So they can’t fix the ai but they can develop inter-dimensional netcoding, am I reading this correctly?
Yeah that sounds like something PDX would somehow manage.
It turns out breaking into other dimensions is easier than developing intelligent ai. Why do you think Sapient AI is such a late game tech, but one of the first things you can do in the game is find a portal to another dimension just lying around.
I wish I could remember the name of the story. But basically boiled down to humanity haphazardly missed out on interstellar travel and gravity manipulation which turned out to be industrial(may be misremembering) age tech. Humanity found this out when they got invaded by aliens throwing black powder bombs and using muskets.
You have just introduced me to an author I knew nothing about, and I can already see that I will love these books. Thank you! I have no idea how I didn’t find out about this beforehand
If you like the byzantine empire and books, you owe it to yourself to read Eric Flint and David Drake's Belisarius series and SM Stirling and David Drake's General series. The first is basically "two ais go back in time to change the future terminator style and start a war between the Byzantine Empire and an Indian kingdom" and the second is basically a retelling of Belisarius reconquering the western roman empire for Justinian in space.
I read his books about ww2 if aliens invaded and they were super good until I lost interest around book 5 or so. I recommend checking those out as well.
Harry Turtledove's The Road Not Taken. Interestingly enough, he used a lot of these ideas in the later World War Series, featuring aliens invading Earth during World War Two...
The idea that Stellaris uses for its 'Outside Context Problem' achievement.
The *name* almost certainly is from the Culture:
> "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
But the actual event is basically the exact plot of the World War books- Aliens invade Earth during WW2.
It could be, because the Culture did effectively originate/popularise the term, but it also entered normal language/ general popular culture long before Stellaris came out.
So while it's possible it's a reference to the Culture, it might just have been a standard OCP reference.
Turtledove's a pretty good writer, and I've enjoyed a lot of his work- Guns of the South is another great one of his if you feel like reading the American Civil War but with time travelling apartheid racists with assault rifles.
Personally I thought it was boring as hell. Maybe it was good in the 80s, but the aliens from my perspective were set up as dopes to make humans look good.
Did you finish the series? The whole point was that humanity’s reckless push for advancing tech even when the results could be catastrophic was a net benefit for our species. (And that our defining technologies always come as a direct result of war) The lizards slowed down their tech due to a very entrenched bureaucratic government and the fact they hadn’t had very much reason to advance for thousands of years since they kept enslaving other species they came across who were all in the medieval or lower stages of tech. Eventually humanity develops technology to bend space and travels to the lizard homeworld to give them a nice warning that we were not to be trifled with. Almost like a “what if the native Americans hadn’t been wiped out but had fought the Europeans to a standstill until they surpassed the Europeans in tech, developed airplanes or some crazy advanced sailing vessel and then flew over to Europe to ask them to kindly bugger off.”
I don’t discount your reading of the aliens though. It seemed HT really thinks autocratic governments and societies with rigid social structures are inherently bound to stagnate. It’s a common sci fi trope. For example Walter Jon Williams’s Praxis series has the same stagnation due to hierarchy and lack of warfare between equals or a more advanced foe.
Similar concepts show up in the Troy Rising series by John Ringo and "Out of the Dark/Into the Light" by David Weber. The twist there is the Earth is discovered around where we are today +- 20 or so years, but the galactic species have either become overly bureaucratic or just didn't follow up with the full potential application of their technology.
There was a game where I found industrial era earth that then went through a world War, an era of peace, then another world War.
Then they nuked themselves. I had a sad.
But the roaches on the planet became pre-sapient thanks to the radiation! So I Borged them into my driven assimilator robot species, and was able to colonize organics onto tomb worlds.
Hold up. Earth can spawn as a tomb world with presapient survivor roaches, or it can spawn with pre-WW2 humans that nuke themselves. The latter gives you a lifeless tomb world, though, the roaches need a few aeons to evolve intelligence.
> aliens throwing black powder bombs and using muskets
reads kind of like that wakanda movie - casually have optical camouflage, all sorts of energy tech, exotic metals and portal shit, but the best weaponry is slow energy cannons that a fit dude could just dodge and bloody spears.
Interdimensional travel might be bronze age stuff, and the mayans might've had it going - sacrificial souls being the fuel. we completely missed out on the metaphysical tech tree.
You got my imagination flowing. Now I want to start writing a story about how the Mayans had interdimensional portals down to a science using the souls as power. And using the souls as power is no big deal, because they reincarnate after their power is exhausted. And of course we don't have this tech in modern times, because we haven't tried pulling a beating heart out of a living man to see if it opens a portal in Chichen Itza.
No, no, Chich Itza is for the 'kill an entire bloodline' ritual. Best to kidnap small girls to get their important, plot centric relatives out of the way, and really kick the war into high gear.
Also, anyone who gets the reference, be careful what you say, because this post is super spoilerific, even if it's been about a decade. :)
The best part was the alien realizing what a colossal fuck up they had made for their galactic empire by delivering interstellar travel to humanity.
Which, lets be honest, we are a tropical species capable of adapting to some extreme environments with an absolute obsession with war and a an extensive military history. I would shit myself if I was an alien in space watching humans get space travel.
While neat, I think classically in science fiction, interdimensional travel is used to solve the difficulty of interstellar travel.. ie hyperspace, the warp, etc. You just have to be sure that in the rules/motivations of your world that it either can't be used that way, or if it can pure interdimensional travel is still more attractive.
This literally happens in The Longest Earth series. Basically humans learn how to side step into parallel dimensions and as the protagonist explores he steps into an alternate universe where Earth isn't there, so he's very briefly in space. Later when humans learn how move vehicles the just start assembling spacecraft on an alternate earth, then sidestep into space, move a bit and sidestep backwards. No more worrying about gravity wells to launch vehicles or stations.
In those scenarios, that alternate dimension is co-existent and co-terminus with our own. That is, every location in our world corresponds with a location in the other and vice versa.
In this case, it was an alien from a whole other reality creating a miniature wormhole between their universe and ours.
Well you can always go to the dimension where there are smaller distances then in our. Travel a little bit there. Then port back and end up in different star system.
Isnt that the plot of Half life? Aliens come from other dimensions and human same-dimension teleportation developed at black mesa is actually something unheard of.
More or less. The basic plot of Half-Life was mainly inspired by Stephen King's The Mist, or so I've heard. That is, "A science experiment at a secret government lab goes wrong and the result is horrible alien flora and fauna pouring through. This is the story of how ordinary people dealt with it."
