[JeffL]

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.

[ethbr0]

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.

[1123581321]

I’d suggest playing Old World if you want a challenging tactical opponent. It’s one unit per tile like Civ 5 onward.