HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ DanAndersen

Unsurprisingly, being near a corner helps one's chance of survival, as you need to defend on fewer sides with the same amount of resources.

⬐ noicebrewery

Wondering why this guy put corners in a civ game to begin with.

/r/civbattleroyale is generally a lot more interesting given a lot of civs are selected specifically to try to play to their terrain strengths.

⬐ nie

A Chinese Go teach phrase for kids: "Gold Corner, Silver Side, Grass (paper) Belly (mid)"

  - A corner is the best place
  - Side comes second
  - Carnage in the middle

⬐ nie

Which explains why most of us are surprised/shocked that AlphaGo developed a winning strategy in favouring battling in the middle.

⬐ fhe

The current explanation from the professional Go community is that, duking it out in the middle is far too complex for humans to master. So maybe it's not so much that corner positions are better than edge positions, which are better than center positions; it's just that the center area is far too complex to yield to human analysis.

⬐ SubiculumCode

Although I was surprised that the civ in bottom left didn't prevail. They seemed to be able to expand first.

⬐ wutbrodo

The top right corner didn't end up being dominated by one Civ until quite late in the game. The bottom left was the only corner who wasn't equipped to take advantage of that, at the very least by the fact that a portion of the military capacity of the region was turned inwards instead of towards the regions neighbors.

⬐ craftyguy

What was that civ? I couldn't figure it out with the light background + orange font for city names, nor did I recognize that color scheme.

⬐ Eupolemos

Assyria

⬐ larkeith

Assyria (bottom left) was able to push a couple underdefended cities early thanks to their unique unit [1] which is exceptional at city-taking, however was stalled by unit buildup from neighboring civs. In the lategame, Greece (top left) mounted a massive attack enabled by their quick discovery of Chemistry, which allowed them to produce far-superior cannons [2], around turn 364 (5:00). The next to obtain cannons were the Ottomans, at turn 377 (5:11), but after a few moments of back-and-forth battle, they were overrun by Greece's superior numbers. After the collapse of the Ottoman defense, Greece was easily to defeat the remaining civs piecemeal, thanks to their overwhelming production advantage.

[1] http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Siege_tower_(Civ5)

[2] http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Cannon_(Civ5)

⬐ jandrese

My first thought was whomever has a good early UU and starts on an edge or especially the corner is probably going to win.

I was a little surprised just how easily Greece rolled the map once they brought those cannons to bear. Ashurbanipal's large empire collapsed practically overnight. Those obsolete siege towers and crossbowmen were no match for Alexander’s cannons and riflemen. The Ottomans put up a better fight, but the AI loves the UU a little too much and they were obsolete by the time the Greek army showed up, but at least they put up a fight. More aggressive targeting of the cannons and they might have prevailed, or at least delayed the inevitable a bit longer.

Also, LOL at the AI for building so many settlers.

I'm a little disappointed he turned off religion, but I'm guessing the missionaries would be unable to move through enemy territory very well due to all of the military units and they would clutter the map.

Warsaw changed hands 18 times. At that point the residents have to check out the window every morning to see which flag is flying.

⬐ zbraniecki

Hey, that's not very far from the last 300 years of Warsaw history.

source: I'm from Warsaw.

⬐ simonebrunozzi

I love playing these kind of "strategy" games (Civ, Total War, to a lesser extent DotA 2, etc). I don't have time anymore, as I am a startup founder, and I simply can't play these for just 1-2 hours a week. I'll play again in a few years :)

What typically annoys me is the AI in these games: never challenging enough, or challenging in the right way. Years and years, and the only hope is that the AI team at Google will figure out a way to apply their ML/DL AI to many games at once. (they did it for DotA 2, with remarkable results).

⬐ untog

I actually find Civ great to play on a long flight (as long as I have access to a power outlet, it chews through my laptop battery). Makes a 6-7 hour flight, er, fly by. But I never finish a game, I just get to somewhere around the Classic era and have to shut my laptop off. And the next flight I take I'm never in the mood to resume a game, so I just start again.

Lots of fun, though.

⬐ simonebrunozzi

I tried a couple of times over the last several years. Somehow I find it very uncomfortable to play a videogame on a flight, where a few people can easily see what I am doing. Not sure why being observed makes me feel awkward.

