount for a really great, truly strategic global power game. I
> dunno. Maybe it's worth organizing, or Kickstarting, or what have
> you. If any game devs out there are reading this and are
> interested, know that there's a niche crossing its fingers for
> you.
I'm actually working on an in-browser MMO strategy game set in space that will try to balance around long run[a] strategy and diplomacy instead of just constantly-at-war deathmatches. Of course, relying on humans rather than AI does help.
I suspect that the market is bigger than the big publishers are willing to take a risk on, especially if it was written to be run within browsers (including mobile browsers) and was fun to play.
I have considered Kickstarter, but it seems like most Kickstarter game projects fail unless they go viral first so there's definitely a major risk[b] in going public too early.
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[a] One way to make the games last a long time (perhaps indefinitely) is to make it a slow-playing game, such as using Civilization-style simultaneous turns that refresh by default once a day. This would also put more focus on forming alliances, socializing, and making strategies. Of course, the issue with this is that there would be a massive surge of traffic on the servers during turn refresh times.
[b] The main risk of Kickstarter is the uncertainty in receiving funds. I could underestimate costs on purpose and have a decent chance of being funded, but with an insufficient amount, or I could provide the "real" amount and have a very high chance of getting no money at all, even though a little bit would go a long way. Neither outcome seems ideal, especially when people would assume that "funded" means that the game is ready to be released given a certain amount of time.
You mean something like Planetarion or Orion's Belt?
To be clear, your phrasing seems to present this as a novel approach, though it is not. Regardless, it's all about the particular game design that makes or breaks a game so I wish you success, it just struck me that maybe you were not aware of this fairly large genre based on how your text sounded.
> To be clear, your phrasing seems to present this as a novel
> approach, though it is not.
Obviously, the idea of a strategy game[a] in a browser is as old as web browsers themselves. I even played a few in the mid-2000s.[b] There's lots of them, written in PHP, and with a fairly static experience.[c] There's a reason, though, that when asked for my inspirations, I'll name desktop games like Civilization II rather than browser games.
The novel thing isn't the idea, it's the opportunity that HTML 5 gives for the execution of the idea. I'm not original. I'm just lucky enough to be at the right place and the right time. My particular execution of the ultimately older-than-computers[1] idea is possible only because of <canvas>.[d]
Digital portable media players existed as far back as 1979 and MP3 players go back to about 1997,[2] but the iPod didn't take off until 2005.[3] It's possible to have the right idea, but years too early and with poor execution.[e]
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[a] Don't just limit it to space. There's plenty of non-space ones, too! There's usually not that big of a difference in how a browser game is played based on the setting.
[b] My observation in footnote a of my previous post that a once-a-day refresh would stress the server is something I experienced in one of the games I played.
[c] Many of them are better than anything Zynga has written, though.
[d] My game was originally going to be a desktop game. That's not very interesting compared to the challenge of doing it in HTML 5 and JavaScript.
[e] The poor execution is often due to being years (or decades) too early.
Agreed 100%. To me, it seems silly -- not to mention cynical and fatalistic -- that the sole purpose of diplomacy in Civilization games is to add a strategic dimension to warmaking.
Out here in the real world, war is a continuation of politics, by other means.
Same thing, really, as your description of Civ II. The goal of diplomacy/warmaking is for one's side to come out ahead of the other.
I hope we've come at least a bit further since the renaissance. Diplomacy doesn't have to be a zero-sum game - indeed it rarely is in the real world. War, on the other hand, is very much that. So in that respect, war is the failure of diplomacy, not the continuation of it.
War is actually a negative sum game today; even "winning" you lose a lot. It's not clear to me if this was ever different for anything larger than Viking raiding parties, though.
That's still possible in a negative sum game; all negative sum means is that the sum of the benefits to all parties is less than the sum of the costs to all parties. So if say the US hoses the Mexicans but good it can still come out ahead as long as the Mexicans go down hard.
In Civ 4 the different leaders have personality. Ghandi is peaceful and will never backstab a weak player, Montezuma is batshit insane and lusts for blood, Isabella from Spain is a religious fanatic, Mansa Musa will quickly forget past wars and is happy to make peace to trade techs. A player can also befriend and ally a KI and win jointly.
There is a Google Tech Talk from the formet Civ lead programmer about this "Fun AI". In Civ 4 the Vanilla AI doesnt focus that much on winning. ManyAI Mods implement a more total War style and brutal min-max-gaming with huge armies to challenge experienced players. Also Civ 5 abandoned the Civ 4 style of diplomacy and replaced it with "hidden box" and a "Hard AI" which plays to win. It was at release date a huge disappointment of many veteran Civ players.
Ghandi always goes for the nukes though. I'm convinced this is an in joke added by the developers of the game to mess with us. Ghandi is one of the most agressive AIs if he views you as a threat.
Fate of the World (http://fateoftheworld.net/) is an interesting indie strategy game. You play as a world organization and your goal in the main scenario is to prevent global warming. The problem is, as interesting as the theme is, the base game had serious issues with balance and simply understanding cause and effect, so it was difficult and not always fun (kind of like trying to solve global warming in real life! :)) I still suggest that everyone looking for an interesting take on 4x strategy games check it out.
In general board games tend to have much more varied themes and goals than video games, and often have limited direct conflict between players or none at all.
Paradox Games (www.paradoxplaza.com) are supposed to be historically accurate, if your main concern is realism. In practice they don't always achieve this goal but they do a better job at it than Civ.
