Question to Sid
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mr Mier,
Have you improved the AI? CivIII was much the same game as CivII. The AI had the same failings. For many of us who play your games, and replay them, we are less interested in the pretty pictures as the game play. A smarter AI goes a long way towards keeping your loyal people loyal.
Are you planning on giving finer grain control of the difficulty settings? If not, why? One of the most annoying features of the game is the way that the difficulty is handled. Once you get past a certain point in difficult, it just cranks up the advantages to the AI (initial start, production, combat) globally. It would be nice to control which advantages it gets. For example, the huge initial advantage makes it difficult to play on the smaller maps. Yes isn't that the point? But the real thing is that if you want a smaller map for time reason (some of us have kids) but want to play a challenging game, you can tell in 10 moves (oops 3 opponents are close) it is time to quit. It would be nice to say, "Give them all the production and combat advantages possible, but only a small initial seed bonus" or conversely on a large sparse map, "give them a huge initial bonus and reduce the production and combat advantages to moderately high" being able to tune things like this will allow the players to create more difficult or easy scenerios. Even better would be for the scenerio editor to have the further away AI get different bonuses to the close ones.
There are a couple of approaches.
Having built and used an underwater cave mapper (The Wakulla2 Project) I know of what I speak. One of the guys (not directly involved with the mapper or rebreather of which I am one of the designers) has a technique for locating underground beacons using the Van Allen belt nulls. I do not know the details, but the technique also works in air caves. He places a beacon underground (in this case 300 ft underground and underwater) that is timed to go off at roughly noon. Noon is important for the null locator. It releases a powerful pulse that allows you to locate it on top. Then you can use GPS to get the position.
If the drains and such were full you could use the cave mapper we built for Wakulla2. (About 1.5 M to build) I would point you at the site, but unfortunately, the site is offline due to funding. We were able to generate really cool 3-D maps of the cave system. The mapper used sonar to get the shape of the cave, an inertial guidance system (from an F-15) and the aforementioned beacons for synchronozation. It is also a self propelled device (oversized scooter). The data was logged and post processed, on the surface.
The mapper is overkill, the the beacons would be a way of allowing you to get GPS data. The devices were moderately inexpensive, but they were all hand made by the designer of the technique. If there is a serious interest in the technique I can chase down who the guy was and were he lives now. Wakulla2 project was in the mid 90s.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr Mier,
Have you improved the AI? CivIII was much the same game as CivII. The AI had the same failings. For many of us who play your games, and replay them, we are less interested in the pretty pictures as the game play. A smarter AI goes a long way towards keeping your loyal people loyal.
Are you planning on giving finer grain control of the difficulty settings? If not, why? One of the most annoying features of the game is the way that the difficulty is handled. Once you get past a certain point in difficult, it just cranks up the advantages to the AI (initial start, production, combat) globally. It would be nice to control which advantages it gets. For example, the huge initial advantage makes it difficult to play on the smaller maps. Yes isn't that the point? But the real thing is that if you want a smaller map for time reason (some of us have kids) but want to play a challenging game, you can tell in 10 moves (oops 3 opponents are close) it is time to quit. It would be nice to say, "Give them all the production and combat advantages possible, but only a small initial seed bonus" or conversely on a large sparse map, "give them a huge initial bonus and reduce the production and combat advantages to moderately high" being able to tune things like this will allow the players to create more difficult or easy scenerios.
Even better would be for the scenerio editor to have the further away AI get different bonuses to the close ones.
There are a couple of approaches. Having built and used an underwater cave mapper (The Wakulla2 Project) I know of what I speak. One of the guys (not directly involved with the mapper or rebreather of which I am one of the designers) has a technique for locating underground beacons using the Van Allen belt nulls. I do not know the details, but the technique also works in air caves. He places a beacon underground (in this case 300 ft underground and underwater) that is timed to go off at roughly noon. Noon is important for the null locator. It releases a powerful pulse that allows you to locate it on top. Then you can use GPS to get the position. If the drains and such were full you could use the cave mapper we built for Wakulla2. (About 1.5 M to build) I would point you at the site, but unfortunately, the site is offline due to funding. We were able to generate really cool 3-D maps of the cave system. The mapper used sonar to get the shape of the cave, an inertial guidance system (from an F-15) and the aforementioned beacons for synchronozation. It is also a self propelled device (oversized scooter). The data was logged and post processed, on the surface. The mapper is overkill, the the beacons would be a way of allowing you to get GPS data. The devices were moderately inexpensive, but they were all hand made by the designer of the technique. If there is a serious interest in the technique I can chase down who the guy was and were he lives now. Wakulla2 project was in the mid 90s.