Quote:
Originally Posted by thejeff
The trouble with most of the "gets 8x resources" approaches to AI is that they usually wind up with an AI who's by far toughest if encountered early. 8x advantage is very hard to overcome when you haven't had time to use your strategic and tactical advantages to build production faster to offset the AI's mechanical advantage. Later, the AI will still get 8x the resources from each planet/city/province/whatever, but you'll have more of them to counter with. Starting out you've each got 1.
I haven't played GalCiv, but this seems to apply to most 4X type games. On the hard levels, if I get attacked by an AI early I get swamped, if not I win easily. I wonder if a progressively increasing multiplier for the AI would work better.
|
I don't think the 8x approach is a substitute for a good AI in a 4X game, it's just a substitute for the ability to do tactical analysis. Instead of being able to exhaustively analyze the outcome of a particular battle to decide whether you can engage his 34 missile frigates with your 4 dreadnoughts, just make some unrealistically-optimistic assumptions about the capabilities of 4 dreadnoughts vs. 34 missile frigates, but what you actually send into battle are 32 dreadnoughts.
That doesn't mean you don't have to know how to expand efficiently, but an AI which can't expand isn't going to do well even if you do dumb down combat to rock-paper-scissors.
Edit: to address your point about 8x being too much when encountered early, all I can say is "good point." Progressive does sound like a better idea in that light, unless the game starts at a point where the human already has a lot of tactical options (Advanced start in MOO2).
-Max