Killing lots of birds with one stone...

from Stardock Forums
an idea for AI, Expansion and Multiplayer threads.

How about the crazy idea of an expansion opening up the AI interface. Brad is always talking about tweaking the numbers for the various AI’s. Why not open it up and let people tweak the AI in an online "Gal Civ Manager" sort of way.

The idea being tweak your AI and set it up on-line against other tweaked AI’s. The game is then played out from a distance. Maybe allowing some fine-tuning to the parameters as the game progressed. That way people would be refining the AI continually to see what worked best.

What is more they could act as a library for players to download for the single player game.

If nothing else, it would be interesting and insightful to see what numbers Brad could play with. None of it is scripted but there are obviously a lot of parameters which need balancing to enable the AI to act as a human would.

This is probably a complete non-starter because of how the game is structured but it may be interesting to build it in as a concept for GalCiv3.


7,715 views 9 replies
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Read my suggestion sometime earlier


Link

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Fools seldom differ eh weepy?

I guess mine is slightly more pragmatic in that it is "people tweaking" rather than the "AI learning" ... otherwise it looks like the same idea to me.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
No offense Weepy but letting players tweak the AI and set them aginst eachother is FAR more practiacal then any sort of learning AI. I like Xpyre's idea. Good games have a huge resource of eager fans, this is why some moddable games become huge successes, by tapping into the player base's creativity as a resource.

Setting up a way for players to adjust the AI would be awsome and probably make the game better but obviously thats a big project so it's probably asking too much.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Brad is always talking about tweaking the numbers for the various AI’s

Well, technically, if you read all various posts made by Brad, it isn't numbers that are tweaked but C++ methods that are modified/added. I am not sure if the whole AI behavior can be parametrized with numbers.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Maybe it is just a dumb idea.
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Nah, Its just unrealistic to the average user.
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Making the AI in any game moddable in any form just isn't done in the gaming industry. There are probably exceptions to this, but I can not think of any at the moment.

Besides the 'difficulty' settings
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
What about Civ4?