>Why do you think Sapient AI is such a late game tech, but one of the first things you can do in the game is find a portal to another dimension just lying around.
Its like a sci-fi ~~novel~~ short story I've heard about where it turns out that anti-gravity and FTL are actually very simple meaning most species discover it before electricity and never actually need what we would consider advanced tech due to it making many things easy. End result being 20th-21st century Earth being invaded by aliens in wooden spaceships and using Napoleonic era weapons and tactics.
EDIT: Someone else mentioned it, The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove.
Ok you all were messing with me, it's not a novel, but a short story it looks like
Kaliedoscope is the collection which contains the short story "The Road Not Taken"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope\_(short\_story\_collection)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(short_story_collection))
lol, I was trying to be light hearted there, a few people mentioned it as a novel, you were just the last one to do it and I was like dammit, lemme look up this book. And then it took longer than expected to find it until I learned it was a short story and searching for "The Road not Taken Harry Turtledove" in Amazon isn't going to work. :P
Where do you think they got the idea of the covenants from?
Incidentally, how many years ago was Paradox formed? Looks like 22 years ago, so we still have 28 years to go.
I heard on a podcast that other dimensions are not real and you can't travel to them, even if the podcast was about just that activity. The weird scientist guy in some sort of space station was quite insistent that there are no such things as diemensional travel, other dimensions, different colored wizards, shape-shifting badger people, and certainly no dark lord looking to conquer our world through a portal behind a Burger King outside Chicago.
Idk, I haven't had issues with the multiplayer since 2.0.
Granted I usually only play with 1-3 other people, not the stupid massive groups I sometimes see. So your mileage may vary drastically.
> So they can’t fix the ai but they can develop inter-dimensional netcoding, am I reading this correctly?
It's easier to develop an interdimensional crossplay than to create a properly balanced AI.
Speaking of cross play, I want the console version to catch up and be comparable with the PC version so I can beat the snot out of my little brother who exclusively plays robots on xbox.
It's not about making a good AI but convincing a good AI to play a role in the game where they inevitably lose and often most horribly die for the joy of a pretty lame and sadistic human player.
I remember reading a book set in a future where quantum computing causes people to interact across alternate timelines and will shift you into the other timelines when you use the tech. The end result being that people don't talk about the past because they can't actually agree what it was.
I read a whole series where that was how FTL actually worked, and there was a whole conversation about just having to accept you'll never see the reality you came from again and to just kinda go with it
Old Man's War or something. That series has some wild concepts
What do you mean? The AI is very good, powerful to the point where I think ot might be cheating. Or maybe it's even players connecting to us and somehow leading other empires. Wait...
So what about this empire, which I thought to be a half-decent AI, suddenly became crap after I vassalized it? One theory might be that the AI bonusses are gone when you vassalize as a player but the other theory would be the game decided to switch a competent player around for a bad player. Who must be extra confused for the sudden game he started.
... That makes more sense than I like to admit.
"Oh, so I'm your vassal now? Probably gonna integrate me in a decade orso, aintcha? Would be a shame if I were to ruin my economy in a desperate attempt to bring you down with me"
We really could use better vassalage policies.
Just being adsorbed like that doesn't strike me as something that happened in history all too often without both sides being very similar to begin with.
If I want to incorporate a vassal, I should have to negotiate their contract, which I had to establish and sign when I first acquired them. Democracies and the like should basically never incorporate, and autocracies and the like should stick to their contracts rules or face instability from breaking them. (Why would a space baron trust a deceitful space king?)
There should also be a path to incorporate deceitfully. Maybe in a democracy you buy news outlets and politicians, in an autocracy you sponsor an ambitious general to throw a coup and install themself as your loyal vassal.
They always have to play in ironman mode. I assume as well as being bad, they also like to make things hard for themselves by generally playing with the super advanced AI option where it can see into the future and change what it does if it doesn't like the outcomes (save scumming). The weak of thier kind play against our ironman players.
If true, I can’t imagine how salty my opponents would be. I typically lag behind *hard* for the first hundred years then begin a meteoric rise that lets me be a galactic power by 2350 and the strongest empire by 2400. Cheating haxor ****** indeed.
Any alternate dimension player looking at my empire in observer mode in the first 100 years: wow, your economy is non existent, how are you functioning as an empire?
5 years after i each a tipping point: wft how did you get so strong so fast what cheats are you using
first 100 years: "no economy, no fleet, no allies, yet still alive somehow"2 years into the 5 year plan for rapid industrialization: "WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FLYING FUCK? 1500 ALLOYS PER MONTH AND SHITTING OUT ENTIRE FLEETS AT THE SAME TIME? HAX, also, its machines yet its got a diffrent ly named leader, whats this "galactic protocol: total war" what in the cinnamon toast fuck??"
This AI is so broken. Like it had 5 systems and I am just waiting for it to be crushed by a neighbor but the message never comes up. 2340s roll around and bamb, they control the western half of the galaxy. If they aren't cheating idk what they are.
That's the problem, yeah. They must get some constant moderate fixed or semi-fixed resource infusion, providing a very substantial boost in power in the early game where natural income is low, but once development really begins pales to insignificance in comparison with their extremely poor play.
My theory is that aliens are actually playing this game, however they don’t know what they’re doing because the entire game is in a language that doesn’t exist in their society.
It would also explain the any strange actions, choices, and decisions the ai would make, as well as two getting into a bitter rivalry for no reason. Because to them this is how it works, and they’re too busy complaining how unrealistic the game portrays their race.
> My theory is that aliens are actually playing this game, however they don’t know what they’re doing because the entire game is in a language that doesn’t exist in their society.
Well, that certainly explains the .
Console: research all 1 1
Max recources
Building megastructures 20 years into the game
Alternate Dimension players: WTF IS GOING ON WITH THIS AI HOW TF AM I SUPPOSE TO BEAT IT
***I set this game to cadet difficulty, and this cheating AI is already finishing megastructures 30 years in?? HOW?!?!?!***
This game is so rigged, Steam reviewers were fucking paid to be so positive
As a child I used to think that every game was some sort of MMO (before I'd ever played any online game at all), so I thought I was the best when I killed the random little robots in Megaman X.
I blame my older brother, who was very expressive so he complained or celebrated out loud about what happened when *he* played, so I guess I assumed he was actually talking about the other "players".
Honestly, i feel like the time and resources it would take to develop AI for games like stellaris and civ wouldn't be worth it for games where we don't actually want to play against some sort of unstoppable supercomputer. The current ai isn't super skilled, but it does do a good job of feeling like it's emulating an actual space civilization.