⬐ untog

I feel the same way sometimes. There's something about planes - if you're in an aisle seat you can see everything a person in front of you is doing, but it's next to impossible to know if they're looking.

My preferred solution is to drink a couple of beers while I play, I forget quickly!

⬐ hermannj314

I've got 18 hours across 2 legs from India to the US later today and playing Civ5 is exactly my plan. The time absolutely flies by playing it on a plane.

⬐ sudomake

Its slightly immersion breaking, but you can save a lot of time by playing on smaller maps. Also quitting after you're 90% sure you've won and skipping the "mop-up" phase.

⬐ toomanybeersies

I've found that Civ is great to play if you're time poor, if you have the self control for it. It's totally possible to play just one or two turns a day, and play a game out over several weeks.

Total War, on the other hand, is not so good. Too many times I've thought "I'll just finished this turn up", and then when the AI has their turn, I end up stuck in half a dozen battles and 2 hours later I'm still playing.

⬐ corey_moncure

>If you have the self control for it

Do you remember the commercial ads for this game? Many of us will keep telling ourselves "just one more turn", "no really the next turn is the last one" until day breaks.

⬐ omot

I recommend watching true start location earth all AI play through. It's interesting to watch how America is divided if Europe wasn't technologically ahead.

⬐ woolvalley

Do you have a video link?

⬐ omot

Drew Durnil has multiple videos

Start state: https://youtu.be/NdpX_2OZJZY

End state: https://youtu.be/xxfCxUB4VMQ

⬐ Gabrielfair

Now give these players a side channel to communicate and you have a solid research paper. An example here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.06960

Plus all of their code is on github

⬐ Sylos

I was surprised at how much time they spent building up their cities, technologies, religions etc., rather than just doing each others head in.

There's this open-source game, Battle for Wesnoth, which is sort of like Civilization without the civilization part, so it's pretty much just hexgrid- and turn-based strategy warfare (and that part much more fleshed out). Would be interesting to do the same with that.

⬐ Gravityloss

In Civ 5, There are so many things to choose from that give tiny 10% or +1 bonuses here and there. Unit promotions, religious bonuses, civics, buildings. I get bonus hunting fatigue.

At least in Civ 1, even if there was only a handful of different forms of government, they had massively different effects. I've played every Civ game except four and six.

Certain elements in the map in Civ 1 gave good bonuses. Now everything's watered down. I feel it's a cop out way to balance something by making everything have a tiny effect.

The automation also leads to you playing by reacting to popups, which is not fun. Oh, this city state now wants this random thing. Your game totally hangs on the ability to get them on your side.

It's fun to make plans and try to follow them through. It's fun (and harrowing) to make interesting decisions. You can't do it with just such random elements. It's not fun calculating cumulative bonuses. And it's also not fun even if it's automated. Have less gameplay elements!

Civ V is a game for coupon hunters and bean counters.

⬐ partycoder

The result has a lot to do with:

- what Civ is next to each other: each civ has unique units, buildings, etc. this can be decisive during an engagement.

- resources

- what alliances form

There is also another factor in play here: you will see that the last civilizations to lose are the ones that secured the corners. This is because they have a smaller border to protect. In this sense it's similar to game of Go, were openings often start with corner enclosures.

⬐ davedx

Soon as I saw the Greeks had riflemen I knew it was all over :D

⬐ bluefreeze

This might be OOT, but I'm just curious how do you train AI on video games? Do you connect AI to internal API of the game or you let AI parse image data the from the screen and use external input (like keyboard or mouse) in order to play the game?

⬐ CaptainJustin

I have seen a few cases where they build a client for the game.

It receives messages like a connecting client application does and sends messages to the server as well.

The downside of this is that you are trying to honor an unpublished API that no one promises not to change and no one will tell you when it does.

⬐ paulryanrogers

IIRC it's almost entirely based on game APIs or memory hacking

⬐ petters

The latter is much harder. It has been done for e.g. Atari games.

⬐ mtgx

The first option is how "game AI" has been developed by most gaming companies until recently. The second option is how DeepMind, OpenAI, and a few others are now building gaming AI. Only the latter is about building a gaming AI that "learns to play the game like a human does".

