It is true, it’s far too hot today. Too hot to move, too hot to write, too hot even to play any vidya that require braining to play. So I’m just going to set up something like Victoria 2 and mess around with the console so everything goes wacky!
The results of my last experiment. The Prussian blue country stretching to Kamchatka is Prussia.
Are there any games you enjoy when for whatever reason you don’t feel up to concentrating on playing? Or are you like me, and you prefer to set things up and just watch them run? Tell us in the comments about how you deal with heat so intense it feels like your skin is flaying itself to try and escape!
Also some games do an atmosphere of cold very well but I can’t think of any that really do a hot one so well.
So, though there’s not a huge amount of information yet, the new SimCity looks like it has potential! Here is the good stuff we know so far:
Curved roads.
PC-only.*
Modding supported.
Launch Arcologies
And the GlassBox engine seems to have a great deal of potential for detail. Here is a link to a GamaSutra interview regarding it, and I’ll quote one of the most interesting parts. It may look a little intimidating if you’ve never seen code before but if you take a minute to read through it you’ll see it’s really rather simple and intuitive.
Here is an example of a unit rule, showing a chaining effect: as a sim consumes mustard, they create an empty bottle, which then adds to a city’s pollution. If mustard is unavailable, they then go buy more mustard.
unitRule mustardFactory
rate 10
global Simoleans in 1
local YellowMustard in 6
local EmptyBottle in 1
local BottleOfMustard out 1
Map rules are simpler than that. In this example, grass will grow only where there’s soil, water and nutrients, which are all depletable resources
Putting aside the amusing image of your Sims eating an entire bottle of mustard and nothing else for a meal, I don’t know if that is the actual way GlassBox stuff can be written, or if modders will have access to this side of the thing, but if it is it will be simple for modders to wrap their heads around but have a great deal of potential for changing how the game operates. It does sound like, hopefully, they are aiming to have a level of detail and fidelity that even SC4 fell far short of, and that in turn should help the development of natural looking cities.
If that still doesn’t make sense, take a look at these videos from the GDC giving some examples of how the engine works:
Of course these are early days. There’s a great many ways this game could go wrong, and there are already things I’m wary of, such as the DLC elements already announced, and how multiplayer is involved. Nonetheless, although rather cautiously, I do have a smidged of confidence that this game will be a worthy update to the series – and if it isn’t, that modders will be able to fix it! What do you all think of what we know so far?
*I have nothing against console games, it’s just that a game as complex as a good SimCity is something that no right-minded company should consider porting to a console.
In videogames, difficulty is a difficult thing to get right. It’s one of the reasons multiplayer is so popular after all; to date we’ve not come up with an AI that comes close to a human opponent, outside of chess at least. Now, it’s not hard to just make an enemy hit harder, have more health, or shoot with greater accuracy. Those things aren’t difficulty in a meaningful sense, but they do make the game harder.
Still, there’s not a lot original to say about this tendency to take the easy route and bump up the enemy’s pure abilities rather than their intelligence. What I want to talk about is a different aspect of AIs, which is something I’ve not seen often addressed, but which will ultimately be core in creating convincing enemies who are challenging, but can be defeated.
That aspect is making mistakes. Making believable mistakes, based on oversight, or failure to account for something by accident, and so on and so forth, rather than the result of glitches or the programmer’s failure to account for something. This may not seem like a huge concern while we’ve still got to figure out a way to be outwitted by the AI, but as we do get better at that this sort of thing is going to be crucial to correct for it in order to keep the game both fun and engaging.
A lot of victories in real conflicts are borne from taking advantage of mistakes the enemy makes. Sometimes this is a tactical error, sometimes strategic, and sometimes it’s more deeply rooted and occurs in the years before the war breaks out, when someone’s guess about the important factors of the next war prove to be incorrect. Oftentimes these things will be corrected over the course of the conflict, but sometimes not. In any event the point is that for the player to remain engaged and interested there can’t be an optimum strategy in all situations, which a ‘good’ AI would seemingly be prone towards, and which would thus force the same degree of efficiency from the player.
Of course in the real world there are all kinds of factors that are very hard to emulate. The Confederacy’s best option was probably a Fabian strategy – ceding land for time, and winning by attrition. But the political nature of the CSA meant that border states could not be sacrificed in such a fashion, and they had to be fought for (Well, except when McClellan was in charge of the Army of the Potomac, then not much of anything needed to be done by the Confederates). You can, to some extent, work with this in a game through mechanics like supply lines, dissent, and partisans, but it really has trouble with the nuances of the situation.