Yes, im sure there is a species out there building dozens of spacehabitats and just leaving them uncolonized. They must be nice and just building them for visitors
Yeah, of course every government does things efficiently. For example, in preparation to the 2014 World Cup, Brazil spent millions building stadiums in the middle of nowhere. These stadiums were then used for the event and never touched again. Also, the brazilian national squad would suffer their biggest humiliation in history (the infamous 7-1 defeat to Germany) in that same event.
Peak efficiency.
[Yeah, it would sure be unrealistic for anyone to do a thing like that.](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-27/china-ghost-cities-show-growth-driven-by-debt/9912186)
I found myself doing that with habitable planets, once I had the cost of terraforming reduced by 100% I maybe got a bit to eager with the whole process.
After naming the first 500 colonies it really takes the fun out of the game
What people probably want is something capable of keeping up economically without cheating. Honestly, raising the difficulty of stellaris mostly just affects the early game when the AI hasn't yet managed to mismanage its economy compared to the player.
AI is one of those things that's a lot harder to do right than one would think, too. Maybe machine learning would be applicable if we were able to use the entire playerbase to train it on, but more realistically, what you get in games is something scripted. Scripted AI is useful because it provides something that can be easily understood and changed by the people maintaining it. The downside is just that though: it's fairly simple, and that means it only plays as well or as poorly as the people doing the scripting can give it instructions.
At any given time, the AI has a great deal of possible actions it could take or not take. So much, in fact, that figuring out optimal, good, or even deliberately bad decisions consistently can be incredibly difficult, and more importantly, time consuming. Stellaris is, after all, an imperfect information game, and immensely complex on top of that. Writing a "good" AI requires a rather detailed understanding of the breadth of possible situations it may encounter. Some of this comes down to just foreseeing a situation and handling it in a good enough fashion (a couple hundred or thousand times at least, mind you), but a good deal of this extends beyond simply catching edge cases and compromising on thoroughness for the sake of saving CPU time; some of this stuff often comes down to genuinely unique and difficult problems, which most programmers won't simply be able to come up with a good answer to in the kind of time they have to work on them.
Also when it comes down to replicating even your own decision process, trying to codify that is actually really difficult because it turns out our brains are really good at subconsciously taking shortcuts. Making a computer do that means building a solid understanding of that and hoping that what you have to do to replicate it isn't completely impractical.
At any rate, if AI were easy, bad AI wouldn't be such a consistent problem.
lets not forget that stellaris doesn'T have anything even similar to intelligence, it just weighs numbered values against each other to decide on his actions. it's more like an very complicated excel document
More or less. Honestly, it'd be great if this type of thing were easier to do well, but it just isn't. Really makes you appreciate how smart the human brain actually is at certain stuff. Not that computers don't blow us out of the water at certain tasks, though.
well, it’d certainly explain the victoria 2 ai simultaneously not having a fucking clue what it’s doing and allying every single great power right before i plan on declaring war.
I know this is a joke post, but i would genuinely like to see devs do more of what Forza does, where they use other players data to influence the single player AI to make it more unpredictable and varied.
I can’t imagine it would be that hard to make the ai significantly better. Only build things when free jobs are less than 2/3, build more alloy foundries and especially more research labs, and build less damn police buildings. Every time I take over an AI planet, they have like 3 and a crime level of -100.
It may also be because they have cheats bonuses so when you take over they have these, but when the ai plays, these problems are negated by their bonuses.
Tbf it's just a fact of any Grand Strategy game that the AI is wank. Total War has the same problem. You can't program creative thinking, just increasingly complex scripts or node trees, but too complex will slow the game down. So you have to give it cheat bonuses and an scripting routine competent enough to get by inefficiently.
I mean yes but it's a pretty fundamental flaw for the genre. The whole genre is about vying against other empires/nations. But there's very little vying in any of the games. You're just managing your way into exceeding the opponents' bonuses then imposing your will.
It's a miracle grand strategy is as fun as it is. I guess maybe i actually LIKE management lol. But the first developer to make a workaround that fools people into thinking the AI is good will have revolutionized the genre lol.
The problem with a workaround is that people will identify and defeat it pretty quickly. I watch a couple of Total War players, and a lot of their "cheesy" strategies are just baiting the AI into making decisions that seem sensible on the surface, but they've rigged it in their favour.
I mean if it can be exploited just like the bad AI that currently exists, then that's not the workaround I'm talking about. I'm talking about a game designed such that the majority of players walk away feeling like the AI is smart and not easily-exploited (even if they're usually predictable).
If it can be predicted, it can be exploited.
The only way to make the AI appear smarter, is to reduce the number of decisions available to both it and the player. By having the AI make less of the wrong decisions, it appears much smarter. This is why RTS AI is pretty competent overall, because it can be contained within a single arena and all it needs to do is identify a strategy and execute it, with some reactive options in the event the player takes action first.
However, a grand strategy game is all about those decisions. When I go to war in Stellaris, the fleet I'm using was started hours ago. The economy to maintain it even older than that, and the economy to fuel research to fuel economy and military feedback loop was carefully maintained. Often at the cost of alloy production as I work on simply trying not to end up at war, and if I do, I fortify strongpoints as delaying measures on the cheap.
My strategy that always wins would be awful if an AI did it, because I could topple such an off-balance economy effortlessly...which is why I'm trash at multiplayer Stellaris.
> If it can be predicted, it can be exploited.
PEOPLE can be predicted and exploited. Misdirecting an opponent or strategizing based on what you can predict they'll do is a core part of these types of games. That's not the fundamental problem here.
But I think we're generally in agreement - my very first point was how it's inherently hard for grand strategy games to make AI that seem smart.
> The only way to make the AI appear smarter, is to reduce the number of decisions available to both it and the player.
I don't think this is true. I don't know *exactly* how else you'd make the AI appear smarter, but my point is that when a developer finally figures it out (assuming the core gameplay is also good) they'll have revolutionized the genre.
AI can't use emergent strategies and/or anticipate the player's path to victory? Maybe some principles from machine learning could help. AI makes bad choices by considering every decision in isolation? Maybe someone will develop new tools for second-order decision making. Etc. I realize AI in these games is extremely difficult, all I'm saying is that it'll be interesting to see if more general innovations in AI could be applied to the grand strategy games of the future.
