Tag Archives: Civilization

Yields, Hermetic Order, and Civ IV

I want to blog about Civilization VI again, and this time about yet another swing and a miss: the secret societies game mode.

Civ VI usually plays exactly how every other Civ game plays out, 6-12 randomly chosen civilizations are plopped down on a randomly generated map, and the player must “build a civilization that stands the test of time,” ie win the game with science/culture/diplomacy before the game ends in 2050. Why 2050? Well the game must end at some point, and when these games were coming out in the early 2000s, 2050 seemed to be so unimaginably far in the future as to be a good “end date.”

But Civ VI has a secret societies mode which shuffles this system around. This mode is built on the popular fiction trope of there being one or several secret societies which have guided human history from the very beggining. There are 4 societies here, and they’re each in perpetual conflict with each other all the way back to the Neolithic era:
The “Order of Blood” aka a secret society of Vampires (think of White Wolf’s Old World of Darkness)
The Hermetic Order aka a science-y magic secret society
The Voidsingers aka a Cthulhu Mythos secret society
The Owls of Minerva who seem ever so slightly Harry Potter themed, although maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, the Civ VI secret societies game mode adds these guys as players to the game. They don’t actually have any cities or units of their own, mind you. But in the early neolithic while the player is exploring the map, these societies will occassionally approach the player and invite the player’s civilization to join them. In exchange, they’ll give the player’s civ powerful abilities that will only increase as the game continues.

But this game mode is very unbalanced, and worse yet it isn’t very well thought out in places.

The order of Blood gives you a vampire unit and later lets you build Vampire castles. The vampire is as strong as the strongest melee unit you have, and if killed it shows back up in your capital needing to be healed rather than actually dying like a normal human unit. That’s neat.

The Owls of Minerva give you bonuses when you send a trade route to a city-state. This would be neato, except these bonuses also inadvertantly cause the city-state to acquire more and more territory, such that if the player picks the Owls as their patron, the city-states on the map will gobble up all the tiles that the actual Civs are supposed to use to build their empires. It’s a shame city-states can’t build empires of their own.

The Voidsingers give you a statue of the Old Gods, which seems to give minor bonuses to faith generation, but then later in the game they make 20% of your faith generation get added to your gold, science and culture generation also. The cult therefore ends up being the most powerful society by far just because of how much it powers up your entire empire, even though their bonuses seem by far the most mundane, almost lame.

The Hermetic Order though is… weird. To discuss them, I first have to tell you about yields and ajacencies.

So the map in Civ VI is divided into tiles, and each tile has a “yield” on it describing how much “stuff” that tile produces. A simple grassland tile produces 2 food. A plains tile produces 1 food/1 production. Yields can be altered by resources, improvements, and technology also. If we have a wheat resource on that plains tile, it jumps to 2 food/1 production. If we farm that wheat, it becomes 3 food/1 production. If that wheat farm has 2 other farms “adjacent” to it, it becomes 4 food/1 production. That last one is more than twice as good as a simple plains tile.

Cities work these tiles and use their yields. A city needs production to produce things and food to feed its citizens. Thus the main gameplay loop is acquiring high-yield tiles and improving them further with builders, technology, and so on. This lets your cities grow large, produce stuff, and have culture, science, and gold to boot.

Next adjacencies, we saw them briefly in the wheat-farm discussion. Civ VI has a system where certain things get bonuses if they are “adjacent” to other things. Nice and vague, but here’s some examples:
A campus gets a bonus to its science generation if it’s next to a mountain.
A commercial district gets a bonus to its money generation if it’s next to a river.
A theatre square gets a bonus to its culture if it’s next to a “wonder of the world,” whether that’s a natural wonder like Mount Everest or a man-made wonder like the Hanging Gardens.

So the other gameplay loop is planning where you’ll place your buildings, farms, and other things to maximize their adjacency bonuses as well.

So here’s where the Hermetic order comes in: the very first thing they give you is the ability to see “ley lines” on the map, which power up your adjacencies is you build buldings near to them. This is also where the problems begin: these ley lines might not be anywhere near where you want to build a city.

The other societies just give you a “thing” immediately, whether it’s a vampire or a statue to the Old Gods, but the Hermetic order demands you go out and not only find these ley lines, but also build your cities near them, because the ley lines are useless to you unless you actually build stuff near them for the adjacency bonus. But what if there’s no ley lines near your territory? What if on this map they’re all in the desert or tundra, far from fresh water, good land, or any kind of resources? Sucks to be you then, because now you’ve basically joined a secret society that gave you nothing in exchange.

