Civ 4 AI Survivor: Season One Alternate Histories

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

You're welcome! And yeah, I think I mentioned this in my first writeups, but running these quickly convinced me that we're better off without it.

[MJW (ya that one)]

You're welcome! And yeah, I think I mentioned this in my first writeups, but running these quickly convinced me that we're better off without it.

If you want to see how good AI s actually are I think you would have to lower the difficulty to Immortal. Deity is a huge distortion of the actual game, shafting industrious civilizations because the production bonuses stack additively not multiplicativity.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Huayna Capac would be even better so he would still be #1 but other civs would change.

[shallow_thought]

You're welcome! And yeah, I think I mentioned this in my first writeups, but running these quickly convinced me that we're better off without it.

If you want to see how good AI s actually are I think you would have to lower the difficulty to Immortal. Deity is a huge distortion of the actual game, shafting industrious civilizations because the production bonuses stack additively not multiplicativity.

I feel ORG gets hit even harder. But Sullla's basic point about needing to keep game pace up probably overrides any "fairness" considerations. We just have to accept that we're seeing which leaders and civs are strong under the chosen conditions.

[MJW (ya that one)]

You're welcome! And yeah, I think I mentioned this in my first writeups, but running these quickly convinced me that we're better off without it.

If you want to see how good AI s actually are I think you would have to lower the difficulty to Immortal. Deity is a huge distortion of the actual game, shafting industrious civilizations because the production bonuses stack additively not multiplicativity.

I feel ORG gets hit even harder. But Sullla's basic point about needing to keep game pace up probably overrides any "fairness" considerations. We just have to accept that we're seeing which leaders and civs are strong under the chosen conditions.

I don't think game pace matters when you are not watching in real time like here. So if you drop the AP you might as well lower the difficulty to immortal. 

I remember T-hawk suggesting quick speed but that would shaft AGG civs because unit speed doesn't scale. 

FDR is the org/ind leader. I don't think he would be very good anyway... 

[MJW (ya that one)]

I also recall that spending a bunch of EP points makes the AI waste EP against player in a futile attempt to catch up. It would be correct to use fog-of-war hack instead and someone even offered a mod to Sulllla to make this happen. Churchill is the only leader who emphasizes EP so he would probably be a lot weaker but aside from that I think the difficulty is much worse.

[Kuro]

I do think it would be cool to find a way around needing the massive EP points for bar graphs and the like if possible.

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

The primary goal of these AHs is to see the "true" dynamics of the maps for the historical games. As such, I'm not looking to tweak the setup at all, and in fact doing so would be counterproductive. (I'm not removing the AP from the alternate histories, merely saying that removing it for the real competition starting in Season 5 was the right choice based on these.)

That said, this discussion did make me realize that I've had one thing different from the original games: the espionage points! I didn't know how these were done and didn't see the need for them in the first place (debug mode offers easy access to demos at any time), so I didn't worry about it and in fact stopped thinking about it in any capacity at all - whoops! I can't say there's been any clear pattern indicating that this did or did not significantly affect the games (and even putting in the EPs may not have anyway - the AHs are run using the game.aiplay command which removes the player from the game as it autoplays the turns), and at this point I'm in deep enough that there's no point in walking that back.

Meanwhile, as far as posting more alternate histories goes: Activity on the Discord is absolutely booming with discussion of the upcoming season, so it seems to me that now is a good time to put these on hold until there's more of a lull. Maybe during off weeks of this season, maybe afterwards. I was on an alternate histories kick for a couple of weeks so I now actually have writeups through Game 6 stored up and ready to post, but I'll wait to actually post them until there would be a bit more interest and they wouldn't immediately be forgotten in the other ongoing discussions. I'll be back with Game 4's results when I think the time is right!

[MJW (ya that one)]

This is going to shaft Chruchill in his game. However, he was first-to-day anyway. He might die faster than 200 turns though.

[haphazard1]

A better solution for maintaining information on the AIs would be helpful, as the espionage spending does distort things somewhat. Certain AIs have a high propensity to spend on espionage anyway, which is almost always a poor choice. The way espionage was added in the expansion without really adjusting the AI to understand it was not handled well by Firaxis, so we end up with AIs that just LOVE spy specialists and burn 10-20% of their commerce on the espionage slider.