I’d just settle for competent AI at any difficulty. I only ever had a few runs in Civ6 because the AI consistently fell apart in late game. Conversely, it’s why I had over 1000 hours in Civ5. Yes, it cheated, but once I started to ignore that, it was really satisfying to climb the difficulty ladder and still feel challenged even into the late eras most of the time.
If I were to be granted a single wish for a new Civ edition, it would be game AI that scaled well across the difficulty range without cheating.
I’d just settle for competent AI at any difficulty. I only ever had a few runs in Civ6 because the AI consistently fell apart in late game. Conversely, it’s why I had over 1000 hours in Civ5. Yes, it cheated, but once I started to ignore that, it was really satisfying to climb the difficulty ladder and still feel challenged even into the late eras most of the time.
With machine learning, there’s no reason we can’t have better AI other than cost. I hope strategy games eventually look into this.
Machine learning is irrelevant to the sort of AI used in a game like this.
It worked for StarCraft. You train a model on human gameplay and then have it play the game.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/30/20939147/deepmind-google-alphastar-starcraft-2-research-grandmaster-level