⬐ akozak

I'd be interested in some of the math here - e.g. if you wanted to compare civ fitness - would you need to test every iteration of initial starting conditions? And then I wonder how that changes if the map is a hexagonal sphere...

⬐ FollowSteph3

The cpu on that computer must be running quite hot. That would definitely be a way to do a computer burn in test. Plus it’s more fun ;)

⬐ cgb223

Are there any AI battles with more normal Civ 5 settings?

Like maybe 8 civs, bigger map with varying features etc

⬐ make3

are they classical AI or learned (RL) actual AIs

⬐ yen223

They are classical rule-based AIs

⬐ make3

too bad. I'd really like to see a genuine (learned) Civ ai

⬐ n1231231231234

Civ 5, with the add-ons, is one of my favourite games of all times. It's really well-balanced and thoroughly thought through. Everything is just in place, game mechanics, city management, unit system, science tree, social policies, trade, etc. I do turn off espionage, though. And the AI leaves room for improvement.

Another thing that I also really like about the game is that you can get away with very little micro-management. However, some some micro-management gives you slight advantage. I think they struck a nice balance here.

And beating deity was great, it almost felt like playing chess. Sure, you have to have a bit of luck with your starting position. And you need some luck later-on when it comes to the distribution of certain resources. But apart from that, it's in your hands and everything you do has to be near-perfect in order for you to succeed.

⬐ ionised

The AI in Civ 5 was its biggest failing.

It's not like the AIin Civ 4 was so much better, but it handled the game mechanics better. The change to 1 Unit Per Tile in Civ 5 and 6 basically brought to the forefront the weakness of the AI in Civ, because in 5 and 6 the enemy AI can't place military units worth a damn.

They can't take cities properly because they spend turns just moving siege units around aimlessly. They are easy to kite because they have no concept of effective unit placement.

You can win military victories in 5 and 6 against much stronger opponents and on harder difficulties because the AI just cannot cope with the 1UPT mechanics in any meaningful way.

I've had entire games as well where the AI just never built naval or aerial units at all. All I needed to do in that situation was be England and build some ships and I'd basically won.

This was on the difficulty one notch below Deity as well.

Civ 4 is still the pinnacle of the series, not because it has better AI, but because that AI can simply deal better with the mechanics in the game. Stacks of units, while having their own problems, at least allowed the enemy Civs to pose a challenge.

⬐ castratikron

I'd be interested if anyone has attempted to make their own AI for Civ 5.

⬐ AndyNemmity

We have. I have done tons of work on the AI, but the best AI at this stage is from the mod Vox Populi and it's really good.

⬐ castratikron

I'll check it out. Thanks.

⬐ Already__Taken

> I've had entire games as well where the AI just never built naval or aerial units at all. All I needed to do in that situation was be England and build some ships and I'd basically won.

Red alert 2 flashbacks HARD.

⬐ sudomake

As much as people like to bash Red Alert 3, the AI in that game understood how to use most of the mechanics, including shipbuilding and shore bombardment.

⬐ Fnoord

Dune 2, orig C&C, orig Red Alert also had (for nowadays standards) terrible AI but we just didn't know better.

⬐ Already__Taken

I think these old games are ripe for having a laugh making your own AI. I wish RA2 was open source to have a poke around at. It's not a skill I have at all and really need some childhood nostalgia to plug away at something like that.

⬐ ralfd

For me (subjectively) Civ 4 was the best civ. It has (objectively) the more challenging AI/difficulty.

A hardcore gamers view in what went wrong woth Civ 5:

http://www.sullla.com/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

⬐ Certhas

I've played every Civ game since the start, and I get what the critique is going for, but honestly, just don't play ICS style games then.

If you don't, then the game is nicely balanced and a lot of fun. Lot's of great mechanics. And the idea that you can't be effective at the game unless you succumb to ICS is nonsense. Here is a turn 196 Science victory with one city:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx_PZPZhHMQ

⬐ mihaifm

Civ 4 has some stellar mods, and I think to this day it has a larger modding community than 5.

I haven't followed the modding for Civ 6, but it looked quite modder-friendly when it launched.

⬐ mercer

I never managed to get back into Civ after playing Alpha Centauri (so Civ 3?). Did something change/improve, or is it possible that I just preferred AC and didn't like how Civ changed after CivII?

⬐ FlyingJohn

Hell no.