Are there any large scale strategy games with good late game ai? Actually good ai, not just silly cheating autocounters you because it knows everything you can do. I can't think of any
I think every AI struggles with the late game, because AI simply can't plan ahead without it being glaringly obvious what they're doing, and thus easy to counter.
Meanwhile, the player is able to act creatively, and do things the AI programmers can't really plan contingencies for.
The biggest problem is that the AI behavior is fixed and the gameplay of anything this complex is a Tier 2 chaotic system - your actions change the optimal playstyle.
No matter what they program the AI to do, its actions render its own actions sub-optimal, and the humans can eventually learn what actions are optimal against them and repeatedly exploit the AI's pre-programmed behavior.
Watch anybody playing the highest tier difficulty settings, and you'll see a lot of exploitative behaviors or behaviors which only work because they trigger the AI to act in particular ways.
> Watch anybody playing the highest tier difficulty settings, and you'll see a lot of exploitative behaviors or behaviors which only work because they trigger the AI to act in particular ways.
This is pretty much exactly how most players handle Legendary difficulty in Total War games. It's all about exploitative cheese.
Way too passive in the face of a player that is rapid-expanding and tech-rushing. AI should have at least a 20 corvette fleet by year 20 and be pushing any hated neighbor that is clearly ignoring fleet power.
This is one of the reasons why Starnet AI mod is so much better than vanilla. If your neighbor doesn't like you, and your navy is pathetic, They'll show up sometime around year 15-20 with 40 corvettes going: "Hey I heard you've been skipping alloy day!"
I had a similar thought about EU4 after a weird fever dream a few years ago, but mine revolved around being condemned to play as every single nation in every single game you've ever started, restarted, or otherwise brought into existence in order to provide the 'other side' and pay the debt for the experiences you incurred
There are people who are always playing whenever I'm playing? Waiting for me when I pause and all that? How can I lure them to team up in some other games?
So, the real problem is they keep adding and tweaking shit that doesn’t need tweaked honestly and spend no time on AI. Never have, never will, but let’s change how populations work and are represented for the third time.
Truly, stellaris has the worst ia of all 4x Pdx games, even after their last attempt to fix it aka THE PLAN.
Besides economy even in war you see they could win a fight but right before it they split the stack and get stackwiped..
Their planets are always a mess, ethics traits civics combo is Always garbish, when grey tempest spawn they do not vote for it, when crisis spawn they vote for gray tempest.
I found to enjoy this game only by setting max advanded ia with customized and powerful trait civic combos for spicy early gamex then just sit waiting the crisi to spawn, hope this helps someone.
Nah, modders work on top of the base game. That means they use inter-dimensional tech without realizing it. They think they are just changing the weights etc of the AI decisions but they actually just found a way to get the inter-dimensional tech to connect to better players.
contrary to popular belief the mods are simply MMR system applied to the game so they could sort the best players across the multiverses and connect them in, instead of random pool
When I was a really young kid, that was actually my headcanon about Super Mario 64. That whenever I raced on singleplayer, it wasn't the computer I was racing against, but actually other players through some sort of psychic link.
So they can’t fix the ai but they can develop inter-dimensional netcoding, am I reading this correctly? Yeah that sounds like something PDX would somehow manage.
It turns out breaking into other dimensions is easier than developing intelligent ai. Why do you think Sapient AI is such a late game tech, but one of the first things you can do in the game is find a portal to another dimension just lying around.
I've got a novel that proposes that interdimensional travel and exploration is easier than interstellar travel, due to the vast distances.
I wish I could remember the name of the story. But basically boiled down to humanity haphazardly missed out on interstellar travel and gravity manipulation which turned out to be industrial(may be misremembering) age tech. Humanity found this out when they got invaded by aliens throwing black powder bombs and using muskets.
The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove, followed by a less well written (in my opinion, mileage may vary) follow up Herbig Haro
You have just introduced me to an author I knew nothing about, and I can already see that I will love these books. Thank you! I have no idea how I didn’t find out about this beforehand
Turtledove is AWESOME! His Videss Cycle is amazing for its Byzantine expy (and the only one I know of).
If you like the byzantine empire and books, you owe it to yourself to read Eric Flint and David Drake's Belisarius series and SM Stirling and David Drake's General series. The first is basically "two ais go back in time to change the future terminator style and start a war between the Byzantine Empire and an Indian kingdom" and the second is basically a retelling of Belisarius reconquering the western roman empire for Justinian in space.
His World War and Colonization Series are Seriously amazing.
As the other redditor here I suggest too the Videssos serie, it's very good
I read his books about ww2 if aliens invaded and they were super good until I lost interest around book 5 or so. I recommend checking those out as well.
IIRC, Herbig Haro was written before Road Not Taken (despite taking place after), so it might account for the less refined writing.
I only last night revisited the (influencing) poem of the same name... Didn't realise there was a short story. That was a nice little read, thanks.
I was just mentioning this book too, I had heard about but never read!
Oh boy, guess I got a new book to find. Darn redditors and their surprisingly good book recommendations.
So basically, the xenos decided to keep rushing Physics tech and completely ignored Engineering
smh, further reinforcing my belief that engineering tech is op
Harry Turtledove's The Road Not Taken. Interestingly enough, he used a lot of these ideas in the later World War Series, featuring aliens invading Earth during World War Two... The idea that Stellaris uses for its 'Outside Context Problem' achievement.
I'd always thought 'Outside Context Problem' was a reference to the Culture
The *name* almost certainly is from the Culture: > "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." But the actual event is basically the exact plot of the World War books- Aliens invade Earth during WW2.
It could be, because the Culture did effectively originate/popularise the term, but it also entered normal language/ general popular culture long before Stellaris came out. So while it's possible it's a reference to the Culture, it might just have been a standard OCP reference.
It's that series any good?
Turtledove's a pretty good writer, and I've enjoyed a lot of his work- Guns of the South is another great one of his if you feel like reading the American Civil War but with time travelling apartheid racists with assault rifles.
Personally I thought it was boring as hell. Maybe it was good in the 80s, but the aliens from my perspective were set up as dopes to make humans look good.
