Hey, hey, hey. Calm down.

No need to get into a fight with those who don't any better. Becoming a troll isn't going to solve any problems. If anything, making a flame post on their site is going to convince them that not only does galciv 2 AI sucks, but that its also played by immature kids, and that the AI was made to entertain such kids.

Crap, I must suck at SE:V. I play it on GameTap occasionally.

Personally, I find GalCiv's demo to be easier and more entertaining than SE:V. Though, I did play Space Fury, the SE:V action-RPG equivalent, and it's pretty good.

Nah, common misconception. Actually, you don't need spreadsheets to play SE5. Since SE5 AI rivals MoO3 AI in stupidity and inactivity, you can't possibly lose if you make at least a few basic things (like expanding fast, making a lot of a trade agreements etc.). After that, you just slowly conquer AIs and win. In reality, SE5 is much easier than GalCiv 2 because there is no opposition in SE5.


Well, i looked at SE5 AI code and it totally blows. Like, at the very start of the game it has a 50 chance to make a colony ship or, say, a mine - that's with a huge mineral sulprus. That also means that AI doesn't try to manage economy at all, even MoO3 AI was better in that regard. Of course AI sucks. It wasn't designed to play good at all.

However, he is right that GalCiv was designed to be simple so AI can play it better.

PC Gamer did a nice section called "History Repeats Itself" (Apr 2008, p. 8) where someone wrote in about how "bad" Crysis is and that Half-Life 2 is so much better. They mentioned the game had a bland storyline, lack of originality, etc, etc... Of course, the next part of the article flashes back to 2005 and displays another letter written by another reader about how "bad" Half-Life 2 is. That reader wrote pretty much the same thing.

Moral of the story:

No matter how good your favorite game is, there is always someone out there who hates your game with a passion. (And for no apparent reason.) They will say whatever they can to get a rise out of you and probably use the word "sucks" a lot. The best thing to do is read it and get over it. The only thing that is important is that you like the game and other people that are playing it. If a game truly does "suck" I want some good proof as to why the game is bad.

The worst thing about SE 5 is the turn times. With only 5 empires, after about 100 turns, you can be looking at several minute turn times.

to say that the the AI in galciv 2 is better than SE 5 due to the fact that in Galciv 2, the AI only makes limiting choice where as the AI in SE 5 can not be as good as Galciv 2 because SE 5's AI have to make more in choices per turn is just a silly comparison and argument all together. Take a look at computer chess, an AI in computer chess has very limiting choice because that is the rule of the game, but it took a long time before the computer chess AI evolving to its current state. It took many iterations of various chess engines in order for us to have Deep Blue.

In SE 5, they can make a better AI, if Aaron has better resources and the company size is bigger. Hence people should be playing it for reasons other than AI. And to say that SE 5's AI can't be compare to Galciv 2 AI due to complexity of choices, well...they don't have to look far to look else where for another comparison. Civ 4 has extremely robust AI, and the choices are equally numerours compare to SE 5. So i don't know what people over there are whinning about.

And as far as moddability goes, well...Galciv 2 is going to be as moddable as SE 5 in less than 2 weeks.

silly comparison?,my opinion(as a computer programmer)

first of all you haven't considered that there is breadth in processing a situation and trying to get an optimal answer,that means in chess you may have a limited breadth of thinking,but an ENORMOUS depth of it.You have to anticipate opponent moves and compute the consequences of your moves for many turns to be a succesful player.On the other hand breadth of thinking can be also important,imagine playing GO that is even more complex than chess(much more) there you have many more options(plus the depth),so many that there is no success into AI even winning casual club players,and if you design one then you get 1.000.000$(for real),so breadth can be equally important to depth,and SEV surely has much more options compared to GC2.That is no to say that SEV has a good AI though .

m3nt0ras, if your argument is true, then i have a question for SE 5 developer Aaron, why make SE 5 so complex if the AI can't be make robust. He will probably admit that he wishes the player to have more options, even though the AI is weak compare to Galciv 2. Then that is a design choice. It is not a fault of Galciv 2's developer for having a lack of depth or Aaron's choice for having more depth but end up with a weak AI. There is one thing that Galciv 2 does right in terms of simplicity, it has a right balance of abstraction and simplification. Look at MoO 3, everyone was whinnng about the extreme hands off approach. Galciv 2 is not a complete hands off approach, but it really alleviates micro management nightmares.

Also, i dont' think you can judge Galciv 2's AI being good or bad solely on the length and depth of choices. It should be look at on the whole, given all the options available per turn for Galciv 2's AI, does it do a good job with them. Does it make choices that challenges the players way of thinking and playing style. Judge a game on its own terms.

I once had a conversation with someone who loves both Poker and Chess equally, I ask is chess more or less complex than poker, my friend said, you can't make such comparison, in chess, everything is fair, in poker, there are deception involved. Given that, it doesn't mean one game is more enjoyable or less compare to the other. They are just different.

For SE 5, if the AI don't do well with complexity of choices, people can resort to multiplayer.