It is unbalanced to the point that only tradition is viable and anything other then a ranged units is a joke(minus for capturing)

It also ha some of the worst game mechanics ever seen in a 4x:Global happiness.It is designed to curve both tall and wide play style yet does neither.All it does is annoy the player while the ai does n't care about it.

Speaking of ai,it is a joke.The ai is absolutely useless at playing the game,especially the combat.It will dance around cities,send workers at you,etc.

Civ 4,hell even civ 6 offer a much better experience.

⬐ viridian

Liberty is good too, although it's more civ dependent, and is basically a "win more" button for civs like Russia who can manage to get an aggressive start. Honor is also useful as a "I'm right next door to Mongolia and Arabia and I'd like the have a slim chance of actually being allowed to play". Other than that you are mostly right of course, the default choice is definitely trad, and piety is unusable. I'd say given a random civ you are probably going to go trad/lib/hon/pie 75/20/5/0 percent of the time.

⬐ AndyNemmity

With the mod Vox Populli, the Ai is ridiculously good, and most other things like policies have been re balanced.

⬐ distances

> Civ 4,hell even civ 6 offer a much better experience.

I know these are personal preferences so no sense to debate much. Can't resist giving my anecdotal observations though: a) I don't know anyone who went back to 4 after 5 came out, and b) most people who wanted to play Civ after 6 came out gave up on it and went back to 5 with Vox Populi mod.

May not account to much, but from my vantage point Civ 5 is currently the highlight of the series.

⬐ SubiculumCode

Good, but I'm an even bigger fan of Space Empires IV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Empires_IV

Its a turn based game that still has a small but active community of gamers and moders.

⬐ zem

i tried to check it out; the website no longer works :( (that is, there is a website of sorts, and it lists a few games, but none of them are actual links you can click on)

⬐ SubiculumCode

http://pbw.spaceempires.net/ has a few games open, and I've used them to manage a play by web game about two years ago and it seemed small but there were active games. I see recent posts, but perhaps active is no longer the right term. :( Its a pretty old game after all.

⬐ zem

i guess people who already have the game are keeping the community alive, but there no longer seems any way to get it now :(

⬐ SubiculumCode

buy it on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1610/Space_Empires_IV_Del...

or probably better, on GOG https://www.gog.com/game/space_empires_iv_deluxe

that site I posted is independent of the sellers of SEIV. Just some ppl who like the game, make mods, and set up a system to handle playing by web

⬐ zem

thanks :) should've thought to check gog

⬐ barry0079

I love SEIV. I had no idea there was still an active community.

⬐ SubiculumCode

active somewhat in quotes...but check http://pbw.spaceempires.net/

People playing here, can join a game. It makes it easy to play by web with downloading turns and gamefiles.

⬐ joshmlewis

Which add-ons do you recommend?

⬐ adventured

Ideally wait until one of the aggressive Steam sales and get the Complete Edition for ~$10 (even $30-$50 for everything would be great given the amount of content).

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/575/Sid_Meiers_Civiliz...

These are my preferred short list of addons / expansions:

Brave New World - https://store.steampowered.com/app/235580/Sid_Meiers_Civiliz...

Gods and Kings - https://store.steampowered.com/app/16870/Sid_Meiers_Civiliza...

Babylon - https://store.steampowered.com/app/16868/Civilization_V__Bab...

Korea - https://store.steampowered.com/app/99612/Civilization_V__Civ...

Several others that add more civilizations are good as well. However, again, the cost right now for all of those items is quite high for the age of the product ($70).

⬐ wsc981

I bought Civ V + expansions through a Humble Bundle[0], probably for around 10 USD - 15 USD. In the past there have been at least 2x a Civ bundle and I'm sure there will be more in the future.

I think it's a good idea to subscribe to their newsletters.

---

[0]: https://www.humblebundle.com

⬐ BigJono

I'd definitely recommend the community balance patch. It completely overhauls a lot of the game's mechanics though, so it's a decent idea to play with just the official expansions for a bit to see how it changes the game.

⬐ Semaphor

It's called Vox Populi now.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t...

⬐ mattmanser

No it's not. It's a good game but has loads of flaws.

For example, you just spent the last 30 turns building a powerful ancient wonder. It's ready next turn! Oops, the computer builds that ancient wonder the turn before you do, you get nothing.

