As Pandora: First Contact's aggressive AI pushed me to my breaking point, I looked to the Internet for answers. Apparently, it's all on purpose. The AI "plays to win," which means that if you get too weak, they will opportunistically take you out in order to grab your resources, and if you get too strong, they will gang up on you and take you out in order to eliminate a threat. Sigh.
I mean, I get it. You've got yourself a strategy game, and so you want the people who play it to use strategy. Specifically, you want to capture the feeling and the experience of a big, multi-sided free-for-all game where the player and five of their closest friends scramble after the same prize - victory. And victory is, by it's nature, exclusive. Only one person can win, and so to pursue victory is the same thing as pursuing the other players' defeat.
And in games where military action is an option, the one surefire way to ensure another player's defeat - eliminate them from the game entirely. If they can't play the game, there's no possibility of them winning. It's a direct and straightforward solution to the problem of your opponent's existence.
The only problem is that it's kind of a misguided way to design a game. It's one thing if there are only two players. Then, when one player loses, the other one wins, and the game is over. But if there are three or more players, then one of them being eliminated means the game simply goes on without them. The penalty for losing is that you no longer get to play the game. Which kind of defeats the purpose of getting your friends together to play a game in the first place.
Of course, the AIs are not my friends, but that just raises the question of why one would want to program them to "play to win" in the first place? They don't get any satisfaction out of it. The most they can ever do is thwart the player from seeing late-game content and force them to start over from scratch. Which they could just as easily do by being too easy to beat (say, for example, in a special "easy mode.")
And look, I know every true strategy-game aficionado is fuming at me right now, because I'm missing the obvious answer of "games are meant to be challenging, because how else are you going to get good at strategy if the AI is a pushover?" But that begs the question. Why would I even want to be good at military strategy in the first place?
The obvious answer is because I'm playing a military strategy game in the first place (in much the same way as if, were I playing Ship Simulator Extremes, I'd want to get good at piloting a simulated ship), but with the 4X genre, there's more room for ambiguity. A lot of games in the genre, you can win the game without ever firing a shot. You can focus on building, diplomacy, or discovery and win that way.
And the cynic would point out that this doesn't contradict their point about the weak AI because all of those things are easier if you combine them with military conquest - why build for yourself when you can invest in an army and take stuff that other people have built, and diplomacy is, of course, a lot easier when you can kill the holdouts and leave your supporters alive, and since discovery is a race, you are much more likely to win with fewer players in the running.
All of that is undoubtedly true, and yet I still prefer to win as a pacifist, and for one simple reason: Winning through wars of conquest, even if they are only meant to supplement an economic or technological victory, is a total dick move. Instead of improving yourself, you tear someone else down, and yes, you get material advancement out of the deal, but what of the cost to your soul?
Which isn't to say that you're a dick just because you play military strategy games. I play military strategy games. I enjoy (some) military strategy games. And I like to think I'm only kind of a dick. It's just that if you give me the option to avoid conquest, I will almost always take it. I generally only move my military when things start to feel personal.
And maybe that's foolish. Maybe I should take "allowable within the game's rules" to mean "perfectly acceptable to use when advantageous." Just treat it as an electronic board game, where I'm moving my pieces around with a particular goal in mind, and in which there is no moral dimension whatsoever. Except that I have to confess - I like the moral dimension. I get a thrill out of seeing militarism fail.
And as long as I'm in a confessional mood, I even enjoy being hypocritical about this. Sure, I prefer to avoid war altogether, but there is something super satisfying about a punitive late-game war where I'm steamrolling an aggressive enemy with the power of my superior economy, especially if they're the ones who started it. Mwah, hah, hah! You thought I was weak, but now I'm beating you at your own game. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Not my proudest impulse, but I am who I am.
I guess Pandora: First Contact is just driving home how much I yearn for a game where amity and cooperation are the unambiguous winning path. Where backstabbing and aggressive conquest are net disadvantages in any situation except one of gross asymmetry in skill. Where every player participating all the way to the end of the game is both expected and desirable.
What would "victory" even look like in such a game? I can't really say. Maybe victory itself is an artifact of the militarist mindset. To look at a new world and see only scarcity, instead of the possibility for plenty. Or maybe competition is too fundamental to what people want to get out of strategy games, and such a dreamily idealistic hippy game is appealing only to myself.
Certainly, it would be perverse and pointless to wish for a humanistic and enlightened version of Chess, so why impose the the same standards on Pandora: First Contact.
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