Had Lee had this little filly on his side, things would have been different.
Now, getting games to that stage would be a tall order of course. Nevertheless I think we could stand to start thinking about how AIs might make believable, varied mistakes. Things that an astute player can see and exploit, but which the AI might realize and fix very quickly as well. This isn’t a completely untried concept of course, Galactic Civilizations 2 is the obvious example of an AI being designed to do this sort of thing, and it’s a commendable attempt, especially because the AI is actually pretty darned smart without cheating. Halo likewise had some clever foes, for its day, and their dynamic nature meant mistakes on their part could emerge pretty naturally and an observant, smart player could exploit those very well.
What do you all think about this idea? Am I getting too far ahead of our current, braindead AIs, or is this something we should look towards?
I’ve written previously about how strategy games give you a pretty weird angle compared to reality due to how they function, specifically that because they put you in charge of a state and they have a win condition, you become pretty psychopathic with regards to your state. It is only a means to your end.
I’m going to come at this from another angle today. I was thinking about it when I was playing GalCiv, because as I am playing as the Humans I’m sort-of-but-not-quite RPing them as they’re written in the backstory; canny traders, excellent diplomats, with an iron fist in the velvet glove. Now GalCiv has election events that are incredibly trivial. You choose a political party and have regular elections. If your party wins you keep their bonuses (Say, +20% to your influence). If they lose, the bonuses go away until you reclaim control. But if they lose you are still in control. Now from a gameplay perspective this makes perfect sense. Nobody wants to sit back and watch your civ get run into the ground by the AI over the next 30 turns or whatever. That doesn’t make it any more sensible or less jarring; ultimately in strategy games you are your state/country, and anything along the lines of elections, changing dynasties, or anything else is entirely secondary at best.
What’s weird isn’t that they do this, it’s that they try and pretend they don’t. I don’t mind being told “You are the overarching driving force behind the French Empire rather than any particular leader or government therein”. But then a game will turn around and I will be presented as being the particular leader or government, such as EU3 where every notification is addressed to “My Emir” or “My King” or what have you. But how can you address this?
Of course the problem is lessened if you're an immortal Goddess-Queen
The Tropico series has possibly the best approach. You are a tinpot dictator and one of the ways in which your score is evaluated is by how much money you have embezzled from your own country over the years. This is a brilliant little mechanic, because you are actively reducing your abilities in one field in order to bump up your endgame results elsewhere. You’re still just going for the nebulous “score” but it’s something. One idea I had was to essentially provide you with ostentatious monuments to build, of truly obscene scale (Think Bender when he becomes Pharaoh), and the larger you build it the better you are. Civ used to do something vaguely similar where a good performance would make your palace or throne room better, a nice sidebar to the main game, and there’s a mod for Civ IV where you really can lose control of your empire to the AI for a number of turns, an interesting if frustrating feature.
Do you have any examples of this issue being done well? How might a game merge leadership of an in-game actor like a country with being an individual leader? Thoughts and ideas!
No. No it does not. Especially when you’re me, and you love Civ and you really love robots. That’s probably why I’ve had a few people recently link a couple of articles to me.
Basically, some geeks (and I use that word with utmost respect, as I always do!) have taught an AI how to read. Not some programming language, but English. Then, to test their AI’s reading ability, they had it play Civilization II both before and after reading the game manual.
Before reading the game manual, the AI won a little less than half of the time.
After reading the game manual, the AI’s win percentage jumped up over thirty percentage points, to a nearly 80% win rate.
This is super exciting to me on a few levels. Firstly, I’m superhuge into the idea of robots and AI. I envision a future where intelligent creatures of all sorts and designs live together in harmony (I ain’t ‘fraid of no Skynet). I think it’s really exciting that an AI has been taught not just to read, but to learn from a human language.
On a slightly less scholarly level, I’d love to see something like this adapted to make better AI in games. I’ve talked before about how I’d like to see improvements to the AI in Civ; bring it on, Civ-playing robot!
So yeah. As I was saying, it really doesn’t get any better. Unless you get a robot playing SMAC. Then it could be better.
