Soren Johnson giving a talk on AI

[Kylearan]

Hi,

we've been touching the subject of AI in the Civ 5 thread, so I thought some people might be interested in a talk Soren Johnson gave on his theory about "good" AIs vs. "fun" AIs, mainly exemplified via his Civ 4 AI. It's on YouTube here:

Soren Johnson: Playing to Lose

Some of these things he had said and written before elsewhere already, but I liked the presentation a lot nonetheless (with the exception of his really weak arguments why even on Noble, the AI has to cheat). Seems like he has really thought a lot about how a game AI should be, which is good - even though my taste slightly differs from his target audience, it seems.

-Kylearan

[SevenSpirits]

I also recommend watching this. It's pretty interesting.

[Sullla]

Thanks for posting that link, Kylearan. Fascinating stuff.

For the curious, we had many of these same discussions during Civ4's development, on the specific question of Fun AI vs Good AI. As you can probably tell from the presentation, Soren leans more in the direction of "Fun AI" that provides an entertaining challenge to be overcome, rather than building one designed to do everything possible to win. I agreed and agree on this point too; an AI that "plays to win" sounds like fun in Civilization, but the reality would be a massive dogpile from every AI entity whenever you get close to winning by space/culture/whatever. That would not be much fun!

It's impressive how much knowledge Soren still has over the in-depth Civ mechanics. For those of you who were around for Civ3, notice how he mentions some of the biggest exploits of the game: Right of Passage abuse, "puppet strings" manipulation of AI units, tech whoring between AI civs, and so on. Soren was a regular reader of Sirian's reports, and he read a lot of the early Realms Beyond Epics stuff. I'm just impressed that he still remembers it all!

I really hope that the Civ5 dev team approached their work with the same thorough knowledge of what worked and didn't work in past games. Jon was a longtime Civ3 Apolyton guy, so hopefully (although I don't recall him following Civ4 as much). I also hope that they had a damn good group of pre-release testers working on Civ5.

[T-hawk]

Good material. But that guy could sorely use some public speaking classes or experience. A written transcript, minus about a thousand "you knows" and "basicallys", would be a godsend. (Not that I'm any good at speaking either. It is a difficult talent to learn.)

[TheArchduke]

Thanks for the link!