How's that well thought through? It's an extremely bad game mechanic, un-fun in the worst possible way. You have no visibility of the race. The old games at least let you switch to your 2nd choice or another building.

Also, generally speaking, the happiness mechanic sucks. It's such an unintuitive way of stopping people growing too fast. It's supposed to make a choice between lots of small cities Vs a few big ones, but it's only fun for a few big ones. So if you enjoy actually expanding and finding new places to put cities, it's not as good as the old games.

Also the entire city states mechanic is tedious.

As for the chess anecdote, the AI is bad, they give it massive bonuses, so it's like playing chess where you start with half the pieces of your opponent. This sucks a lot of the fun out of the game, as you get little opportunity to make wonders or other things early game as the computer simply brute forces past you.

⬐ mihaifm

The Wonder mechanic has always been like that in Civ games, and I would prefer it to stay the same. You can rely on scouting to make sure no one else builds it. If you can't scout, you need to evaluate the risk and decide if it's worth it.

⬐ OskarS

It hasn't always worked like that. In earlier games, if another civ built your wonder, you could switch to building something else and retain like 75% of production (don't remember the exact numbers). That meant you didn't lose a massive amount of production in one of your most important cities for no good reason.

(I should say: it's been a while since I played the earlier Civ's, but I'm fairly certain this is how it worked. It's certainly works this way in Alpha Centauri, the best game in the series!)

⬐ moreira

In Civ 2 at least, if you switched to another wonder you'd keep -all- your production so you could just shrug and switch to another wonder without losing anything. It's only if you switched to a normal building or a unit that you'd lose 50% of the production.

⬐ pgalu

It's not quite the case that you get nothing for losing a wonder race. In fact, you are given an amount of gold equal to the amount of production you've sunk into the construction of the wonder until that point. It certainly isn't equally valuable, but notably, it is a far better hammer-to-gold conversion rate than "Wealth" production. It can be situationally useful.

⬐ crummy

For what it's worth (to your last point) - an unbalanced game of chess isn't necessarily un-fun.

http://reallybadchess.com/

⬐ iotscale

This is my favorite mobile game of all time. The AI is also very weird (in a good way) and sometimes genius! It feels like the custom maps I used to create with "Age of Empires II" in which I let random units fight against each other.

⬐ shapiro92

Apart from your last comment, the others are just personal preference. I, for example like it that if two Civs are building the same wonder the 2nd will be at a disadvantage.

⬐ j7ake

If you are a neighbouring civilisation It seems intuitive to me to be able to notice a giant Egyptian pyramid building in your backyard. This should somehow be implemented in the game.

⬐ None

None

⬐ Sommer717

In regards to the wonder mechanic, that's just completely wrong. You get a 1:1 conversion of hammer input to gold if you don't complete the wonder.[1] Compare this to the usual 1:4 conversion if you just use the city to produce gold.

[1] https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/126105/how-to-cal...

⬐ tgb

Oh wow the game could let you know that, Otherwise yeah it's super frustrating. Of course I'd much rather have the wonder than the gold since say the pyramids would give you less than 185 gold and buying even a worker costs more than that IIRC.

⬐ Redoubts

It does, and has since Civ 4 at least.

⬐ mattmanser

I know that, nothing was an exaggeration, but gold's virtually meaningless in the context of Gold vs Wonder. You would never, ever leave your top production city producing Gold for 20 turns early/mid-game.

It's a really frustrating mechanic. Some other commentators clearly didn't play the early games which didn't include this mechanic.

There's loads of really bad mechanics in Civ 5 that they made kinda ok with the DLC, but it doesn't make them "thoroughly thought through".

Like the other really frustrating mechanic for me is the puppet cities nonsense. You used to conquer stuff, now you sort of own it, but don't at all. It's to try and counter the steam-roller effect, but it's really obviously gamey and unsatisfying. For many play styles civ 5 was rubbish. If you accept the flaws, you can have fun, but it doesn't hide that there are loads of flaws still.

Honestly, the best Civ game is still Alpha Centauri by a long shot. I feel like the Endless series is doing a better job with the legacy than the Civ series, even though it has it's flaws (Endless Space 1 I found was competent but a bit boring, Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 are great).