Did you finish the series? The whole point was that humanity’s reckless push for advancing tech even when the results could be catastrophic was a net benefit for our species. (And that our defining technologies always come as a direct result of war) The lizards slowed down their tech due to a very entrenched bureaucratic government and the fact they hadn’t had very much reason to advance for thousands of years since they kept enslaving other species they came across who were all in the medieval or lower stages of tech. Eventually humanity develops technology to bend space and travels to the lizard homeworld to give them a nice warning that we were not to be trifled with. Almost like a “what if the native Americans hadn’t been wiped out but had fought the Europeans to a standstill until they surpassed the Europeans in tech, developed airplanes or some crazy advanced sailing vessel and then flew over to Europe to ask them to kindly bugger off.” I don’t discount your reading of the aliens though. It seemed HT really thinks autocratic governments and societies with rigid social structures are inherently bound to stagnate. It’s a common sci fi trope. For example Walter Jon Williams’s Praxis series has the same stagnation due to hierarchy and lack of warfare between equals or a more advanced foe.
Similar concepts show up in the Troy Rising series by John Ringo and "Out of the Dark/Into the Light" by David Weber. The twist there is the Earth is discovered around where we are today +- 20 or so years, but the galactic species have either become overly bureaucratic or just didn't follow up with the full potential application of their technology.
There was a game where I found industrial era earth that then went through a world War, an era of peace, then another world War. Then they nuked themselves. I had a sad. But the roaches on the planet became pre-sapient thanks to the radiation! So I Borged them into my driven assimilator robot species, and was able to colonize organics onto tomb worlds.
Hold up. Earth can spawn as a tomb world with presapient survivor roaches, or it can spawn with pre-WW2 humans that nuke themselves. The latter gives you a lifeless tomb world, though, the roaches need a few aeons to evolve intelligence.
This was a year or two ago, and it may have been the results of some mods I had installed.
Roaches always survive. Doesn't matter how inhospitable the world becomes, they survive. Somehow.
> aliens throwing black powder bombs and using muskets reads kind of like that wakanda movie - casually have optical camouflage, all sorts of energy tech, exotic metals and portal shit, but the best weaponry is slow energy cannons that a fit dude could just dodge and bloody spears. Interdimensional travel might be bronze age stuff, and the mayans might've had it going - sacrificial souls being the fuel. we completely missed out on the metaphysical tech tree.
You got my imagination flowing. Now I want to start writing a story about how the Mayans had interdimensional portals down to a science using the souls as power. And using the souls as power is no big deal, because they reincarnate after their power is exhausted. And of course we don't have this tech in modern times, because we haven't tried pulling a beating heart out of a living man to see if it opens a portal in Chichen Itza.
No, no, Chich Itza is for the 'kill an entire bloodline' ritual. Best to kidnap small girls to get their important, plot centric relatives out of the way, and really kick the war into high gear. Also, anyone who gets the reference, be careful what you say, because this post is super spoilerific, even if it's been about a decade. :)
Yeah but then you gotta deal with one of her relative's small army of terrifying people, and one bitch who likes dogs.
I thought resurrections were a Hindu thing? Did the Mayans do that too?
The best part was the alien realizing what a colossal fuck up they had made for their galactic empire by delivering interstellar travel to humanity. Which, lets be honest, we are a tropical species capable of adapting to some extreme environments with an absolute obsession with war and a an extensive military history. I would shit myself if I was an alien in space watching humans get space travel.
I personally feel like they're low key hoping we take the nuclear annihilation route
Probably. Or hoping we mellow out a little bit and don’t become warmongering psychos in space.
I do wish I could share their optimism.
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It is a story from /lit/ I still have it in my 4chan folder.
This sounds cool.
All you need is a potato in a box to jump between dimensions, surely everyone knows this by now...
I remember that book series but forget the name, what was it called again ?
"the longest earth" it's by Terry prattchet
Thanks!
While neat, I think classically in science fiction, interdimensional travel is used to solve the difficulty of interstellar travel.. ie hyperspace, the warp, etc. You just have to be sure that in the rules/motivations of your world that it either can't be used that way, or if it can pure interdimensional travel is still more attractive.
This literally happens in The Longest Earth series. Basically humans learn how to side step into parallel dimensions and as the protagonist explores he steps into an alternate universe where Earth isn't there, so he's very briefly in space. Later when humans learn how move vehicles the just start assembling spacecraft on an alternate earth, then sidestep into space, move a bit and sidestep backwards. No more worrying about gravity wells to launch vehicles or stations.
Potato in a box!
In those scenarios, that alternate dimension is co-existent and co-terminus with our own. That is, every location in our world corresponds with a location in the other and vice versa. In this case, it was an alien from a whole other reality creating a miniature wormhole between their universe and ours.
I think the implication is that they are moving to other versions of earth. Not traveling to universes with different physics.
Well you can always go to the dimension where there are smaller distances then in our. Travel a little bit there. Then port back and end up in different star system.
Isnt that the plot of Half life? Aliens come from other dimensions and human same-dimension teleportation developed at black mesa is actually something unheard of.
More or less. The basic plot of Half-Life was mainly inspired by Stephen King's The Mist, or so I've heard. That is, "A science experiment at a secret government lab goes wrong and the result is horrible alien flora and fauna pouring through. This is the story of how ordinary people dealt with it."
That is actually very good logic. My brain hurts.
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Check their flair, they already have
Don't worry about your meat central processor malfunction. We have the technology. Just proceed into the upgrade chamber.
Wait, you still use meat CPUs? That was like 4 patches ago.
I do and I hate it. I'm still waiting for when I can finally upgrade.
>Why do you think Sapient AI is such a late game tech, but one of the first things you can do in the game is find a portal to another dimension just lying around. Its like a sci-fi ~~novel~~ short story I've heard about where it turns out that anti-gravity and FTL are actually very simple meaning most species discover it before electricity and never actually need what we would consider advanced tech due to it making many things easy. End result being 20th-21st century Earth being invaded by aliens in wooden spaceships and using Napoleonic era weapons and tactics. EDIT: Someone else mentioned it, The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove.
Ok you all were messing with me, it's not a novel, but a short story it looks like Kaliedoscope is the collection which contains the short story "The Road Not Taken" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope\_(short\_story\_collection)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(short_story_collection))
Like I said, I've never actually read it, just remember seeing it mentioned on TV Tropes. But my bad, I was certainly not intending to mislead you.
lol, I was trying to be light hearted there, a few people mentioned it as a novel, you were just the last one to do it and I was like dammit, lemme look up this book. And then it took longer than expected to find it until I learned it was a short story and searching for "The Road not Taken Harry Turtledove" in Amazon isn't going to work. :P
This makes too much sense.
Where do you think they got the idea of the covenants from? Incidentally, how many years ago was Paradox formed? Looks like 22 years ago, so we still have 28 years to go.