People call it save-scumming, but whatever: when I want to join the Hermetic Order, I’ll first save the game, and then join them to reveal the ley lines. If I find out there’s no ley lines in reasonable locations from me, I’ll just reload the earlier save and join a different society instead. No other secret society is this dependent on random luck to make them useful. This is added to the fact that how you join the order is also a pain: you can’t join the Hermetic Order until you find a nature wonder, which are quite rare on the map, and again you may have absolutely none near you.

The other societies give you fairly simply joining requirements: find a tribal village, find a city-state, kill some barbarians. Villages, city-states, and barbarians virtually litter the map, but natural wonders are very very rare. So not only are the bonuses this society give you very hit or miss, but even joining them is a pain.

Later on in the game, the Hermetic Order will power up your ley lines by giving them yields based on how many Great People you’ve earned, but this is unfortunately a “win more” scenario, not an actual benefit.

What do I mean by “win more?” That’s a thing where the bonuses you receive don’t help you win, because you only get them if you’re already winning. Essentially they’re bonuses that don’t actually help make the difference between your winning and your losing, they just make you look stylish if you’re already winning.

See, getting Great People requires your nation to build a lot of buildings of the right type, and use faith and gold to entice the great people as well. This obviously means you already need lots of production, faith, and gold generation to get great people. So if you’re getting lots of great people, the Hermetic Order will rewards you by upgrading your ley lines with more… production, faith and gold.

This isn’t like Civ IV where you could focus on getting great people or focus on a non-great people economy instead. Every useful thing in Civ VI generates great people, so if you’re playing well and winning the game, you’ll get a lot of them. If you’re not playing well and struggling, you’ll get almost none. So if you’re winning, the Hermetic Order will help you win more, if you’re not winning, they won’t help you at all. Not a great system to be honest.

I think this is why this is the worst of the secret societies, even if mechanically they are by far the most interesting. The other societies all give you a very direct way to turn their bonuses into win conditions. The Voidsingers tell you to maximize your faith generation, and in return they’ll give you all the other stuff you need. The vampires tell you to maximize your military power, and that in turn powers up your vampires. The Owls of Minerva tell you to maximize your relations with city-states, and in return they’ll ensure those citystates remain utterly loyal and VERY powerful for you.

But the Order of Hermes demands that you get lucky enough to find a bunch of ley lines, and then also be winning enough to get a bunch of great people.

I’d prefer it vastly if instead of the ley lines being randomly generated, if the Order gave you a special unit that could *build* a couple of ley lines wherever you want them. Maybe give you a few more ley lines as the game progresses, like how the vampires give you extra vampires as the game progresses. Then they could actually feel like a pure benefit instead of a diceroll.

And instead of powering up ley lines based on how many great people you’ve recruited, maybe they could power up your great person recruitment for every building you build near them. Then instead of a “win more” condition, they’d actually help you come from behind and recruit great people if you haven’t already gotten some.

Anyway that’s my 2 cents. The devs have long moved on to Civ VII, but I think it’s unsurprising that game was so poorly received, when so much of Civ VI showed but flashes of brilliance with not enough thought put into them to make them truly stand the test of time.

Opportunity Costs in Civilization 6

One of the most important concepts I learned in economics is the idea of opportunity costs.  Every action we take has a cost, not just the cost of the action itself, but the cost of *now not being able to do something else* with either the time or money or both that we just spent.  

A simple example: a company only has 100$ to invest in a machine.  If they buy the machine that makes blue widgets, they can’t also buy the machine that makes red widgets.  Thus, buying the blue widget machine doesn’t *just* cost 100$, it also has the *opportunity cost* of not buying the red widget machine.

There are also opportunity costs with time, if you decide to go to Europe for your holiday vacation, you can’t also go to South America at the same time.  So the cost of going to Europe isn’t just the cost of the time and the tickets, it’s also the opportunity cost of not going to South America (or anywhere else) as well.

As an aside, this is why for some people it can make sense to NOT go to college EVEN IF college were totally free.  The cost of going to college includes the *opportunity cost* of not having a full-time job (if you’re a full-time student).  

A comedian once made a joke that, after graduating college he couldn’t find any work “because the dropouts already had the jobs.”  A funny joke, but it demonstrates a point:  You spend 4 years getting a degree, but if that degree doesn’t measurably increase your employment prospects, you could have been better off spending those 4 years getting work experience at a full-time job.  You could not only get the money that a full time job gives you, but the experience itself would increase your employability and ability to get better jobs.

So the education and degree you’re seeking needs to increase your employability *more* than just doing 4 years of work.  If not, then it’s a net loss *even if your education was free* because you had the *opportunity cost* of not getting those 4 years of work experience.

But I didn’t want to blog about college, I wanted to blog about Civilization again.

