Civ4 AI Survivor 2: The AI-stralian Outback

[Gazglum]

Random personalities ruins the fun entirely. I would be interested in using one of the better AI mods though, as its much more fun to see AIs actively pursuing victory goals instead of stumbling into them.

[Gavagai]

As for Gavagai's suggestion of K-Mod, it could be interesting to see smarter AI actions. One question there as I haven't really used the mod except for one quick playthrough, does it change anything other than AI logic/programming? As in, does it change the flavor/preferences from the XML? Because if it does that would go right back to muddying the waters in understanding why a particular leader succeeded - was it because his XML personality works better with smarter AI (whatever that would be...invasions/tactics/whatever) or something else? I think a more fun use for K-Mod if someone is up to the challenge would be to run the same matches Sullla is running in BTS under K-Mod, as a shadow game/tournament. Contrasts would certainly be interesting anyway. But that's a lot of work and a lot to ask.

K-mod has a lot of balance tweaks and sublte mechanic changes (e. g. culture is more dynamic in the mod and early religions spread much slower to give later ones a chance). Personally, I see almost all implemented changes as a direct improvement over base BTS, at least provided that we are speaking about high-level SP for which the mod is balanced. But this is a matter of personal preference, of course.
It does change AI personalities a lot. But if we want to see original personalities in action, that would be pretty easy to fix. All we would need is to remove respective XML-file from the mod folder.

[Gavagai]

(It should be noted, however, that K-mod personalities are much more subtle and varied, so I don't see why we wouldn't want to use them.)

[LKendter]

I may need check back here more regularly. This could be interesting.

I am playing way to much stuff, and with no adventures this got lower on the priority list.

[Sullla]

It's nice to hear so many responses, sounds like there's still interest in this project. Let me respond to some of the suggested ideas one at a time.

Random Personalities: I agree with Rowain that this would largely defeat the purpose of the competition. For me, much of the fun comes from watching the different AI personalities in action. If we have no idea what personality each AI is running, then the gameplay stops being comprehensible. Everything might as well be random at that point. Plus the same AIs would draw different personalities in future games... I dunno. This option doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Unrestricted Leaders: I love this option for the competitive multiplayer games. It makes things much more interesting (and fairer) when running a snake pick draft, or to spice things up after playing the base game dozens of times. But conversely, when running an event that's heavily based upon atmosphere and roleplaying, I don't like using Unrestricted Leaders. The combinations get confusing and it's not obvious which leader is paired up with which civilization. I'm expecting a good number of people watching these games to have only cursory knowledge of the Civilization series, and I feel like this option would be too confusing. Not to mention, it would make the prediction contest harder to understand as well - what happens when we have Gandhi of Russia, Catherine of England, and Victoria of India all in the same game? It's hard to disassociate the leaders from the civs. Believe me, I've thought about this option, but I don't think it's the right fit for these games. Perhaps eventually if we continue doing this down the road.

Mods: I think it's pretty well known that I'm not a modding guy. I have little interest in mods, designing them or playing them. I know that Realms Beyond has been going pretty heavily into Civ4 mods in recent months, one reason why I've barely posted here recently. They're simply not for me - I want to play Civ4, not the K-mod version of Civ4 or whatever other version might be out there. More power to those who like them. K-mod is a completely new game in its own right, one with its own gameplay rules that I know nothing about. I'm not particularly interested in staging a competition between K-mod AIs, regardless of how well they might perform from a gameplay perspective. So I'm afraid that I have to decline this offer as well, since I'm not investing a lot of time and effort into something that doesn't hold my interest.

What I will do is provide savegame files for anyone who wants them, if there's interest in running a shadow version with mods or other options turned on. I'd be as curious as anyone to see how things change.

[Westbrook]

For the most part I totally agree with Sullla about mods. Most aren't nearly as polished as what the developers have created, and they alter what they intended into something unrecognizable. But I've got to point something out: there's a reason developers try to support modding. Sometimes the fan community, people who are most passionate about your work, are the one's most able to fix things or suggest improvements. And every once in a while, we get a really polished mod that is worthy of attention. Counterstrike and Team Fortress, whether you like them or not, were revolutionary mods at first. Then there are mods from fans that enable multiplayer (Just Cause 2), UI mods that add elements that should've been in there from the beginning (i.e. Civ 5), and compatibility mods that allow us to play old games on newer hardware (games like MoO..) or at modern resolutions or using modern technology (Helix mods for Nvidia 3d Vision). And I saved the most important example for last: There was a mod for Warcraft 3 named DOTA. And the only reason we have League of Legends is because of the mod DOTA. And even you will appreciate that, Sullla...

[Rowain]

Given that the BTS-AI basically stems from a Player-mod (Blake's great work) to the Base-Civ4-AI doing a BTS-tournament is a mod-tournament .

(and yes the Civ4-AI was that weak that the devs cut down the AI-boni on the higher levels and most players had to play on a 1 or 2 grades lower difficulty for the same results in BTS).

[Jkaen]

Sulla, looking at your spreadsheet some of the code could be streamlined to make your life easier, but I assume Speaker or whoever sets things up for you is more than capable of handling that.

i.e.
=IF(C5="Mansa Musa", 5, 0) + IF(C5="Justinian", 3, 0)
should read
=IF(C5=C$3, 5, IF(C5=E$3, 3, 0))

[LogicalTautology]

Lurked through the last one, interested in following along with predictions this time around!

[Commodore]

Should be interesting; arid maps might make it even slower for the poor sideline reporter, though.

And I saved the most important example for last: There was a mod for Warcraft 3 named DOTA. And the only reason we have League of Legends is because of the mod DOTA. A

And as a former fan of RTS who watched his beloved genre cannibalized by that braindead dudebro drool-laden aesthetic nightmare of a "game", I think I see your point and now I'm 100% anti-mod.

(This is where you refute me by saying I have to play a Stockholm-syndrome amount of game time on it to be properly qualified to critique such a masterwork.)