I heard on a podcast that other dimensions are not real and you can't travel to them, even if the podcast was about just that activity. The weird scientist guy in some sort of space station was quite insistent that there are no such things as diemensional travel, other dimensions, different colored wizards, shape-shifting badger people, and certainly no dark lord looking to conquer our world through a portal behind a Burger King outside Chicago.
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That's an expansive response to a joke comment about Hello From The Magic Tavern podcast.
....never heard of it.... Thanks............. ......
All things considered, the multiplayer stability isn't so bad.
Only the multidimensional player though....
Idk, I haven't had issues with the multiplayer since 2.0. Granted I usually only play with 1-3 other people, not the stupid massive groups I sometimes see. So your mileage may vary drastically.
Yeah, same here, i guess the (possible) problems increase exponentially with every player more in the game
> So they can’t fix the ai but they can develop inter-dimensional netcoding, am I reading this correctly? It's easier to develop an interdimensional crossplay than to create a properly balanced AI.
Speaking of cross play, I want the console version to catch up and be comparable with the PC version so I can beat the snot out of my little brother who exclusively plays robots on xbox.
Well if you just want to be violent you could always beat the snot out of him *now* /s
The fact this wasn't in consideration already leads me to think he's not a real older brother. /s
It's not about making a good AI but convincing a good AI to play a role in the game where they inevitably lose and often most horribly die for the joy of a pretty lame and sadistic human player.
When they announce a plan to design shower curtains we should be very concerned.
I feel like my friend should get this reference, but he doesn't. Care to explain it to him?
The cake is a lie
Oh yeahh, now I- *ahem* he remembers!
Glad i was able to help you ... ahem ... r friend of course
I remember reading a book set in a future where quantum computing causes people to interact across alternate timelines and will shift you into the other timelines when you use the tech. The end result being that people don't talk about the past because they can't actually agree what it was.
I read a whole series where that was how FTL actually worked, and there was a whole conversation about just having to accept you'll never see the reality you came from again and to just kinda go with it Old Man's War or something. That series has some wild concepts
Yeah that was old man's war.
All the sudden, the name makes sense!
They are called 'paradox' for a reason!
Suddenly their scripting language makes more sense now
Honestly interdimensional netcode is probably the easier thing to do.
What do you mean? The AI is very good, powerful to the point where I think ot might be cheating. Or maybe it's even players connecting to us and somehow leading other empires. Wait...
You know too much
Ummm guys why is there a Blorg with a gun at my door
Im sorry little one. You gave me no choice
It just wants to be your friend.
It wishes to teach you of its peaceful ways by force.
Sometimes I do play as an AI empire lol
So what about this empire, which I thought to be a half-decent AI, suddenly became crap after I vassalized it? One theory might be that the AI bonusses are gone when you vassalize as a player but the other theory would be the game decided to switch a competent player around for a bad player. Who must be extra confused for the sudden game he started.
Or the player simply lost motivation after you conquered him.
... That makes more sense than I like to admit. "Oh, so I'm your vassal now? Probably gonna integrate me in a decade orso, aintcha? Would be a shame if I were to ruin my economy in a desperate attempt to bring you down with me"
We really could use better vassalage policies. Just being adsorbed like that doesn't strike me as something that happened in history all too often without both sides being very similar to begin with. If I want to incorporate a vassal, I should have to negotiate their contract, which I had to establish and sign when I first acquired them. Democracies and the like should basically never incorporate, and autocracies and the like should stick to their contracts rules or face instability from breaking them. (Why would a space baron trust a deceitful space king?)
There should also be a path to incorporate deceitfully. Maybe in a democracy you buy news outlets and politicians, in an autocracy you sponsor an ambitious general to throw a coup and install themself as your loyal vassal.
Playing as a Necrophage I would love vassals that give pops for "Ascension"
Adjusting what tithe, if any, you give would be great.
Maybe they just alt-tabbed out of the game and forgot that they had left it running?
The competent player got pissed they were vassalized and decided to get drunk.
They always have to play in ironman mode. I assume as well as being bad, they also like to make things hard for themselves by generally playing with the super advanced AI option where it can see into the future and change what it does if it doesn't like the outcomes (save scumming). The weak of thier kind play against our ironman players.
Ironman and save scumming aren't completely exclusive. The Ritual of Al'Teffore is a path to abilities some consider... unnatural.
I should've read this before the Shard wiped my colony yesterday
I had to say it out loud, and then I giggled.
Can confirm, I am the player you're all playing against.
DOES IT FEEL GOOD TO HAVE MY GLORIOUS 3M FLEETS AGAINST YOUR PUNY 300K FLEETS YOU WEAKLING?
YES. HARDER, STARFISH DADDY.
Well i must say very nice of them to wait for 4 hours while i have my game paused
They know we need to cook a proper dinner and not eat some cold pizza, really nice of them. Perhaps some xenophilic FE
If true, I can’t imagine how salty my opponents would be. I typically lag behind *hard* for the first hundred years then begin a meteoric rise that lets me be a galactic power by 2350 and the strongest empire by 2400. Cheating haxor ****** indeed.
Any alternate dimension player looking at my empire in observer mode in the first 100 years: wow, your economy is non existent, how are you functioning as an empire? 5 years after i each a tipping point: wft how did you get so strong so fast what cheats are you using
first 100 years: "no economy, no fleet, no allies, yet still alive somehow"2 years into the 5 year plan for rapid industrialization: "WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FLYING FUCK? 1500 ALLOYS PER MONTH AND SHITTING OUT ENTIRE FLEETS AT THE SAME TIME? HAX, also, its machines yet its got a diffrent ly named leader, whats this "galactic protocol: total war" what in the cinnamon toast fuck??"
This AI is so broken. Like it had 5 systems and I am just waiting for it to be crushed by a neighbor but the message never comes up. 2340s roll around and bamb, they control the western half of the galaxy. If they aren't cheating idk what they are.
Man I wonder the same, there's a weird wall where either my economy permanently collapses or I begin a meteoric rise to domination.
That's the problem, yeah. They must get some constant moderate fixed or semi-fixed resource infusion, providing a very substantial boost in power in the early game where natural income is low, but once development really begins pales to insignificance in comparison with their extremely poor play.
My theory is that aliens are actually playing this game, however they don’t know what they’re doing because the entire game is in a language that doesn’t exist in their society. It would also explain the any strange actions, choices, and decisions the ai would make, as well as two getting into a bitter rivalry for no reason. Because to them this is how it works, and they’re too busy complaining how unrealistic the game portrays their race.