The non-gamers in my audience may be tired of my gaming blogging, but I’ve spent a lot of this holiday season playing Civ IV and Civ VI with friends, so I’ve been thinking about this.

I complain that in Civ VI, some of the leaders seem to have traits that are utterly worthless, they don’t feel like they improve your Civ’s abilities any more than having a vanilla Civ with *no* traits.  Eleanor of Aquitaine is one of these, her ability to culture-flip cities feels very underpowered and completely useless, and doesn’t make her any more powerful than a Civ that doesn’t have any abilities at all.

My friend shoots back at this by saying that if you put a lot of resources into it, you can set up a situation in which you culture-flip whole continents in an instant.  And yes, this is theoretically possible.  Does that mean Eleanor is “very powerful in the right circumstances?”  No.  Because of *opportunity costs*.  

See, the cost of putting all your resources into Eleanor’s culture-flipping ability is that *you can’t put those resources into other things*.  You can’t research technologies or build military units if you are instead spending your entire GDP on culture buildings.  Culture isn’t free, and it doesn’t just cost what it costs to produce it, it has the *opportunity cost* of not doing anything else with that money and production.

So in any situation where Eleanor can “culture flip a continent” by spending an absurd amount of resources on culture, any other Civ could just use those resources to win the game with military, or science, or even diplomacy.  

Eleanor’s ability is useless not because you *can’t* use it to do things, but because the amount you have to spend to make her ability not-useless could instead be better used to win the game in *any other way at all*.  Her ability has an *opportunity cost* in that if you try to use it to its fullest, you are by definition not using those resources on better strategies that will win you the game more easily.

And that’s what I feel about a lot of the Civ VI leaders.   Some  leaders have abilities so minor they don’t feel impactful.  Some have abilities that completely change the nature of the game.  And some like Eleanor have these abilities that are actually traps, because the opportunity cost of trying to use their ability to its fullest makes you worse off than if you’d ignored their ability and played the game normally.

People didn’t like Civ IV’s leader system because every leader drew from a limited pot of abilities.  Gilgamesh is Creative/Protective, while Catherine the Great is Creative/Imperialistic.  From my perspective, that’s unique, *no one but Gilgamesh has that specific combination of traits*.  From other people’s perspective though “they’re both creative so they’re too similar to be cool.”  

These people who say this seem to really be drawn to Civ VI because every leader has *completely unique abilities* not seen anywhere else.  But from my perspective “many of those abilities are worse to use than just ignoring the ability and playing the game normally.”  Leaning into your “special ability” can have an opportunity cost, and no one but me seems to recognize this.

So in the future, please think about opportunity costs, both for college and for your video games.  Making a nation have a super special ability isn’t actually cool if leaning into that ability makes you worse off than if you’d ignored it and played the game normally.   Opportunity costs are real, even if not everyone understands them.

Why does the Civ VI AI feel so incompetent?  Part 2: Examining how it was made. 

When I was last writing about the Civilization series, I was complaining about how the AIs in Civ VI feel much stupider than the AIs in Civ IV.  I encourage you to read that post, because this one is a direct follow-on. 

In brief, there were a lot of ways AIs could threaten you in Civ IV.  They could send their military to attack you, they could use their production to build wonders before you could, they could use their culture to steal the hearts and minds of your people, making your own cities flip to their side in the process. 

In theory, all these methods still exist in Civ VI, but the AIs are very incompetent at executing them.  None of the Civ VI AIs can threaten you with their military, wonder-building, or culture the way AIs could in Civ IV.  And I think the reason is one of Civ VI’s biggest selling points: unstacking the map. 

See, Civ IV militaries came in “stacks,” where 20 to 100 different units could all sit on one tile together and attack wherever they wanted.  Defeating these stacks meant you had to have a stack of units all your own, and some people complained that this made warfare just a numbers game without any tactics.   

I think those complainers were dead wrong, but regardless Civ V was the first game to “unstack” the military, forcing 20 units to all sit on 20 different tiles instead of stacking together to attack you.  Civ VI continues this trend, and coincidentally Civ V and Civ VI have the same problem in which warlike AIs are incredibly bad at war.   

But while Civ V was the first to unstack the units, Civ VI went further in “unstacking the map.”  In Civ IV and Civ V, your city could have any number of buildings in it that you wanted, built at any time.  So you could build a Forge for +25% production, a Library for +25% Research, a Market for +25% gold.  The question then becomes, which buildings should you build, and in what order? 

If you already know you’re going to build all 3, then you should build the Forge first.  It’s bonus of +25% production will speed up how fast you build the Library and the Market after its finished.  But maybe you are in a severe economic crunch, and you just NEED GOLD NOW.  In that case, maybe build the Market first, and then maybe skip on the library and forge so you city can focus on producing wealth and not spend its scarce resources building infrastructure. 

