Civ4 AI Duel League: gauging interest and exploring mod possibilities

[yuris125]

That's a good point, I didn't want to delve deeply into mod development for Civ4, but if all I need is to send Enter to the game every 5 second or so, I guess that can be done easily enough. Will see if I can make it happen!

[ArtDeco]

This is a project several years in the making. The idea is simple: the outcome of AI Survivor games is often influenced by the map and by diplomacy. What if we took these factors out of the equation? Could we run a competition where AIs faced each other in 1-on-1 games on mirrored maps? And if we did, who would come out on top?

The biggest challenge is how big such a contest would be. If I were to simply throw all leaders in a single elimination bracket, it would take 51 games to decide a winner, but it would be a competition heavily affected by bracket luck and fluke AI decisions. Once I start looking at structures which reduce randomness (double elimination, best-of-3 matches), the number of needed games quickly goes past 100 - and of course, it's not just a matter of playing out 100+ games, but also reporting them. That's what Sulla pointed out when I talked to him about this idea a few years ago, and that's why I ended up putting it off

Well, seeing how interest in Civ4 isn't declining, and Civ4 AI Survivor is going strong as ever, I think now is a good time to come back to this idea. I had plenty of time to think about how much effort it would take, and am certain I will be able to play out this contest without abandoning it

With this in mind, there are two questions I'd like to ask:

The big one - Do you guys find this interesting? If I were to go ahead with this project, would you follow?

The less big one - I would like a QoL mod/script to make running the games easier. I have a detailed tech spec in mind, but the biggest change I would need is to automatically end player turns, so that pressing Enter every turn is not necessary. I would need to be able to look around the map during AI turns, and have certain triggers to stop autoplay. I'm completely unfamiliar with Civ4 modding, so would someone be willing to help me with this?

I find it intersting so thats why I am replying.
So as far as I understood your plan is to fight 52 leaders all against each other 1v1 means 51x52/2=1326 duel autoplays??
Probably warmongers win and come at top
What is QoL? Using any mode is necessary for this?

[yuris125]

It won't be an everyone plays everyone kind of league - not only would that take too long to play out, but also impossible to report! The format I used for tests was 8 groups of 6 or 7 AIs played out as double elimination brackets, with 2 leaders advancing from each, then a double elimination final bracket for the top16. I may change the final bracket to single elimination best-of-3 matches - need to test that. Whatever structure I choose, the aim is to keep the total number of games under 150 at the very maximum

Using mods is not necessary, but I don't want to press Enter every turn, and simply doing autoplay won't allow for proper reporting. But I looked at AutoHotkey as NobleHelium suggested and think it will work

[Fluffball]

It's not as interesting as a 'real' game, since civ is not a dueling game. But I would definitely follow your project.