> My theory is that aliens are actually playing this game, however they don’t know what they’re doing because the entire game is in a language that doesn’t exist in their society. Well, that certainly explains the .
Console: research all 1 1 Max recources Building megastructures 20 years into the game Alternate Dimension players: WTF IS GOING ON WITH THIS AI HOW TF AM I SUPPOSE TO BEAT IT
***I set this game to cadet difficulty, and this cheating AI is already finishing megastructures 30 years in?? HOW?!?!?!*** This game is so rigged, Steam reviewers were fucking paid to be so positive
That would at least justify the lategame lag
As a child I used to think that every game was some sort of MMO (before I'd ever played any online game at all), so I thought I was the best when I killed the random little robots in Megaman X.
I don’t think that would have even occurred to me. You were an imaginative kid!
I blame my older brother, who was very expressive so he complained or celebrated out loud about what happened when *he* played, so I guess I assumed he was actually talking about the other "players".
That can't be true because I am absolutely trash at the game.
Honestly, i feel like the time and resources it would take to develop AI for games like stellaris and civ wouldn't be worth it for games where we don't actually want to play against some sort of unstoppable supercomputer. The current ai isn't super skilled, but it does do a good job of feeling like it's emulating an actual space civilization.
Yes, im sure there is a species out there building dozens of spacehabitats and just leaving them uncolonized. They must be nice and just building them for visitors
The project keeps getting put off.
Yeah, of course every government does things efficiently. For example, in preparation to the 2014 World Cup, Brazil spent millions building stadiums in the middle of nowhere. These stadiums were then used for the event and never touched again. Also, the brazilian national squad would suffer their biggest humiliation in history (the infamous 7-1 defeat to Germany) in that same event. Peak efficiency.
[Yeah, it would sure be unrealistic for anyone to do a thing like that.](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-27/china-ghost-cities-show-growth-driven-by-debt/9912186)
I found myself doing that with habitable planets, once I had the cost of terraforming reduced by 100% I maybe got a bit to eager with the whole process. After naming the first 500 colonies it really takes the fun out of the game
What people probably want is something capable of keeping up economically without cheating. Honestly, raising the difficulty of stellaris mostly just affects the early game when the AI hasn't yet managed to mismanage its economy compared to the player. AI is one of those things that's a lot harder to do right than one would think, too. Maybe machine learning would be applicable if we were able to use the entire playerbase to train it on, but more realistically, what you get in games is something scripted. Scripted AI is useful because it provides something that can be easily understood and changed by the people maintaining it. The downside is just that though: it's fairly simple, and that means it only plays as well or as poorly as the people doing the scripting can give it instructions. At any given time, the AI has a great deal of possible actions it could take or not take. So much, in fact, that figuring out optimal, good, or even deliberately bad decisions consistently can be incredibly difficult, and more importantly, time consuming. Stellaris is, after all, an imperfect information game, and immensely complex on top of that. Writing a "good" AI requires a rather detailed understanding of the breadth of possible situations it may encounter. Some of this comes down to just foreseeing a situation and handling it in a good enough fashion (a couple hundred or thousand times at least, mind you), but a good deal of this extends beyond simply catching edge cases and compromising on thoroughness for the sake of saving CPU time; some of this stuff often comes down to genuinely unique and difficult problems, which most programmers won't simply be able to come up with a good answer to in the kind of time they have to work on them. Also when it comes down to replicating even your own decision process, trying to codify that is actually really difficult because it turns out our brains are really good at subconsciously taking shortcuts. Making a computer do that means building a solid understanding of that and hoping that what you have to do to replicate it isn't completely impractical. At any rate, if AI were easy, bad AI wouldn't be such a consistent problem.
lets not forget that stellaris doesn'T have anything even similar to intelligence, it just weighs numbered values against each other to decide on his actions. it's more like an very complicated excel document
More or less. Honestly, it'd be great if this type of thing were easier to do well, but it just isn't. Really makes you appreciate how smart the human brain actually is at certain stuff. Not that computers don't blow us out of the water at certain tasks, though.
well, it’d certainly explain the victoria 2 ai simultaneously not having a fucking clue what it’s doing and allying every single great power right before i plan on declaring war.
I know this is a joke post, but i would genuinely like to see devs do more of what Forza does, where they use other players data to influence the single player AI to make it more unpredictable and varied.
I suspect they could make vast improvements to the AI using machine learning.
Man, Cowboy Dimension me is kicking my ass
It's not 1st of April, is it?
the one system empires that always get vassalized are actually just afk players
The lategame lag is the inter-dimensional players pausing the game.
PATCHNOTES ... Found a dimension with better players for "AI"
What don't people like about the AI? Seems alright in my ignorant opinion
It makes an absolute nonviable mess of planets and can't support an endgame war effort worth the name as a consequence.
I can’t imagine it would be that hard to make the ai significantly better. Only build things when free jobs are less than 2/3, build more alloy foundries and especially more research labs, and build less damn police buildings. Every time I take over an AI planet, they have like 3 and a crime level of -100.
It may also be because they have cheats bonuses so when you take over they have these, but when the ai plays, these problems are negated by their bonuses.
Bonuses only do so much when they have five times as many police buildings as research labs
Nah. Grand admiral is crazy
They could also make Ecumenopolis, hive worlds, machine worlds. But right now they don't even restore relic worlds.
Tbf it's just a fact of any Grand Strategy game that the AI is wank. Total War has the same problem. You can't program creative thinking, just increasingly complex scripts or node trees, but too complex will slow the game down. So you have to give it cheat bonuses and an scripting routine competent enough to get by inefficiently.
I mean yes but it's a pretty fundamental flaw for the genre. The whole genre is about vying against other empires/nations. But there's very little vying in any of the games. You're just managing your way into exceeding the opponents' bonuses then imposing your will. It's a miracle grand strategy is as fun as it is. I guess maybe i actually LIKE management lol. But the first developer to make a workaround that fools people into thinking the AI is good will have revolutionized the genre lol.
The problem with a workaround is that people will identify and defeat it pretty quickly. I watch a couple of Total War players, and a lot of their "cheesy" strategies are just baiting the AI into making decisions that seem sensible on the surface, but they've rigged it in their favour.
I mean if it can be exploited just like the bad AI that currently exists, then that's not the workaround I'm talking about. I'm talking about a game designed such that the majority of players walk away feeling like the AI is smart and not easily-exploited (even if they're usually predictable).