Or maybe your city produces a lot of science, but almost no production or gold.  Is it worth building the Market and Forge in that case?  Maybe you should *just* build the library and be done with it. 

These are all simple ideas, and you can easily see the AI thinking of the game like an excel spreadsheet and just trying to maximize its values at the end.  The AI sees its running out of gold, it builds markets in response.  It sees a city with high science, it builds a library there.  It sees a city with good everything, it builds Forge first, then Library and Market after.   

The AI in Civ IV is really just deciding what order to build things in, and when.  Its goals can be thought of as simple profit-maximizer functions, and it can be coded in the same way.  The programmers who actually built this AI then had a straightforward job in front of them: adjust how the AI weights each one of its goals until you find a system that makes the AI play reasonably well.   

You can downweight Libraries if your playtesting reveals that the AI is going bankrupt by building those instead of Markets.  You can upweight Forges if the AI is foregoing them to focus only on science and gold.   

Up- and downweighting just chances where the AI puts its build orders in the city queue, and while there’s a lot more to build in Civ IV than just Forges, Markets, and Libraries, the build queue itself is quite simple to grasp. It’s easy to visualize the build queue by just writing it out, and it makes sense that you could try to use it to improve the AI’s intelligence while sitting in front of your computer trying to program the game. 

But with unstacking the cities, there’s no longer just a build queue.  It isn’t just about *when* you build things, but also *where*.  Even explaining this system through text or a spreadsheet is difficult, and you’ll see what I mean.  And I believe that this difficulty made it harder to program a “good” AI.  Because instead of a simple build-queue that can be thought of as a profit-maximizing function, you’re suddenly solving a *graphical* problem instead. 

So here’s an example of unstacking the cities.  In Civ VI you’ll still build the equivalents of Forges, Libraries, and Markets.  Only now Forges give bonus production for being near mines and quarries, Libraries give bonus science for being next to mountains, and Markets give bonus gold for being on a river.  Each building can’t stack on top of another building, so you can’t place a Library where you already put your Forge. 

Let’s say we have a city that’s just south of a river, near a mountain range immediately to its west, and has some mines on the opposite side of the river near the mountains (so northwest from the city).   

Well if you put down the Forge near the mines (so across the river), you invalidate using that spot for your Market.  If you then put your Market down on this side of the river, you no longer have any room to place your Library near those mountains.   

Is this easy to visualize in your head?  Do you think it’d be easy to try to program an AI to maximize its bonuses in this system?  I don’t think so, and I think this might be a fundamental problem with the Civ VI AI: it can’t think in terms about graphical problems, it only seems to think about functional problems.  And I think that’s because the programmers programming it also had trouble solving the graphical problems because translating a graphic problem into code isn’t something most people are used to. 

And I think this is the case because Civ IV’s AI *also* had a fundamental difficulty of solving graphical problems.  Most of Civ IV’s gameplay was like those profit-maximizing functions I talked about above: what do you build or research and in what order.  But *where* to place your cities is a more graphical problem, and it was one problem the AI was unusually bad at. 

Here’s an example of Civ IV’s graphical problem: where to settle your city?  You’re playing as Egypt, and Egypt’s special unit is the War Chariot, which requires Horses.  You see there is a Horse resource a ways east of some Wheat, and to the northeast of the Horse resource is Fish.  Wheat and Fish both provide a lot of food, and food is the most important resource of all in Civ IV (as it is in real history).   

So you want to maximize your food AND get the Horses, but how can you get all 3 of these together in a single city?  Settling closer to the Wheat gives you a city that’s off the coast and can’t get to the Fish.  Settling closer to the Horses means you have to wait until borders expand to get either the Fish OR the Wheat.  Settling closer to the Fish means you have to wait until borders expand to get the Horses. 

Again, this problem of where to settle cities is probably very hard to visualize.  And while a skilled player will quickly learn to solve this problem, it seems the Civ IV programmers couldn’t get the AI to solve it.  The AIs will regularly settle cities in terrible spots where they can’t get any resources or can’t get as many resources as they *should* get. 

Again, I think the graphical problems of Civ IV were harder for programmers to visualize and program for than the profit-maximizing problems, and that’s why Civ IV is worse at the game’s graphical problems, like settling cities, than it is at the profit-maximizing problems, like when to build its Forge, Library, and Market. 

I think as the games’ problems have become more and more graphical, the programmers who are used to coding functions haven’t been able to keep up.  And that leads to a severe disconnect between how the programmers want the AI to behave an how it actually does. 

