Civilization 5 Announced

[Krill]

IIRC there were at least 2 map hacks. That was a player, Yoia, or something about 4 years ago that was kicked off the ladder for usinga map hack, but then he was dumb when he abused it (moving stacks in manners that only made sense with knowledge from a hacked map, for instance).

[Sullla]

Just wanted to share this little gem I saw posted at CivFanatics. Apparently the game settings were Egypt, Ancient Era, Continents, Tiny, King, Quick, and Random Personalities. After 160 turns (Quick speed = 240 turns Normal speed), the player's AI neighbor to the south looked like this:



One city, two warriors + scout for an army, zero tile improvements ever built. If one picture sums up the failure that is Civ5, this is it.

[T-hawk]

Well, to be fair, that's not a fundamentally broken game design. That could be fixed with some comparably minor AI tweaks to make sure it goes for workers and settlers. Civ 5 has deep flaws, but that's not necessarily one.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

But it wasn't building military either. Or anything.

[haphazard1]

It certainly appears pretty seriously broken to me, at least in terms of results. Maybe it is not the fundamental game design at fault, as T-hawk says, but that is pretty sad. 160 turns on quick and the AI has done essentially nothing.

I am curious as to what exactly it has done. Even with just a single city and no improved tiles, there should have been 250-300 hammers (at least) and a fair bit of gold. Plus research, of course -- given its current size of 17 the AI should have accumulated at least 1000 beakers over 160 turns, and probably more since early growth tends to be pretty quick.

Where did all of that output go?

[luddite]

wow they don't even have a worker. I don't get it- I thought that one of the changes they made in the patch was specifically to make the AIs expand more aggressively? Maybe that's one of the parts of the AI personality that's somewhat random- so if the AI get's a random low roll on expansion, they'll just sit there like that.

[v8mark]

I can see the Hanging Gardens and Chichen Itza from here, so presumably that's where all his hammers went...

[haphazard1]

v8mark -- OK, I did not look that closely at the image. I had considered wonders as a possibility, but in a lot of ways that is even worse. "Come get the good stuff! No defenses here!" Even a peaceful builder civ should expand to a few cities, IMHO, and have a semi-credible defense force. And where are the improved tiles? No excuse for that (unless someone has pillaged him clean without bothering to take the city). Even if tile improvements in Civ V do generally suck.

luddite, I could maybe buy the random personality shifts explanation -- if this was not Genghis Khan! If the random factor is big enough to make Genghis Khan into a non-expanding wonder builder, then you might as well just call them truly random personalities.

Hmmm. Does Civ V have a "fully random AI personality" option? That might explain it, at least partly. This is really a randomly generated, ultra-pacifist, wonder hog AI. It just happens to be hidden behind Genghis Khan's name.

Ah. Just noted in Sullla's first line that Random Personalities was on. So that presumably is the explanation, although the AI is still acting stupidly as I mentioned above.

[sunrise089]

T-Hawk, I think you're being a little too much of a devil's advocate for the dark side here. I get what you're saying and trust you that that flaw is more easily fixed than others, but still, we don't want to loose sight of the goal of the game here.

I mean, if an NFL wide receiver had excellent speed and caught every pass thrown to him, but fumbled the ball every single possession is the takeaway that he could be tolerable with only minor tweaking? I'd suggest most people would pay more attention to just how bad he sucks. And if the AI ever ends up in the situation it did in this game (no worker?! seriously?!) I again wonder what sort of things the AI testers actually looked for...

...maybe it was the combat AI

[ThERat]

This AI got the build wonders roll of the dice and since tile improvements are almost worthless, it did just what the programmers wanted it to do. build wonders.

I think in our abandoned SG on immortal, Egypt did a similar stunt just for us to take their wonder city. Totally brainless stuff if you ask me.

By the way, did anyone not notice that the SG part of civ 5 is as DEAD as it can get? I feel very sad what happened to the franchise. After playing for almost a decade of civilization, it was this succession game 'brotherhood' that got me really sucked into the game around 2004. It was vibrant for civ 3 as well as civ 4 and just following games could be a ton of fun.
Civ 5 is plain dead. It's honestly sad. Apparently the only ones left playing this game are those casual gamers who would never bother to play a succession game where one would need some patience to write down their turns and discuss things. Damn it.