I still stick with Civ 5 myself. Never really cared for Civ 6.
Although Civ isn't really my type of strategy game anyway. It's fun, but man the games take forever(and I play classical chess...). And for single player, the AI is so dumb, annoying and belligerent it kinda saps the fun out of it for me. The difficulty levels in Civ 5 are actually all the same dumb AI, just with varying levels of cheats enabled. I believe on Diety it starts with 3 settlers or something bonkers like that, and a huge production multiplier to boot. And yet the AI is still so dumb that a strong human player can win a game against 5 diety AIs on the same team. If Civ 5 had a somewhat passable AI I would play a lot more I think, because then I could actually get practice put of single player mode.
Additionally there's so much busy work(micromanaging tiles/workers can get pretty tedious). I feel like strategically and tactically the game is pretty simple. In games against much more experienced players where I get a lucky start and we're even entering the endgame I tend to win because I'm just a better tactician due to studying chess. But they usually get much better early games because they know all the mechanics more intricately, which is basically rote. I'm kind of more partial to Risk for that reason. The rules are dead simple, yet it is still tactically very complicated.
I wouldn’t mind but diplomacy is broken still. Civs stay mad at you for invading a neighbouring civ for the entirety of the game. Things like denouncement and warmongering issues don’t fade away nearly as fast enough to allow varied gameplay.
Usually a civ will start expanding into your land, cause a war, then you take them out but of course everyone else is now mad at you and it stays like that for the rest of the game.
It's not very tangible like "oh that's just like a skewer tactic in chess!", it's more a general ability to think ahead and enumerate various likely scenarios, and ways of deciding what to do. Chess is not just pure pattern recognition. It's also a game of decisions, understanding what your opponent is trying to do, swallowing your own pride, etc.
You can play chess in an almost poker type way, playing risky lines betting that your opponent won't find a tricky refutation. It seems like the board state(and clock) is all there is, but that is far from the truth.
One of the biggest challenges for learning chess players is to learn to consider your opponent's plans and factoring it into your own. This sounds obvious, but from my experience tutoring kids it's very much not the natural state of things. The natural thing is to only consider what you want to do. Which doesn't work if the opponent's plan is quicker. Then you need to find a new idea. Even if you're just a few moves away from completing yours. There's a mental discipline to avoiding the sunk cost fallacy there that can easily be worth a few hundred rating points.
Now, most of the research on transfer of chess skills has focused on things like IQ and working memory, and found no meaningful transfer. But there's a lot more to chess(or any other skill) than that. I'm not convinced this is adequately expored by the field of psychology at all.
I regularly beat people at simpler strategy games even though they're the ones teaching me the rules of the game.
You could argue I'm just naturally good at strategy games, and that's why I play chess. And that must be at least partially the reason. But it's my intuition that some of these more abstract game decision making, opponent modelling, etc skills do transfer(I am biased though, obviously). But that's a lot harder to research than doing an IQ test and a short term recall test.
AoE is an RTS game, right? I used to play a fair bit of Starcraft 2 back before the expansions. I'm hilariously bad at it and it's too stressful for me, but I love watching pro players play it, in fact it's become one of my favourite sports to watch. AoE4 multiplayer was a bit of a clusterfuck balance wise, last I heard. I hope they get that sorted so a real pro scene could develop, and I can enjoy watching it :D
I feel like there's very little meaningful transfer between RTS and chess. Much more dependent on fine motor skill, fast thinking, and multitasking, all of which are things I'm not stellar at.
I forgot the example. The one I remember best is this 6FFA where all but me and another much more experienced player(who introduced me to civ in the first place) were irrelevant by the endgame. I was slightly ahead in science and snowballing, and he was playing for culture victory, and succeeding. I could tell that my only option was war. But he has more production. So it had to be nukes, and he had to not know about it, otherwise he could declare war and stop me in time. So I had to make him believe this was not a threat. I did several things like feigning playing for diplo victory(actually to avoid him banning nukes) I got him distracted right there trying to keep me from taking all the cs. By the time I completed the Manhattan Project, his invasion was too late and I was able to nuke his cap and his nr. 2 city. I laid this plan a lot of turns in advance. Afterwards he said he thought the culture win was a sure thing.
It is an interesting assertion. What we know about learning and chunking in our brains implies that chess knowledge is too specific to be used elsewhere directly. The years of playing chess probably just mean parent is good at analysis and learning things like chess, and is why they were interested in chess to begin with. Maybe some chess concepts work and apply, but chess memory and skill is rather specific.
A lot of it is specific, but it's not like chess and civ are completely disjunct either. There is some significant overlap between some of the thought processes involved. They both have minimax game trees, though civ obviously has a much bigger branching factor so you have to be a lot fuzzier about it. But I'd argue that just having played a lot of chess with a more managable branching factor makes it easier to make the meta decision of how to think about these games.
