Totally agree. The response to complaining about bad AI in civ is usually about how players don't really want good AI, but for me as the AI randomly shuffles their units around outside your city you constantly pick them off with mutually supporting ranged units, achieving kill ratios in the 20:1 range is so totally unrealistic that it destroys immersion.
I fully believe that the great mass of the bell curve is happy with the bad AI, but for those of us who are a little better at the game, we will keep complaining about how terrible the AI is.
I think the great mass of the bell curve also hasn't actually seen a good CIV AI experience because they never played the 4th iteration. But people know there is something wrong with the AI. One just needs to look at the steam forums and reviews. By and large, everyone agrees that the AI does not really know how to play the game. Which is a shame because I think the games themselves are genuinely built with love and care.
Tesla has lots of showrooms with cars, test drives, and sales people. If you're there and want to buy a car, they direct you to a computer with an Internet connection.
I agree with and appreciate your comment, but I do think there is some validity in the more broad usage of "socialism" that has come to be. To steel man the other sides argument, if you have to pay taxes on an asset, be that the means of production or real estate, or else the government will come and take it away from you, it feels more like renting than owning, and the only thing you "own" is the right to pay rent on the governments asset.
I do definitely think that just labeling every government overreach that one dislikes as "socialism" is not the most useful.
For example, I have (in what I realize is largely futile) advocated for a return to using more accurate political terms for describing philosophies. Left and right are terrible terms to use for this. Liberal, Progressive are Conservative are much better, but still lack some depth for range. Terms like fascism, neoliberal, neoconservative etc are much better and better represent ideas in discourse.
Folks who seriously think about socialism as a real economic philosophy often also have accompanying liberal and/or progressive ideas attached to it, like higher taxes to fund social safety nets and better schools, for example.
They however aren’t the same thing. Taxes are a political act with economic consequences, regardless of what those consequences are.
Where as social ownership of the economy can have more diversity in practical implementation and thus should not be lumped together like it is.
I realize this isn’t a common discussion point, particularly in the US where these philosophies were never given equal footing to capitalism[0]. Frankly I sincerely believe most Americans, even educated folks who should know better, don’t differentiate socialism from communism and use the terms at least somewhat interchangeably and often incorrectly.
[0]: free markets aren’t inherent to only capitalism either. They absolutely exist in a market socialist economy. Remember the origins of corporations were chartered with expectation they would serve a purpose that demonstrably benefited the public good
When you are new to it, yes. For me it's a better experience because I've been using it so long and have a good idea of what it can and can't handle. I use it extensively on roads I know it works well on, and use it sometimes tentitively on new roads when I'm in the mood. That I spend almost all of my driving time on the same few routes makes FSD very valuable to me. It's probably still not a net benefit if you're mostly driving new places or places where it doesn't work well, but it's getting better.
> For me it's a better experience because I've been using it so long and have a good idea of what it can and can't handle.
How would you know that, though? That's the reason why at this point I can't see myself ever using that kind of a feature. The added stress of the unpredictability would make the experience miserable.
I use FSD a lot and generally like and feel less stressed and safer. For me, since I dive mostly the same roads a lot, I know which roads and intersections FSD can handle correctly and which ones it can't, so I use it where it works and don't use it where it doesn't. I've personally had a pretty big increase in use over the last year because it's just plain getting so much better. It works in places now where it didn't before.
I have FSD and totally agree with you. I use it about 90% of the time, feel less stressed and more safe. I feel like I have a good idea and where it might have an issue and am super vigilant in those situations but way more relaxed on those same stretches of road it's driven perfectly 100 times already. It's "nice to have" in normal driving conditions and f-ing wonderful when there's traffic.
Insurance for the consumer is lowering your expected value to reduce variance. Gambling for the consumer is lowering your expected value to increase variance. The profit and operating costs for both casinos and insurance companies is the lost EV of their patrons.
Yes, I have it. It's great. I much prefer a quick swipe on the side of the touchscreen to having a giant physical gear selector wasting a ton of space.
I honestly love just about everything about the UI of the refreshed Model S, from the yoke to the turn signal buttons to the on screen gear selector. Only thing I don't like is the horn button for the two times a year that I honk it.
Wasting what space? Sure, the gear selectors on a lot of cars are in the center console, and maybe I’d rather store something there. But I have never, in my entire history of driving cars, wanted to put anything right behind the steering wheel — first, it’s really awkward to get anything else there and second, any dangly thing there could tangle with the wheel, thus killing me.
So no, please keep the critical driving controls in fixed locations that are easy to access without looking away from the road or looking away. IMO that includes the horn, the turn signals, the wiper control, cruise control settings, and turn signals. And things I might want to adjust in a moderate hurry while driving should have fixed, tactile locations; climate control and sound volume are in this category.
My first car nailed all of this. Recent cars, not so much.
That's what the developers say, but I think it's part true and part a cop out. The AI in Civ 5 & 6 is just so so bad, that it's only challenging when you play on the really hard modes that gives them all sorts of cheats. And then it's a bit less fun because you're walking the line between impossible because of the cheating and having to essentially exploit the AI because of the cheating.
I don't necessarily want an AI that tries to play like a human, though it would be a fun option, I want an AI that isn't just straight up terrible given the same starting resources and rules as the player.
