Civ4 AI Survivor: Season Three

[Huinesoron]

TLDR: So as far as I can tell, the origin of Nuclear Gandhi meme was due to a typo (programmer typed 1 and then changed it to 2 without deleting the 1 for example) or intentional joke (possibly even a reference to one of the two spoilered things) in Civ5 where they gave him 12 on the nuke scale of 14.  The Civ1 explanation is inaccurate because the scale for aggression is 1-3 and it only became popular after people started complaining about Gandhi giving the nuclear smack down in Civ5.

This doesn't sound right to me; I know I remember hearing it before I even owned Civ IV. I can at least confirm that it predates CiV: this 2008 review of Civ:Revolution mentions it ("Nothing screams Sid Meier's Civilization like Gandhi threatening you with nuclear weapons while he shakes you down for technology.") I... had more post here, but it looks like other people have covered it.   The 2004 CivFanatics post antisocialmonkey links does show that the idea ("Never trust Gandhi with nukes...") was out there in 2004, before Civ IV was even out; unfortunately, before that you're into the days when everything wasn't on the internet.

Ultimately, I think we can all agree that this remains hilarious regardless of whether it was a bug or just a quirky feature due to normal game mechanics:

On-topic: I'm delighted to see AI Survivor again, and even more delighted to see a return of the written reports. I've never been one for watching videos, so being able to read about the crazy courses these games take is fantastic. Thanks, Sullla!

[Sullla]

Game Three took place earlier today and didn't go quite the way that the community expected. Thanks to everyone who was able to turn out today and take part in the Livestream. Special thanks to ArtDeco, who won the prediction contest for the third game with 24 points. We also had two unofficial "testing" entries that scored even higher, at 28 points and 25 points, which goes to show that randomly entering results sometimes works better than expected. Here's a bunch of links as we get ready for Game Four coming up in two weeks from today.

Next Game: Friday, 01 September 2017 at Noon EST

Overview Season Three AI Survivor Page

Current Bracket and Standings

Game Four Written Preview

Game Four Video Preview

Game Four Picking Contest Entry Form

Overview Map:

The recording of Game Three can be found here. I'm hoping to have the written report finished by the end of the weekends. Thanks all.

[Fluffball]

Request about the colors: Can you take into account that an extremely significant percentage of your audience is color blind when changing colors? The last game absolute heinous for that. Mao and Sitting Bull were the exact same color to me, Peter and Ghengis were the exact same color to me. 


Civs need to be different shades OR hues. If it's any help you can put put the map in grayscale and see if you can tell the difference between civs. If you can't it's likely about 12% of your audience can't either.

Edit: Not to be mr. complainy pants, I am loving this competition. It's just something that would make it better for like... 30 of your viewers or whatever.

[Ramkhamhaeng]

But another percentage of your audience dislikes every nation colour changes at all

@Fluffball: How does you solve this issue in general? Had you tried a software like Visolve to transform the video output on your monitor?

[Brian Shanahan]

I'm getting an error all day on the bracket and standings spreadsheet, both on my phone and on my desktop. Anybody else with this problem?

[RFS-81]

Re Gandhi: Damn, I wanted to believe that "Civ1 Gandhi goes crazy with nukes because of an integer wrap-around" story. Next you're telling me that Santa isn't real.

Jokes aside, I like reading the write-ups of those games, but I don't know enough about Civ4 to join the prediction game. I was wondering what "Peace Weight" means. It's confusing that the leaders seem to have a separate aggression stat. Does the peace weight just act as a sort of team colour?

[Fluffball]

But another percentage of your audience dislikes every nation colour changes at all

@Fluffball: How does you solve this issue in general? Had you tried a software like Visolve to transform the video output on your monitor?

I haven't used any software. If things are vastly different shades, it's pretty easy to tell them apart. For example France is a very dark blue and Sitting Bull is a (I think) very light yellow. Even in grayscale you could easily tell them apart. 

A lot of games take that into account since such a huge number of their customers are colorblind. It's a rare game that completely ignores that part of the market.

[Fluffball]

I was wondering what "Peace Weight" means. It's confusing that the leaders seem to have a separate aggression stat. Does the peace weight just act as a sort of team colour?

It's just a number assigned to every leader. If two AIs have similar numbers, they're predisposed to like each other and vice versa.

Very generally the leaders that got pigeonholed into being "bad" like Monty or Alex all get along with each, and the leaders you think of as being peaceful builders tend to all like each other (and the human player).

[Ruff_Hi]

@Sullla - really enjoying the games - keep up the good work.  Also ... you might give some thoughts to adding a commentator who can be the 'color commentator'.  You do the play by play and the other 'guy' can fill in some of the details ... maybe pick up more from the chat thread. I noted that you had an unofficial 2nd commentator for some of game #3

I might actually be available to watch #4 live (I have the day off work) ... but it is my anniversary so I might not be able to watch all of it.

Anyway, one aspect of watching the vids that I note is that we jump around a fair bit.  Totally understandable ... but if the default view showed more of the map, then you won't have to jump around so much.  The game defaults to a general zoom of '42'.  However, this number is editable via the ini file.  A higher number will show you more of the map by default.  You can still zoom in and out ... but the standard setting shows more map.

[haphazard1]

RFS-81, feel free to join in the predictions. Knowledge of Civ IV is not required, and may sometimes be a hindrance rather than a help. Some of the purely random entries are doing better than my predictions. You can make a semi-educated guess, but there are so many random factors with things like where the civs send their initial settlers or how religions spread that is is not really possible to predict with high certainty. It is still fun to try, though.

I tend to think of the peace weight value as putting leaders into the "warmonger" or "builder" camps. Warmongers like/respect other warmongers but dislike builders, and similarly the builders  like/respect other builders but dislike warmongers. The effect is not all that large (I think) compared to things like having different state religions (for most leaders, anyway, some care more and others less). But it can be enough to shift relations by one "level" (cautious to annoyed, for example) and that can trigger a threshold for allowing a leader to declare war when they otherwise would not.

The aggression rating is a separate value, and does not seem to be directly correlated to the peace weight. There is some relation in that the leader characteristics are based (if rather loosely) on the actual history of the various leaders.