I think my final piece of evidence for this is the 2021 patch for Civ VI/ 

In the Civ VI 2021 patch, the Devs tried their damndest to finally make the AI smarter.  They did this by making the AI overemphasize science to a ridiculous degree, hoping that if the AI could have a tech lead against the player than all its other problems would fall into place. 

This didn’t work because the AI was still building Libraries in terrible places, it was just now building more of them and invalidating good locations for Markets, Forges, and everything else.  The huge overemphasis on libraries created AIs that would blow through the early-game research before stalling out due to a lack of money and production to build buildings in the later eras.  The AIs still couldn’t win technology victories, or even beat the player in technology, but when you captured their cities you’d find tons of libraries built in spots that should have had a Market or Forge. 

It sounds like the Devs faced exactly the type of graphic problem I’ve described, but tried to solve it with a profit-maximizing solution.  The AI can’t research well?  It’s very hard to teach them *where* to place libraries, so just tell them to build *more* of them.   

I don’t know what can be done to fix this, maybe force the devs to have a copy of the game running on a second monitor as they program, or introduce some training about how to translate a graphical problem into a code-able solution.  But I think this difficulty of solving graphical problems is why the Civ VI AI is so much dumber than the Civ IV AI, all the biggest problems in Civ VI are graphical. 

Civilization VI and the No City Challenge

Let me tell you a hilarious story, then later get technical about why it happens.  

The Civilization series of games gives you control of a civilization and asks you to “win” history.  You can win by conquering the world, or by having your civilization elected supreme leader, or my researching enough technology to escape the cradle of earth and go out to colonize the galaxy.

But fundamentally civilization is about cities.  Cities are where everything happens, you build your military in cities, you get money from cities, you get research from them, your civilization is nothing without its cities, and when your last city is lost, you are defeated.  

It makes sense then that you want to always have *more* cities so you can have *more* stuff.  Two cities give you twice as much of everything as just one, a third city upgrades you 50% from two and so forth.  The Civ games have tried to put limits on “infinite city spam,” but generally *more* cities is always better than *less*.

That’s why the One City Challenge is such a challenge.  The One City Challenge is a longstanding challenge for Civilization veterans, demanding you win the game using *only one city*.  This means staying unconquered long enough to either diplomacy yourself into the World King, or research your way into galactic colonization.  

But the One City Challenge is nearly impossible when you’re up against AIs building as many cities as they can.  I’ve never beaten the One City Challenge, and most who do beat it do so on the lowest difficulties.  Beating the One City Challenge on Deity (the hardest difficulty in the game) is only for Civ Masters with a *lot* of luck on their side.

But Civ VI introduced something new, wonderful, and stupid.  Civ VI introduced the No City Challenge, and it’s doable on Deity.

See in Civ VI, the Maori civilization starts with the ability to sail the oceans, and their starting settler and warrior both begin in the ocean.  It’s easy enough to send the settler and warrior way down to the artic ice caps and hide in the ocean forever, never meeting or even interacting with any other Civs (because who would explore the desolate ice caps in this game?).  Now you’re playing the “No City Challenge,” an attempt to win the game while hiding in the ice caps and never even settling a city.

But how on earth would you *win* this challenge?  No city means no research, no money, no production.  You could never settle the galaxy OR be elected world leader this way, could you?

Well galaxy no, world leader yes, because Civ VI also has a hilariously broken victory condition.  

In previous Civilization games, Diplomatic Victory required a majority of the world’s population to vote for you as leader.  This meant you needed to make very good friends with a good number of the other Civs, becoming allies and trade partners, and being such good friends with them that they’d be willing to elect you leader, even though it meant giving up their sovereignty to you.

Civ VI doesn’t do this though, instead Diplomatic Victory means collecting “diplomatic points” until you have 20 of them, and 20 points means you win.

But how do you get diplomatic points?  Some ways still rely on production and money, for example you can help out after natural disasters and build wonders of the world to gain diplomatic points.  

Clearly those ways are unavailable if we’re hiding out in the ice caps, so the No City Challenge instead relies on the World Congress, which is hilariously broken in its own right.

The Civ VI World Congress starts up once enough time has passed for the game to reach the medieval era.  At that point, every Civ will gain the opportunity to vote for random “world congress resolutions.”  These resolutions are chosen at random, you have no control over them.  And they’re binding on you, even if you’ve never met half (or all!) of the other nations in the World Congress.

And these resolutions make no sense when you think about that.  For example, our real world has done a lot of work banning Ivory hunting, even though Ivory was considered a luxury centuries ago.  The Civ VI world congress can also ban Ivory, but it does so even if the people voting on the resolution have never met each other.  So you can have a situation where people you’ve never met, on the other side of the world, are now enforcing an ivory ban on you even though your own ruthless Civ sees nothing wrong with Ivory hunting.