Part of the problem, I think, is that each iteration of Civ, they make the game more complicated in a way that makes it even harder for the AI to do as well as a good player, but probably most players don't care and there isn't a lot of reason to become good at the game anyway.
Actually, if you play Stellaris, there is a mod called StarNet AI, which uses weights that are considered "meta". From my very limited personal experience (I got destroyed), it is not really fun to play an AI that uses very good strategies as it eliminates all previously viable, but not optimal playstyles.
Also, it feels _really_ good when you get to a new ship tier faster than your neighbors. The reverse is, however, very frustrating, as you are forced to play catch.
This comes up often in discussions about Axis & Allies Online. It has an AI, but it’s pretty basic and really only there as an aid to learn the rules before playing humans. The main way the game is played is ranked play on the built in ladder against humans, or custom games. There’s a discord that runs regular tournaments as well.
The problem is AI for complex games like that is absurdly hard to develop. The combinatorial complexity of a game like Axis & Allies is something like a hundred orders of magnitude greater than chess. It’s probably similar with Civ, probably a lot more so.
But aside from just competency, what makes playing humans so compelling is personality. Human players range the full spectrum from terrible to excellent, but even beyond that they vary massively in the ways they are terrible, and the ways in which they are excellent. With A&AOL there are top tiered players that employ radically different strategies, to great effect.
IMO it's the reverse. I could swear some of these games intentionally keep the gap between good-play and bad-play very small so as to hide the deficiencies of AI.
The lack of choice in buildings, reasonably inconsequential bonus tile yields, minimalist tech tree where you have to research everything, lack of synergies between buildings-resources-terrains, etc. all make a lot more sense when you see what horrendous decisions the AI makes even on hardest difficulties.
Sid had achieved competent but un-fun AI early on in the series and backed off. Players hate it because of how good it is at sacking poorly defended cities, especially early on when the AI knew too much about the global map.
A good AI shouldn't need to know any more about the global map than a human player would in the same situation. If they made it see the whole map, it's basically cheating.
In general with strategy game AIs it’s not feasible to make it play at decent human level, so the way they make it challenging to play is by cheating in various ways. Resource boosts, global vision, etc.
In particular, humans are very good at reasoning based on limited information. We can form hypotheses about where resources or objectives might be, or if an enemy unit goes out if the visible map, estimating where it could be on a later turn, or what it’s presence indicates about its home civilisation’s disposition out of sigh. That sort of thing is extremely hard to program, so the only way to compensate for the AIs inability to intuit information is by actually giving it the information.
Meta made an AI to play Diplomacy which is able to talk to other players and play the game. It doesn't use a LLM, but it was able to win a tournament against human players.
I suppose what I mean is, in the context of a computer game where you’re playing a computer, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about cheating. The way the game works is the rules. There may be different rules for the human and AI players, but the expectation that they are the same is an assumption ported over from board games. It’s not really a thing in native computer games. For example nobody expects the computer opponents in a FPS to obey the same rules as the human player. So I don’t think cheating is really an applicable term.
My point is that it's kinda weird to claim that we had AI that was so good at opportunistically playing "like a human" by e.g. picking on poorly defended cities that human players hated it, but then admit that its proficiency is at least in part because it knows the whole map - that, by definition, is not "like a human".
The means is not human like, but the behaviour might well be. A human might conduct a search with scout units and intuit city locations from observed units and such to identify and target cities. Doing that in software might be infeasible, so you give the model full information and maybe program in a delay based on the distance to enemy cities before targeting them. The implementation is different but the behaviour ends up being hard for human players to distinguish.
Yes, but the problem persists since a truly competent AI will have good guesses about where and when to strike into your hidden territory based on what’s revealed to it, using the same advances that give computational room to respect fog of war.
The main thing I'd want in a Civ AI is to be barely competant at combat. Right now, if you can get a couple archers up in time, you can beat an AI army that's 2-5x your size depending on the terrain. Yeah, it feels bad as a beginner when you haven't bothered to build any military and an AI comes and kills you, but a beginner should be playing a beginner mode.
I'd love God mode AI to put up any sort of half decent fight without needing to have so many more units that just go through an endless meat grinder because they can't coordinate or figure out how to back off and heal.
Realistically, if the Civ team were to want to do this, here's how I'd go about it:
1) Break the problem down into strategic goals and tactical actions, and then group the tactical actions into areas (e.g. diplomacy, resourcing, combat, research).
2) Process recorded online games of human players into streams of relevant events / choices.
3) Continually retrain your models on the output of 2.
You should thus have an AI that approximates the meta approaches of humans, which is really what we're talking about.
New players look exactly like bad AI: making poor choices, oblivious to things "the players community" already knows are always optimal, etc.
So really the problem is "How do we build a model that already knows what most of our players do, at this stage of the game's lifecycle?"
Which is essentially what one of the recent fighting games(?) did with their AI.
Is it that players hate good AI or that flagrant cheating breaks immersion? I think the latter would be an interesting AI target: can you make something which plays well but doesn’t do things which are obviously impossible for the player to do in-game - e.g. helping the AI with some extra resources isn’t glaring but having attacks perfectly target things the AI shouldn’t be able to see, or instantly repair damaged units, etc. is something you could never duplicate even if you were the best player in the world.
I fully believe that the great mass of the bell curve is happy with the bad AI, but for those of us who are a little better at the game, we will keep complaining about how terrible the AI is.