In the board game Twilight Struggle, a game about the Cold War (& #1 on boardgamegeek.com), you lose if you escalate matters to defcon 1 and cause a nuclear war. A big part of the strategy, though, is knowing how to cause your opponent to inadvertently trigger defcon 1 (http://twilightstrategy.com/2011/12/12/general-strategy-defc...).
The guy also wrote a book about how the game works, which has some good insights into real geopolitics. Can't find the link, unfortunately, but it was a really good read.
This is why the master of orion 1 AI fascinates me, especially considering how old it is. Usually, it doesn't even care to declare war. it might just expand straight through you. It might declare war for exactly 3 systems and stop. It might go on a total war. It might just start shooting your ships without even being in an actual war. It's just weird how different it feels from many modern AIs.
I recently started playing Civ V, and was surprised at how the AI approached the first war I had started against me: the AI made a really lucrative offer in exchange for right of passage through my territory, then moved a bunch of units in and declared war on me. After losing the initial wave of units and the second invading wave without any territory changing hands, the AI asked for a cease-fire. When I declined, the AI came back in a few turns and sued for peace, offering me most of his treasury and a few other perks to get me to agree to the cease-fire. I wasn't too impressed by the initial decision to take me on, but the rest of the process seemed quite a bit more complex than anything from previous Civ games.
I'm in a game of Civ V now and experienced the exact same thing you described.
Playing as India and going for a few big cities and a mass cultural strategy, but I keep getting dragged into a war with the civ to the south. Keeps backstabbing me, attacking, losing most of his units, giving me the bank for peace and 5 turns later repeating the whole thing.
Problem is, I just can't support a military large enough to defeat the civ outright - so I'm now just building a line of forts along my border and leaving my army there. Waste of money, but I have no other choice.
Frustrating, but I appreciate that I'm being forced into do something I don't want to do rather then blindly following my preferred strategy to an easy victory.
I don't know Civ4's AI routines, but it might be such that after a certain year passes, it decides that the only way to stop the human player is total war. Before that it can be less aggressive.
I have a game of Civ1 somewhere where it takes about a half-hour to get through each turn because each city demands attention. I'd love to modify the ROM to skip the animations.
Fun fact: The original Civilization actually had it hardcoded into the AI that if the player was in the lead when the year 1900 was reached, all the AI would declare war on her.
It's slightly less obvious in the later games, but there are definitely still diplomatic penalties for the human player such that the AI are less likely to make deals with them and more likely to declare war.
Anyone interested should read Soren Johnson's blog (http://www.designer-notes.com/). Soren was lead game designer and AI programmer on Civilization IV, and he actually designed the ruleset and the AI hand-in-hand, so that they would have a game the AI could actually play well.
"I don't know Civ4's AI routines, but it might be such that after a certain year passes, it decides that the only way to stop the human player is total war. Before that it can be less aggressive."
What seems more likely, at least in my experience, is that the AI is always trying to pursue a single goal: beating everyone else. It will select whatever means it deems possible at any point in time. It will make calculations, each turn, about the relative strength of its military versus the strength of its intended target, or else the combined strength of its allies' militaries against the strength of an opposing alliance's militaries. That's about it. It's always looking for an excuse to attack somebody. The only thing that holds it back is any sort of power imbalance sufficiently not in its favor.
There are some AI "personalities" and leader traits in the game that will favor more aggressive styles than others. But generally speaking, a more aggressive AI personality is simply an AI personality that has a lower threshold for declaring war. It will go to war with slightly riskier odds than a less aggressive personality will. But they'll all go to total war if the odds are sufficiently stacked in their favor. The "aggressive" trait is really just a sliding scale of risk tolerance.
Gandhi and some other like Abraham Lincoln wont ever declare war if they are pleased. For all other leaders you have to go to the "friendly" relationship status. The exception is Catherine the Great of Russia. That bitch is the only one who can be bribed into war even if she is friendly with the victim.
There is lore that Gandhi's nuke-trigger-happy code was fat-fingered from 1 to 12. And so he will always nuke if he can. It started as error, grew into joke, became accepted as tradition, and became expected in all the sequels.
Well, there's 3 diplomacy phases: Phase 1, when everyone ignores you. Phase 2, when everyone is friendly. Phase 3, total war. You go through #1 and #2 quickly, then all that remains is #3.
The problem with Civ4 is that the AI is so hyper-aggressive that long-term stability is all but impossible, unless I become a dominant superpower and take on the role of "world police," intervening in every war of aggression on the side of the underdog. But after awhile, there's really no fun in that. So I have tried to cultivate a game in which a few superpowers are at least my equals, if not my superiors. Since I'm always going to war to defend whoever's about to get wiped out, unfortunately, I'm switching sides constantly, and diplomacy is basically out of the question. (None of the AI players will even return my calls, so to speak. We've all nuked each other so many times over that we won't even speak to each other now).
The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict. No, when it declares war, it won't cease until either it's beaten or it totally annihilates its enemy. It's like a Terminator. It becomes quickly apparent that the Nash Equilibrium in a game of Civ4 is one nation standing, while all others have ceased to exist. The game drives ineluctably toward this conclusion, unless the human player puts aside his own nation's interests in pursuit of global stability and game longevity. (And, ironically, being the sole force for stability renders him a political pariah among all the other nations). It's sort of like trying to play one sport, when all the other players in the game have been programmed to play another.
Sometimes I wish the AI were more sophisticated, and/or that it could be incentivized to prefer economic growth and interests over nonstop warmaking. Or that one possible victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind (i.e., "Global Victory," instead of just one nation's domination of all others by X or Y measure, or else its complete extirpation of all other peoples on the planet). I realize that's not the game that 99.99% of Civ players want to play, but it's refreshing to hear that I'm not the only one.