Comment by aithrowawaycomm

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.