With Civ5 you probably want to use Vox Populi. It really improves the game to a completely new level, including the AI. It's not a human opponent but much better than any Civ version ever shipped officially.
Vox Populi is a DLL mod though so Windows only. This mod is basically the only reason I keep Windows around.
Edit: and forgot to say that the development and community is very active, 12 years after the game originally shipped. New versions come out regularly.
Running yes but the mod is shipped as a Windows installer package so that needs to be extracted, either by running the installer or by some other means. So needs a bit of effort to figure it out unless someone already posted working instructions.
Proton is basically Wine.
Wine creates a "Wineprefix", which is a folder hierarchy similar to that of a Windows installation. You can run the installer within that Wineprefix using wine. That will install the files. Then you can run Civ 5 and everything should be in place.
Yeah... I love history, so I really want to enjoy HOI4, there's just so much fucking busy work to deal with. I think I'm just spoiled by playing chess where there is nothing but the "battle of ideas", as GM Yasser Seirawan likes to put it.
Woah, this looks slick! I had no idea this existed.
Now I kinda want to have a poke at this Civ AI business. Or at least look at the code so I can get a better idea of how the AI is implemented and why it's so bad.
Edit: that is, assuming this version has similarly bad AI to the original.
Mostly because the AI isn't able to really strategically "plan".
Most of the work goes into iterating over all units and giving each an action based on certain metrics. Thus coordinating units and strategy isn't really present.
Now with some work you could add a higher level planner system. Vox Populi, a Civ5 mod, has done some really clever stuff with organizing units into formations for battle.
Makes sense. Only game AI I know intimately is chess AI, so my intuition is to do minimax tree search(like alphabeta). The implementation is tricky though because there's multiple moves. And likely the branching factor is far to high for alphabeta to be helpful.
I think Monte Carlo methods might be more promising. Maybe with some simplified gamestate, allowing you to modify it more cheaply, reducing the overhead per node. "Computing a turn" can take a long time in late game civ5. Probably a lot of probabilistic stuff is needed to get it cheap enough. Like you could have credences based on current information about which win condition is most likely for each civ. Then you could feasibly decide what the long term goal should be.
Kinda feels like a cognitive architecture(like soar) is necessary to get anything even resembling decent play.
It's sort of hard to have an intuition of what kind of heuristic search is feasible without having some idea of the branching factor, though.
Really the simpler answer is have a planning layer that can influence the lower agent decision weights.
Top level AI is going for Domination Victory? Higher weight on making Military Units at your Cities. Pick a target and weight movement of the army towards it. Etc.
Yes, this type of thing is what I was alluding to qt the end of my 2nd paragraph. I was sort of thinking it over as I typed and that's where I sort of ended up. You need some sort of coarse grained planning like that. Or I guess the technical term is hierarchical planning?
Pick a win condition. Science.
Ok, what are the subgoals you want for that? You want growth, first and foremost. And you want to get to plastic asap. How do you get growth? Improve food tiles tiles, research civil service and chemistry, spec into tradition, unlock more caravan. Which of those are more worthwhile? Chemistry kinda conflicts with getting to plastics faster, and so on.
Sort of feels like some sort of SAT problem. Which isn't great news, I admit.
I need to read more papers and maybe have a peek in my Russell & Norvig because now I can't stop thinking about this.
Having played a good number of hours of Unciv myself as well as Civ V, the AI is indeed similarly bad. Their meta-strategies are largely one-trick ponies making them trivial to predict. Harder difficulties just wildly tip the resource scales in the AI's favor without improving their decision making at all.
Although Civ isn't really my type of strategy game anyway. It's fun, but man the games take forever(and I play classical chess...). And for single player, the AI is so dumb, annoying and belligerent it kinda saps the fun out of it for me. The difficulty levels in Civ 5 are actually all the same dumb AI, just with varying levels of cheats enabled. I believe on Diety it starts with 3 settlers or something bonkers like that, and a huge production multiplier to boot. And yet the AI is still so dumb that a strong human player can win a game against 5 diety AIs on the same team. If Civ 5 had a somewhat passable AI I would play a lot more I think, because then I could actually get practice put of single player mode.
Additionally there's so much busy work(micromanaging tiles/workers can get pretty tedious). I feel like strategically and tactically the game is pretty simple. In games against much more experienced players where I get a lucky start and we're even entering the endgame I tend to win because I'm just a better tactician due to studying chess. But they usually get much better early games because they know all the mechanics more intricately, which is basically rote. I'm kind of more partial to Risk for that reason. The rules are dead simple, yet it is still tactically very complicated.