Before I begin, I would like to say I love the concept of instead of playing as a nation, you play as an avatar leading a country which is constantly changing throughout the course of the game.

This however, makes me wonder what computer players will look and act like in this game.

Will they have an avatar that represents their nation? Will there be a set number, say 30, avatars the computer will play as?

Will these avatars have a set personality, such as Sofia the Scientist, who always plays tall and tries to be as technologically advanced as possible, while we have Frank the Warrior, who loves war and expanding and always tries to lead his country in that direction?  (Yes the names are puns I just made up.  Feel free to use them, Amplitude.)

Will they essentially be lunatics who evolve their culture and strategy randomly?

Do we want them to be strategic and change their culture based on circumstances, ergo if they are isolated and aren’t being pressured by anyone, they’ll try to build themselves up and pick nations such as Babylon; or the Harappans, while if they are surrounded and have no good places to found cities, they’ll pick an aggressive nation, such as the Hittites, and try to take cities from other players.

Perhaps an approach that combines elements of all three, where computers have preferences, but they’ll try to play somewhat tactically, while also having a few small elements of RNG in their decisions to keep the game from getting stale.

My personal feeling on this is, I’d like a set number of avatars with personalities I can get to know, so I can have those Civ 4 moments of jumping for joy when I find out Isabella is my neighbor, to the “oh no, I just forward settled Genghis Khan who I didn’t know was there!  This changes my game completely.”  Which is, of course, shortly followed by a war that ends either in me winning or me shouting explicatives, all while hitting that alt f4.

Regardless of how opposing nations are implemented, I’m looking forward to this game and would love to know what other people think/feel about this.

My biggest thing, like all 4X Games, AI seem to always devolve into purely combat. You could try your hardest to make an ally of a nation in Civ 5 and 6, but they'll ultimately just declare war on you if you get to strong. Something Endless Legends and Endless Space also do- Which is making it harder and harder to be friendly to the AI if you are on par or below them. They'll likely always be angry with you. 

Which makes Diplomacy almost silly in both games. Why even have it if it becomes a chore to do? I want certain AI to not go out of their way to declare war on me despite everything I try. That one AI that if you get them in a game you know you can ally with them. Of course, having an "Evil" AI thats hellbent on destroying everyone is also nice, but I find that if every AI player is this, then its boring. 

I do like the idea of a set of personalities that'll recur, it would add a lot of replayability to the game if you saw them recurring and got to know them a bit over playthroughs. That might conflict with the avatar system though if their appearances are randomized, especiaĺly if they don't get personal names along with civilization names.

I've seen a few people asking to be able to make certain ai leaders to play against, so maybe it'd be good to borrow the stellaris approach for the AI avatars? There all the empires on a map can be randomly generated, but there are also set empires like the commonwealth of man that you can make spawn in your game and you can make your own empires that you can make spawn in the galaxy. if they do something similar for humankind that'd allow both the people who want randomly generated AIs, the ones who want set-AI personalities and those with their own "homebrew" AI opponents to be happy.

Yesterday when I created this post; I mentioned how much I liked the civilization 4 system, but didn’t give a lot of reasons as to why, so I’d like to expand upon that now.

First of all if you didn’t like set personalities, there was an option to give leaders random personalities and even let leaders lead other nations; Sitting Bull leading Persia was a thing, when you setup a custom game.

In Civ4, your neighbors really changed how you played the game.  There were aggressive AI’s like Alexander and Montezuma, who were constantly going to war, and you knew that if you spawned next to them, you either had to get ready for a fight or had a lot of micromanaging to do to keep them at war with people who are not you.

Some of this probably seems familiar to anyone who has played other Civ games:  Now let’s talk about the other side of diplomacy, alliances.

In Civ4 if you met a friendly AI, such Isabella or if I remember right Augustus, and shared a religion and kept similar Civics, they were your friend.  They would defend you in wars.  Some people who wanted to win culturally stopped researching new technologies entirely after a certain point, because they knew no matter how bad their military got their friends would defend them.

 Your allies wouldn’t care if you took half the continent, they wouldn’t even betray you if you were about to win.  They’d even vote for you to win diplomatically!

You could trade technology with them, a feature I’m still trying to figure out if I like or not.

To me this is what computer players should feel like in a game.  Leaders with set personalities, some of which you can befriend, who’ll stand by you, and others who you know it’s on the second you see them.

Just stopping by to share a quick answer from last week AMA on Reddit :

Owlexander wrote:
Will these avatars have a set personality [...] Will they essentially be lunatics who evolve their culture and strategy randomly?

That's actually the most detailed answer given by Amplitude so far, regarding the AI : They pick their culture depending on the situation and their personality. Nothing much has been revealed yet by the studio though.

But as a personal taste, I would also really like that AI's personality would be deeper and consistent throughout the game, and wouldn't flip to a warmongering beast the way it does in Civ 6 for instance. 

Waykot wrote:

Just stopping by to share a quick answer from last week AMA on Reddit :

Owlexander wrote:
Will these avatars have a set personality [...] Will they essentially be lunatics who evolve their culture and strategy randomly?

That's actually the most detailed answer given by Amplitude so far, regarding the AI : They pick their culture depending on the situation and their personality. Nothing much has been revealed yet by the studio though.

But as a personal taste, I would also really like that AI's personality would be deeper and consistent throughout the game, and wouldn't flip to a warmongering beast the way it does in Civ 6 for instance. 

Thank you very much, I was unaware of that AMA.  It's great news that The AI will have some form of personality.  Thank you so much for taking the time to share this!

I guess the best way would be for character personality mixed with current and previous culture types effecting it. But they should also play to their strengths and weaksnesses of their situation. I don't want them to be too static and predictable.

I think diplomacy was one of the weakest parts of Civ VI. What I want out of diplomacy is the formation of very real economic and cultural bonds between civs. Things like trade agreements or diplomatic marriagas, all of which give both parties strong boosts. The boosts ought to be so strong that declaring war on an ally would have severe economic costs from losing these bonds.