In reality, though, it largely left AI decision-making up to chance, as the flavors were generally not good at creating long-term planning or predictive behavior models. The AI would select tasks, policies, and so on based on these flavors, a system which-on paper-makes a lot of sense. Everything was flavored-AI personalities, buildings, units, wonders- and these flavors were weighed and changed dynamically during the game.
I'll spare the details, however the core of the Firaxis AI was a system of flavors. Regarding AI design, we really had to step back and reevaluate Firaxis's design. If it isn't already coined, I'd like to coin the maxim that a game developer is only as good as its beta testers. This is, of course, as good a time as ever to praise our community of users, beta testers, and content creators. There's no way Christoph or I could have worked on the AI and debugged it efficiently. Grooms: It does require a programmer, but-more than anything else-it requires a human player to sit down and play against the AI. Personally I focus on the C++ part because that's what I know best, but you don't need to be a programmer to contribute: Artist skills are also important. There are different components to a mod: SQL, XML, Lua and C++. Where do you even begin?Ĭristoph: Well, Firaxis really gave the community a lot to work with.
The fact that you're messing with core elements of the game-the AI-goes beyond a lot of what people usually mods into games. I don't want to pat us on the back too hard, but the Vox Populi AI is widely considered by users to be one of the (if not the) best turn-based strategy AIs currently available for a modern game. From here, we really started looking at AI bugs and poor performance, specifically improving the combat AI, diplomacy AI, and the city development AI. From here, I started chipping away at nagging bugs in the game, until-finally-I decided to branch these bugfixes off into an entirely new project, the Community Patch.Īt this point, I appealed to the community for help, after which Christoph joined.
I took his DLL as a base and expanded upon it, adding in the code for my first project, City-State Diplomacy (CSD).
Grooms: William Howard, he's really the project's grandfather. Ambition came in only later when I realized that we can actually create a significant improvement and wanted the project to shine. So I started to get to know the code better, and step by step we rewrote the important parts. Which was surprisingly easy because there was a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick. And then Firaxis released the Civ5 SDK, which made it possible to see what the AI is doing and improve it.
Because professional developers target a large market of casual gamers who maybe don't even notice the difference between a good and a bad opponent.īecause of the long duration of the game, Civilization isn't really suitable for multiplayer, so this started to annoy me. Image courtesy of YouTube creator Maik's HobbyzimmerĬan you talk to me about the origins of the community patch? What prompted you to attempt something this ambitious?Ĭristoph: The problem with single-player games is that the AI is mostly atrocious. In all honesty Civilization-and games like Civilization-played a major role in my childhood interest in history, and that has carried on ever since.Ĭivilization has come a long way since 1991.
in Comparative Imperialism), so the series was a natural fit. Jeff Grooms: I'm a historian by trade (Ph.D. The turn based aspect is very important to me, I like to have time to think. It's just one of the best games ever, regarding its scope and the connections to the real world. Waypoint: Why'd you originally fall in love with Civilization?Ĭristoph: Well, I can't really remember, I played the first part back on my Amiga 500-and stuck with it. (This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
To understand what it was like to build Vox Populi, and if there was any tension over a patch that implicitly criticizes Firaxis' design, I spoke with designers Cristoph and Jeff Grooms (Cristoph asked for his last name to be kept private.) You can imagine what the response to that comment was like. "If you're going to make a mod, make it at least possible to beat without cheating," reads one comment on the game's subreddit. The goal was to make the AI more like a real-life player, someone who goes out of their way to try and screw you over. When looking up comments about Vox Populi, inevitably you find people throwing up their hands at how different it feels. By making the AI smarter, it's also made Civilization V more difficult.