Comment by NoboruWataya

3 months ago

This seems very cool - I am sceptical of the supposed benefits for "civilization" but it could at least make for some very interesting sim games. (So maybe it will be good for Civilization moreso than civilization.)

9 comments

NoboruWataya

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aithrowawaycomm  3 months ago

I think the Firaxis Civilization needs a cheap AlphaZero AI rather than an LLM: there are too many dumb footguns in Civ to economically hard-code a good strategic AI, yet solving the problem by making the enemies cheat is plain frustrating. It would be interesting to let an ANN play against a "classical" AI until it consistently beats each difficulty level, building a hierarchy. I am sure someone has already looked into this but I couldn't find any sources.

I am a bit skeptical about how computationally expensive a very crappy Civ ANN would be to run at inference time, though I actually have no idea how that scales - it hardly needs to be a grandmaster, but the distribution of dumb mistakes has a long tail.

Also, the DeepMind Starcraft 2 AI is different from AlphaZero since Starcraft is not a perfect information game. The AI requires a database of human games to "get off the ground"; otherwise it would just get crushed over and over in the early game, having no idea what the opponent is doing. It's hard to get that training data with a brand new game. Likewise Civ has always been a bit more focused on artistic expression than other 4x strategy games; maybe having to retrain an AI for every new Wonder is just too much of a burden.

  • BlueTemplar  3 months ago

    Galactic Civilizations 2 (also, 1,3,4 ??) in the same genre is well-known for its AI, good even without handicaps or cheats. This includes trading negotiations BTW.

    (At least good compared to what other 4X have, and your average human player - not the top players that are the ones that tend to discuss the game online in the first place.)

    EDIT : I suspect that it's not unrelated that GalCiv2 is kind of... boring as 4X go - as a result of a good AI having been a base requirement ?

    Speaking of StarCraft AI... (for SC1, not 2, and predating AlphaZero by many years) :

    https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swar...

loudmax  3 months ago

I really dig namechecking Sid Meier for the name of the project. I'm also skeptical that this project actually works as presented, but building a Civilization game off of a Minecraft engine is a deeply interesting idea.

foota  3 months ago

I'm somewhat amazed that companies releasing strategy games aren't using AI to test out different cards and what not to find broken things before release (looking at you, Hearthstone)

bbor  3 months ago

Yeah, I was dissapointed (and thrilled, from a p(doom) perspective) to see it implemented in Minecraft instead of Civilization VI, Humankind, or any of the main Paradox grand strategies (namely Stellaris, Victoria, Crusader Kings, and Europa Universalis). To say the least, the stakes are higher and more realistic than "lets plan a feast" "ok, I'll gather some wood!"

To be fair, they might tackle this in the paper -- this is a preprint of a preprint, somehow...

  • BlueTemplar  3 months ago

    I suspect that Minecraft might have the open source possibilities (or at least programming interfaces ?) that the other games you listed lack ?

    For Civilizations, the more recent they are, the more closed off they tend to be : Civ 1 and/or 2 have basically been remade from scratch as open source, Civ 4 has most of the game open sourced in the two tiers of C++ and Python... but AFAIK Civ 5 (and also 6 ?) were large regressions in modding capabilities compared to 4 ?