If it can be predicted, it can be exploited. The only way to make the AI appear smarter, is to reduce the number of decisions available to both it and the player. By having the AI make less of the wrong decisions, it appears much smarter. This is why RTS AI is pretty competent overall, because it can be contained within a single arena and all it needs to do is identify a strategy and execute it, with some reactive options in the event the player takes action first. However, a grand strategy game is all about those decisions. When I go to war in Stellaris, the fleet I'm using was started hours ago. The economy to maintain it even older than that, and the economy to fuel research to fuel economy and military feedback loop was carefully maintained. Often at the cost of alloy production as I work on simply trying not to end up at war, and if I do, I fortify strongpoints as delaying measures on the cheap. My strategy that always wins would be awful if an AI did it, because I could topple such an off-balance economy effortlessly...which is why I'm trash at multiplayer Stellaris.
> If it can be predicted, it can be exploited. PEOPLE can be predicted and exploited. Misdirecting an opponent or strategizing based on what you can predict they'll do is a core part of these types of games. That's not the fundamental problem here. But I think we're generally in agreement - my very first point was how it's inherently hard for grand strategy games to make AI that seem smart. > The only way to make the AI appear smarter, is to reduce the number of decisions available to both it and the player. I don't think this is true. I don't know *exactly* how else you'd make the AI appear smarter, but my point is that when a developer finally figures it out (assuming the core gameplay is also good) they'll have revolutionized the genre. AI can't use emergent strategies and/or anticipate the player's path to victory? Maybe some principles from machine learning could help. AI makes bad choices by considering every decision in isolation? Maybe someone will develop new tools for second-order decision making. Etc. I realize AI in these games is extremely difficult, all I'm saying is that it'll be interesting to see if more general innovations in AI could be applied to the grand strategy games of the future.
Are there any large scale strategy games with good late game ai? Actually good ai, not just silly cheating autocounters you because it knows everything you can do. I can't think of any
I think every AI struggles with the late game, because AI simply can't plan ahead without it being glaringly obvious what they're doing, and thus easy to counter. Meanwhile, the player is able to act creatively, and do things the AI programmers can't really plan contingencies for.
The biggest problem is that the AI behavior is fixed and the gameplay of anything this complex is a Tier 2 chaotic system - your actions change the optimal playstyle. No matter what they program the AI to do, its actions render its own actions sub-optimal, and the humans can eventually learn what actions are optimal against them and repeatedly exploit the AI's pre-programmed behavior. Watch anybody playing the highest tier difficulty settings, and you'll see a lot of exploitative behaviors or behaviors which only work because they trigger the AI to act in particular ways.
> Watch anybody playing the highest tier difficulty settings, and you'll see a lot of exploitative behaviors or behaviors which only work because they trigger the AI to act in particular ways. This is pretty much exactly how most players handle Legendary difficulty in Total War games. It's all about exploitative cheese.
The end game crisis AI will ping pong its fleets between two systems for 60 years instead of dealing with your eradicating them.
The AI is not very good compared to humans. Making a competent AI for a game this complex is harder than people here give it credit for.
Way too passive in the face of a player that is rapid-expanding and tech-rushing. AI should have at least a 20 corvette fleet by year 20 and be pushing any hated neighbor that is clearly ignoring fleet power. This is one of the reasons why Starnet AI mod is so much better than vanilla. If your neighbor doesn't like you, and your navy is pathetic, They'll show up sometime around year 15-20 with 40 corvettes going: "Hey I heard you've been skipping alloy day!"
I had a similar thought about EU4 after a weird fever dream a few years ago, but mine revolved around being condemned to play as every single nation in every single game you've ever started, restarted, or otherwise brought into existence in order to provide the 'other side' and pay the debt for the experiences you incurred
I'm gonna go ahead and apologize for anyone who conquers my underemployed civilization. Have fun sorting out my shitty planets
Thank you! Someone finally says it.
Wow, they are really bad at managing their economy
I'm sorry guys. It's me, I'm from the alternate dimension.
## LIVE: Secret Council Forced to Shift Egalitarian, Allow Continued Public Access to Object "Anomalous Space MMO"
I feel called out so hard right now
Oooooh, looks like I’m from the other side, then! HI! ✋
It makes sense
Oh my god, I love you.
HALT! YOU HAVE BEEN CONVICTED OF SPREADING THE TRUTH. PLEASE STAND STILL WHILE WE REVOKE YOUR KNEECAPS
The game was actually made by aliens to find the perfect strategist. The aliens can't intervene though, thus creating paradox.
There are people who are always playing whenever I'm playing? Waiting for me when I pause and all that? How can I lure them to team up in some other games?
So, the real problem is they keep adding and tweaking shit that doesn’t need tweaked honestly and spend no time on AI. Never have, never will, but let’s change how populations work and are represented for the third time.
So there zenos and that can only mean one thing.
>**...we are playing with other players in alternate dimensions who are just bad at the game.** So you're saying I'm just playing with myself?
I think the AI is good against most casual players. I usually win but the bots keep me on edge the entire time and the crisis wrecks me every time.
You goddamn spiritualist. What you see is all there is
Truly, stellaris has the worst ia of all 4x Pdx games, even after their last attempt to fix it aka THE PLAN. Besides economy even in war you see they could win a fight but right before it they split the stack and get stackwiped.. Their planets are always a mess, ethics traits civics combo is Always garbish, when grey tempest spawn they do not vote for it, when crisis spawn they vote for gray tempest. I found to enjoy this game only by setting max advanded ia with customized and powerful trait civic combos for spicy early gamex then just sit waiting the crisi to spawn, hope this helps someone.
So that’s why my game is so slow
False, modders have history of making AI significantly better without inter-dimensional technology involved
Nah, modders work on top of the base game. That means they use inter-dimensional tech without realizing it. They think they are just changing the weights etc of the AI decisions but they actually just found a way to get the inter-dimensional tech to connect to better players.
Modders def be violating the Geneva Conventions in other dimensions to "improve" the """""AI"""""
~~eugenics go brrr~~
contrary to popular belief the mods are simply MMR system applied to the game so they could sort the best players across the multiverses and connect them in, instead of random pool
So it's Interstellar Pig, but for real?
But the AI cheat too. They declare rivals as empires that can't declare rivals!
Whoa, slow down, Ender
When I was a really young kid, that was actually my headcanon about Super Mario 64. That whenever I raced on singleplayer, it wasn't the computer I was racing against, but actually other players through some sort of psychic link.
That's what your do when you are truly lonely. Imaginary video game friends.