Anyway, any time you vote for the winning “side” of a resolution, you earn a diplomatic point.  Even if the vote wasn’t close, *even if you only casted a single vote*.  If the world votes to ban Ivory and you also voted Yes, you get a diplomatic point.  

You get votes according to how many cities you have *but you also always get 1 vote no matter what*, and here’s where we come back to the No City Challenge.  Our Maori Civ hiding in the arctic still gets to vote in the World Congress, even though they don’t have any cities.  It’s also *very* easy to predict how the AIs will vote, and very easy to know which World Congress resolutions will pass or not.  So if our Maori Civ can just cast their 1 vote for the winning resolution each time, they can rack up Diplomatic Points until they have 20 and they win.

Think about this, a Civ sitting in the arctic, never founding even a *single* city, has “won” because they voted for the winners in every election of the World Congress.  The other Civs of the world have determined that the Maori (who they never knew existed until now, wait how did their votes even get cast?), the Maori who have zero cities mind, are truly the skilled diplomats the world needs to lead it to peace and prosperity.  And these Civs (who again, *have never met the Maori*) will give up their spaceships and their weapons of war to let these Diplomats rule the world.  

And this isn’t even a theoretical victory condition, it’s actually happened.  Several times.

This insane “victory condition” comes about because the AIs in Civ VI are very bad at *winning* even if they’re pretty good at *not losing*.  See, the World Congress is Weird and Broken, but even then, previous Civ games would never have seen this type of victory because an AI would have won some other victory before then.  Previous AIs were pretty good about conquering each other, culturally dominating each other, or reaching Alpha Centauri alone, especially if the player wasn’t there to stop the strongest Civ from running away with the game.  And that’s what the rest of this post is about, Civ VI AIs can’t easily *lose*, but they can never *win*

I recently got the Civ VI bug again and wanted to write about it.  I made some posts long ago discussing how Civ VI is the only Civ game I’ve ever beaten on Deity (the hardest difficulty level).  This isn’t really because I’m good at the game, it’s because the AI is bad at it. 

See, there are really two sides to “winning” a game.  One side has to lose, the other side has to win.  This seems obvious, but let me be clear: the AI in Civ VI is *really really bad at winning*, so much so that if the player can even become *moderately good at not losing* then they are guaranteed to win eventually, even if they themselves are bad at winning.  

Let me compare Civ VI to its predecessor, Civ V.  I once played a very high-level game of Civ V with Polynesia.  I settled islands, I built my navy, and since this was an “archipelago” map where there was lots of water everywhere, this made me undefeatable in war.  

See Civ V made it so that land units traverse the water by just walking into it and conjuring up a boat for themselves (maybe they built their boat on the land).  But these land units are completely powerless in water, they are instantly destroyed by any true naval unit.  A roman trireme can attack a division of marines, and as long as the marines are on the water the trireme will win and take zero damage.

So in this Polynesia game, my main war strategy was to bait enemy land units into the water and slaughter them with my ancient, obsolete ships.  I would repeatedly send triremes against marines and modern armies, and win with no casualties because the AI never build naval units to defend their sea-borne land units.  

It was impossible for me to lose.  But I was never going to win.

See although I had an impregnable military, my economy was in dire shape.  High level AIs get obscene bonuses to production, research, and the economy.  My enemies were in the Industrial Age while I languished in the Renaissance, and even if this didn’t matter militarily it would soon matter technologically.  

Civ has always provided a number of ways to win, both through war *and* peace.  You could conquer all your enemies, or you could build a spaceship to Alpha Centauri and say neener-neener as you colonize the galaxy, that also counts as winning.  Well my enemies were clearly going to get to Alpha Centauri while I was still figuring out coal and oil.  They were going to *win* even if it it didn’t feel like I would *lose*.  

Militarily, I was unstoppable.  Culturally, I was fine.  Economically, I punched above my weight.  But in the end, my enemies could always win through Technology, and win they did.

This story is meandering, but it proves an important point: winning isn’t just about *not losing*, it isn’t just about staying in the game and staying active.  There are victory conditions that the AI can still meet, and they can use those to win even if they don’t knock you out of the game, even if it feels like you never “lose.”

Civ VI though, Civ VI AI’s don’t have this.  Civ VI AIs are like me in that Polynesia game, they’re good at *not losing*, they’re terrible at *winning*.  And in fact they’re so bad, that they are almost incapable of winning at all.  

