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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   2572 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I do wish the singleplayer AI had been fleshed out a little more; a pretty common complaint about games of that era.

Era? I've yet to play a single 4X game with a decent AI, which is by far my biggest gripe with the genre; Low difficulty gets boring quickly, high difficulty is about taking advantage of the quirks of the AI. So far I usually have most fun by using medium difficulty, lots of arbitrary self-constraints and/or other obstacles, such as very frequent and aggressive barbarians/pirates.

Modern 4X AI tends to lack adaptivity. AI of games of that era tended to lack subsystems altogether.

(For instance: MoO II has creative/uncreative races. Normally you pick from one of ~3 choices in tech, uncreative gets one randomly, creative gets them all. So how do normal AI races in MoO II pick tech? ...completely randomly, as though they were uncreative.)

Lacking adaptivity is a great understatement. I've played multiple entries in the genre in which I was at first amazed, only to find out that the AI is barely functional for several factions - it gets stuck on a small number of planets, utterly mismanages holdings in a way that even a static AI could do better or is completely incapable of running a war in a meaningful sense.

It took me faaaar too long to realize how poorly Hearts of Iron's AI handles convoys. I can't imagine what it's mangling on the less visible fronts.

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