Although this would hurt the poor robot's feelings, I've no doubt. :(
So the other day I was playing Civ IV, because apparently I’m still desperately addicted to it, and I was playing a single player game and I decided to bump up the difficulty by a notch. You know, jump up from “Noble” to whatever is just above Noble. Prince, I think?
It seemed like a sensible thing to do. I’d played up through the ranks– Settler, Chieftain, Warlord– and each had been a reasonable ramp up in difficulty level and finally I’d landed on Noble, which is the game’s default “average” difficulty level. And I could beat the game on Noble with few issues, so why not tune it up a notch? It makes sense, right?
So, fairly confident in my own abilities, I started up a game on Prince.
…within about ten minutes I knew I was going to have some problems when all of the other AIs were mysteriously doubling my score, and then by about twenty minutes in I was cheating via the World Builder because all of the other AIs were mysteriously tripling my score.
Needless to say I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the outcome!
My reactions before the game started and shortly after the game started.
I think the reason why this happened is because the Civ IV AI is built to pretty much act the same regardless of difficulty level. The easier difficulty levels are “easier” because they give you bonuses in terms of your population’s happiness or health (and, on Settler at least, the civs seem slightly less likely to declare war on you), and the higher difficulty levels… well I don’t know, they give the AIs crack or something. It feels somewhat “false”, regardless, and reminds me of ten years ago when I’d play Starcraft for hours on end and you were always reasonably certain of what the computer was going to do so it was easy to exploit it (You knew there was always going to be an initial attack of zealots or marines about ten minutes into the game, and then another group of the next tier of units at about twenty, and etc.)
I’d like to play a difficult Civ game against an AI that isn’t just “the regular AI but CHEATING”. I think there are mods that improve the AI; I’ll have to look into those.
Anyways! Your stories about ridiculously hard AIs or difficulty levels?
Er, or the pigeons. Anyway. What I’m going to talk about in this post is something I expect will be a common theme for me because I find it rather fascinating. That is to say, how AIs act when direct human intervention is absent or minimized.
I’m not quite sure why this is, but I am fascinated by – have always been fascinated by – watching a game do its thing with a minimum of intervention on my part. I suppose this is something that many people do enjoy, given the success of The Sims franchise, but for me it extends into almost any genre you can think of. If there are AIs, I will want to watch them do their thing without me being involved, or watch them reacting to some particularly huge event I set in motion and then retreat from the scene, like some kind of nuke-delivering playwright.
Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with nukes
Here’s the thing: I know what the computer can do to me, generally speaking. I can figure out how it works and unless I set myself particular conditions (Which I admit I usually have trouble sticking to) I can exploit the AI’s inevitable weaknesses. When it’s AI against AI, I can oftentimes see a more level playing field which is consequently quite enjoyable to watch.
Sometimes though, it goes in a stranger direction still. Take Populous: The Beginning. Now, when I play that game, I really get into it. And when I visit disasters on a rival I really like to watch how they deal with it. I very commonly storm in, wipe out everything except any critical buildings and a couple of builders, then retreat and watch them rebuild. I do the same in various other strategy and RTS games. I love watching an AI country/state/tribe/etc. put itself back together, deal with the hardship I have inflicted. Now, I’ll concede, to some extent there is a streak of vicious sadism here. I flat out enjoy knowing that their puny civilization exists at my indulgence. But still, I enjoy watching it work as a system, as an ‘intelligence’ of whatever sort as well as a group of little computer people, a simulated society (However crude these simulations may be at this point notwithstanding).
With broader applications I think systems like this can be very powerful for immersion and enjoyment in games. Though I think GTAIV was a somewhat flawed game, the way it drew you into the world – in large part reliant on building a convincing city to inhabit – was quite astounding and unmatched. I guess what it boils down to is: Watching stuff happen without player involvement can be a critical thing in immersing the player. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when a game comes out where you are just one actor among many. Not in the MMO sense so much as… imagine Dynasty Warriors. Now imagine you’re a regular soldier on the battlefield, or at least the other generals and such run around as actively as you do. Conventional game design wisdom places the player as the primary actor, but also makes the player’s character the primary actor in-universe, and often enough the only one who has agency of any meaningful sort. I don’t agree entirely with this wisdom – I think being part of a larger system could not only serve as a strong method of immersion, but would also make the things the player does control that much more tangible and meaningful.