The Civ VI AIs are terrible at building a spaceship to go to Alpha Centauri.  They are incapable of achieving cultural or religious domination.   They will never conquer most of their neighbors.  And with those being the main ways you can win, a player playing competently will *eventually* luck into one of those.  So long as a player just *doesn’t lose* they can slowly crawl their way into *winning*, even though the AIs are strong enough that they *should have won long ago*.

Coda to my thoughts on Civilization 6

I recently wrote about how the AI in Civ 6 seems to be worse at its own game than previous Civ games. I want to give a shoutout to the youtuber Sulla whose “AI survivor” series put this into sharp contrast for me. Sulla sets up games of Civilization 4 that pit the AIs entirely against each other, with no player involvement. He then looks to see how it all turns out.

In Civilization 4, the AIs will usually manage to conquer each other. The games start with 8 AIs and it’s never been the case that they all survive to reach the end of the game. On the other hand in Civ 6 I rarely see even a single AI get eliminated unless I’m doing the eliminating. It just goes to show how passive the Civ 6 AIs are, and how utterly incapable they are at using 1upt and the rules of their own game.

Just something to think about.

Civilization 4 thoughts

Playing Civ 6 made me nostalgic for Civ 4, so I made it my project to get better at it.  I’ve been watching videos from Sullla’s channel (a big Civ lp-er) and have learned a lot of good stuff that helped me in Civ 4

Now to start with this victory wasn’t exactly easy.  I took the most broken, OP leader in Civ 4 (Huana Capac) and used a map-type that the AI does really poorly in (highlands with dense peaks, AI pathfinding screws up).  Even then I did a tiny bit of save-scumming at the beginning to fight off the barbarians.  But once things were going, I found that a Civ 4 game can be really easy… when it acts like a Civ 6 game.  Let me explain:

The reason Highlands map is so easy is as I said the AI’s pathfinding screws up.  I never got war declared on me during my Emperor level game, my only neighbor was Charlemagne who loved me because I adopted his religion, and my other close neighbors fought inconclusive wars amongst each other with no territory changing hands.  This let me sit back and tech away, *and that’s also how I won my Civ 6 deity game*.  It’s made me definitely appreciate that one of the big things holding back Civ 6 difficulty is the AIs’ inability to conquer each other and snowball out of control.  In a normal Civ 4 game one or more AIs will declare war, conquer their neighbor, and suddenly roll right up to the player’s boarders with the world’s largest army in tow.  A successful conqueror loses relatively few units to gain a lot of territory, and unsuccessful one throws away all their production producing units.  This helps AIs snowball when they focus on conquest. I don’t know exactly why Civ 6 AI is unable to conquer each other (OK I do, it’s 1upt) but this failure is a large part of the reason why I think they aren’t able to challenge a player once you escape the early game and are in the midgame.  No single AI will be so far ahead of everyone as to be unstoppable, everyone is usually around the same size.

So that’s a bunch of random thoughts, but it’s what I thought of when playing Civ 4.

Civilization (the game) thoughts

I don’t know if I’ve blogged about Civilization 6 before.  The game has received its final DLCs and the devs have all but left to work on Civ 7, so I guess being 5 years late is the perfect time to talk about it.  Warning, this is a long post.  Also warning, I do enjoy Civ 6 and pretty much every Civ game I’ve ever played, but I will be very critical in this post.

To step back a moment, I’ve played every Civilization game since 3.  Most Civ games have a difficulty scale with funny little names, but basically there are 8ish levels of difficulty, and the AI gets progressively more bonuses as difficulty increases.  In 3, I could barely win on difficulty 3 of 8.  In Civ 4, I could reliably win on difficulty 5 of 8, and sometimes 6 of 8 (Emperor) with the right setups.  In Civ 5, I could win on 6 of 8 reliably, and once managed 7 or 8 using a broken setup and a lot of savescumming.  

Difficulty level 8 of 8 is always called Deity, and it is always an exceptional challenge with the AI receiving ludicrous bonuses to every single statistic.  I have never beaten any Civ game on Deity.  Until Civ 6.

Civilization 6 was the first game I beat on Deity and the crazy thing is I don’t actually think I’m better at Civ 6 than I was at Civ 4 or 5.  I know I’m bad at Civ 3, but that’s because I hate the trading mechanics.  But with Civ 6, I genuinely think it’s just an easier game than its predecessors in an interesting and perhaps bad way.

To start off, let’s discuss how the Civ games make higher level AIs difficult.  They don’t particularly add any new mechanics or strategies, they just give the AIs big multiples to everything they do.  At high levels, an AI city will grow 50% faster, train units 50% faster, build buildings 50% faster, and they start with free technologies.  At the highest difficulty of Deity, the AI also gets to start with 2 settlers to the player’s 1.  That means that on Deity, the AI will start with twice as many cities as the player does, and each city will be 50% more productive.  

