Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Which one is best?
Published on March 3, 2006 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

There are 9 different AI personalities in Galactic Civilizations II.  Which makes debugging oh so fun.  But there are significant advantages to it as well.

First question, why write 9 different AI personalities? Most games have one.  The answer to this is because in a single player game, players usually find a weakness in a given AI and then it's boring.  So we coded up 9 different ones.  They are all derived from the same base class so there are a lot of similarities, but there are many differences too.

It's fun to test to see the AI play against itself.  See each one do their thing:

Watch the Drath manipulate other races to declare war on each other.  Or see the diplomatic Terran Alliance (the humans) build up coalitions to win.  Or of course, the Drengin, grinding one civilization down after another. 

So who wins? It really depends on the game.  It's usually quite amusing to watch the Torians and the Drengin start out near each other.  The Torian AI is very unstable (strategicaly I mean) so they will often do very well or crash and burn.

In the 10 games I've had them play each other, the Drengin have won twice, the Humans have won twice, the Drath have won once, the Korx once, the Torians twice, the Altarians once and the Iconians once.

But this was on a medium galaxy.  Different sized galaxies yield different results.


Comments (Page 2)
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on Mar 16, 2006
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the cheats page on the GalCiv Wiki . . .
on Mar 16, 2006
Well it might be interesting if one of the AI races was one you'd customized, either with just the regular customization options, or perhaps for the more hardcore modders, actually changed the AI it's using. I think that would make it a viable game feature, from the aspect of being fun and interactive.
on Mar 17, 2006
So do some of the races share a personality? Since technically there are 10 playable races and the Dread Lords that would leave 2 personalities that would need to be duplicative if there are nine unique ones.

I am just curious. I think that having this many unique AI personalities is one of the things that make this game great. I apologize if this has already been gone over.

Thank you.
on Mar 17, 2006
I suppose the Dread Lords don't count; they are pretty much hack and slash and probably don't require a fully fleshed-out AI like the other races. Of course that still leaves a pair to share an AI, unless he was miscounting. Actually, he probably wasn't. You're never going to need more than 9 in one game, because the 10th player is the human. So probably each race has a preference list of personalities and when the game is generated the 9 personalities are doled out accordingly. If a race's first preference is taken by another race the game gives them the next choice on the list. Heck, it could be a random roll among 3 or so appropriate personalities, weighted toward a favourite and second favourite choice.
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