That’s a big hole to dig yourself out of, but the player has much better knowledge of the game mechanics and so a very good player can still win, even on Deity.  

The thing is that the AIs understood the game mechanics in 4 and 5 a hell of a lot better than they do in 6.  Some would say 6 is more complex, but I don’t buy that, I think in many ways it has (thankfully) been made simpler and more streamlined for easier access.  But I do think the Civ 6 AI understands its own game a lot worse than 4 and 5.  

It comes down to “one unit per tile” or 1upt as it’s known in Civ circles.  In Civ 4, you could stack as many buildings and as many units on a tile as you wanted.  Want your city to have a forge, a market, a theatre, and be garrisoned by 10 archer units?  Go ahead.  Civ 5 changed this in that only 1 archer unit can ever fit on any tile, but they didn’t update the AIs to make them good at this new system.  There’s a complex juggling act that is needed to make all your units be effective when you can’t stack them all on a tile.  And the AI is not good at this juggling act.

In Civ 4 the AI wasn’t great but it was at least smart enough to gather a dozen units and march towards the nearest city.  If you only had a single archer in that city, well even Alexander the Great can’t win against those odds.  But in Civ 5, the AIs will gather a dozen units, and they will all get in each other’s way as they fail to march against an enemy city.  A single archer in Civ 5 can indeed pick off their enemies one by one, defeating a dozen units without taking a scratch.

So with 1upt, wars in Civilization became heavily player-favored, as no amount of enemy numerical advantage could make up for their incompetence.  However the Civ 5 AIs still had ungodly bonuses that could let them tech up and win the game through other means.

Civ 6 then decided to “unstack the cities,” doing to cities what 1upt had done to military units.  Now you could no longer have a forge, a market, and a theatre all in one place.  They had to be spread across the map of your city.  To make this mechanic fun, they added “adjacency bonuses” so that buildings work a lot better when they’re near things that help them.  If a market is near a river, then it can trade with far away places easier and it makes more gold.  If a theatre is near a world wonder, then it’s in a more beautiful part of town and produces more culture.  The player is encouraged to use these adjacency bonuses to get the most out of their buildings.  The AI… cannot do this to save its life.

Just like 1upt led to the AI being terrible at war, districts led to the AI being terrible at peace.  They have no ability to manage districts or even look for the best spots to place them.  You’ll often conquer an AI city and see districts placed in just such a way that they have zero adjacency bonus, which is hard to do if you know even just look at the tooltips.  They also seem to hyperfocus on research to the expense of all else, which doesn’t really help them.

But on deity the AI is still hard.  In fact, Deity AIs in Civ 6 are the hardest they’ve ever been, getting to start the game with three free settlers and a good sized army while the player starts with a single settler and a warrior.

But this gives a game against Deity AIs a sort of strange difficulty curve.  On turn 1 every single AI is more than three times as strong as you because they start with 3 settlers and their cities get free bonuses.  But as the turns go on the player makes more and more good choices while the AIs make poor ones.  Eventually the player pulls ahead of the AIs, and then starts to “snowball” from there.  Snowballing in strategy games is when the strongest ones in the game get even stronger over time relative to their peers.  Players always snowball better than the AI and so once a player is stronger than the AI, they’ll never ever be weaker again.  

So in a game against Civ 6 deity AIs, the first few turns are the hardest by far, and you can die within the first 10 turns easily.  But if you just make it to turn 50, you’re golden, untouchable even.  The AI isn’t skilled at getting any kind of victory, so even with their huge bonuses you can snowball out ahead of them and get whatever victory you want at your leisure.  This difficulty curve existed in every Civ game, but it is at its harshest in Civ 6 because the AIs have never been worse at playing their own game.

So while I have gotten my first Deity-level victory in Civ 6, I don’t actually feel like I’m all that good at it.  I feel like I’m playing chess against a 5-year-old only they’ve replaced all their pawns with queens.  I feel like this is definitely something that needs to be improved upon in Civ 7.  “Better AI!” isn’t exactly a hype-worthy back-of-the-box quote, but these are primarily single player games and I feel the single player experience is paramount.  I think I’d enjoy my time much more if I felt that my victories were from being out-maneuvered and outplanned, rather than because my opponents got free stuff at the start.  And I think it would be more fun if I could be ahead all game and then a smart AI could sneak up and overtake me in the lategame.  As it stands, once we’re out of the classical age, I’m golden.

I know no one at Firaxis games reads my blog, but if someone could tell John Civilization to fix his AI, that’d be great.