Civ4 AI Survivor: Season Three

[Brian Shanahan]

Picks (again for my own recall)

Me

Win Sury
2nd Mao
First to Die Carthage
Wars 10
Condition Domination
Turns 330

Random.org

Win Chinngis
2nd Sury
First to Die SB
Condition Culture (hah!)
Wars 10
Turns 337

I'd love if we could get the spoiler button back, btw.

[T-hawk]

I'd love if we could get the spoiler button back, btw.

It's there, sort of. The third button from the right (with no icon) is a dropdown that includes a spoiler tag as one of the options. (I don't know if this changes for other themes than the one I'm on.)

[Brian Shanahan]

No don't see it, unfortunately.

Oh, now I do it's the "insert" button. Thanks T-Hawk.

[Dark Savant]

Sulla, you mention in you Game Two report that Gandhi in earlier games goes militaristic and builds lots of nukes because of a bug.

This didn't actually happen (at least in the original PC versions), and is a modern-day meme.  The explanation in the Reddit post that apparently inspired this belief is a fabrication, or at the very least it's describing a different game.  Among other things, AI friendliness in Civ 1/2 is on a 3-point scale (not 256-point), and the AI will never revolt to Democracy in the original Civilization.  Being in Republic/Democracy also does not really make the AI any friendlier in Civ 1/2, since it can and does instantly revolt to Monarchy/Communism/Fundamentalism, during your turn, with no anarchy.
 
The earliest game where this really happens is Civ 3, where AI Lincoln (among a few others, but I think he's the most extreme case) is specifically programmed to build a lot of nukes.  You actually may have seen RBE2, where Sirian/T-hawk/et al. won partially because AI Lincoln nuked #1 AI Hiawatha back to the Stone Age.

[Sullla]

I've added the community predictions to the Game Three Preview on the website. Feel free to check out the graphs and some of the more interesting written predictions. Long story short: there's a lot of support for Mao and Suryavarman, and not a whole lot for Sitting Duck Bull. For anyone who hasn't submitted a prediction yet, there's still about a day and a half before we start the game itself on Friday.

Dark Savant: I don't know if that's true or not. I've always heard the story that Gandhi was accidentally given an extremely high propensity for warring in the original Civilization, but it wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be an Internet hoax. Perhaps Sirian knows, since he played more of Civ1 than just about anyone on earth.

[Dark Savant]

Dark Savant: I don't know if that's true or not. I've always heard the story that Gandhi was accidentally given an extremely high propensity for warring in the original Civilization, but it wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be an Internet hoax. Perhaps Sirian knows, since he played more of Civ1 than just about anyone on earth.

Gandhi has exact same aggression rating as Lincoln or Hammurabi in Civ 1.  Cite: Wilson, JL and Emrich A (1992).  Sid Meier's Civilization: Or Rome on 640K a Day, p. 249, Table 7-1.  Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing.

It'd be better to cite the program executable, but I was never taught in school how to cite a binary file.  

The aggression rating of an AI doesn't make nearly as much difference in Civ 1 (or 3) as it does in Civ 4.  It's impractically difficult to keep the AI happy in Civ 1 if you're doing well, the AI has ~3+ cities, and you're past the early game; it doesn't matter much what its aggression rating is.

[T-hawk]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the Civ 1 Gandhi thing is an urban legend. Everybody likes to blab how "oh Gandhi goes nuts and nukes you" but nobody actually has any firsthand report of it actually happening in a game. There's never any corroborating details like, what civ were you, how many cities got hit, who won afterwards and how. Fake news.

Cite: Wilson, JL and Emrich A (1992).  Sid Meier's Civilization: Or Rome on 640K a Day, p. 249, Table 7-1.  Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing.

Nice, I had that same book! (Probably still do, somewhere.) It had its share of made-up stuff too, but one point stuck with me. About the aircraft units, it says "Forget using fighters to escort bombers, it just doesn't work." Fighters have to return to a city every turn, bombers can stay out on the map for one turn interval... during which they're exposed to attack while your fighters are grounded. That was probably the first time in any game I realized that mechanics don't always work out as they seem to be designed.

[antisocialmunky]

It seems like the meme about Civ1 underflow became prevalent when Civ5 came out because Gandhi was set to 12/14 nuke preference which is 4 above the average value of 8 the rest of the leaders were. This Civ5 bug/feature was found a few months after the game was released in 2011.  As for the Civ1 meme, I can't trace it beyond an November 29, 2012 edit to the civ wiki by an anonymous person:

• (cur | prev)  15:31, November 29, 2012‎ 140.203.12.3 (wall)‎ . . (16,759 bytes) (-229)‎ . . (→‎AI Traits) (undo)
  

The original entry read:

The biggest thing that stands out is Gandhi has a nuke rating of 12. This is 4 points ahead of the closest leaders (Catherine, Montezuma and Ramesses tied at 8) making him hands down the most nuke prone leader. While this seems to go against Gandhi’s perception as a man of peace it may have been added for balancing purposes. Since the Indian Civilization will tend to have a small land area it would be at a disadvantage in troop production. This may serve as a deterrent for the other AI’s who might decide to team up on Gandhi late game. Another explanation is the “fat finger theory.” This states that whoever was programming Gandhi’s nuke rating meant to give him a 2 ,but instead also hit the 1 key causing a 12 that was not picked up on later.

Diff:
http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Gandh...ldid=35887

If we go back before that, it was neither common knowledge or a meme:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/n...dhi.87085/

It was just a memorable, funny sequence of events that Civ games could sometimes produce.  The sheer dissonance between Civ leaders and their real life counterparts was referenced in the run up to Civ5 in 2010:

TLDR: So as far as I can tell, the origin of Nuclear Gandhi meme was due to a typo (programmer typed 1 and then changed it to 2 without deleting the 1 for example) or intentional joke (possibly even a reference to one of the two spoilered things) in Civ5 where they gave him 12 on the nuke scale of 14.  The Civ1 explanation is inaccurate because the scale for aggression is 1-3 and it only became popular after people started complaining about Gandhi giving the nuclear smack down in Civ5.

PS. Another Meme for the Road:

[Fluffball]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the Civ 1 Gandhi thing is an urban legend.  Everybody likes to blab how "oh Gandhi goes nuts and nukes you" but nobody actually has any firsthand report of it actually happening in a game.  There's never any corroborating details like, what civ were you, how many cities got hit, who won afterwards and how.  Fake news.

I had a game where Gandhi was throwing nukes around, but it was because I started on an island big enough only for a single city and no where in the even remote vicinity of another landmass, and the other AIs started on various continents. I tried restarting that game like a dozen times trying to figure out a way to win it.
Anyway, everyone got to nukes because I was so insanely hampered and everyone used them. I found Stalin and Ghandi on their own continent nuking the ever loving hell out of each other. If I remember right France was on the next continent over occasionally nuking both of them.
I can't remember if that was Civ 1 or Civ 2 though. One of the weirdest and most interesting games of any Civ I'v played though. One of the worst map scripts I'd seen as well.

[Dark Savant]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the Civ 1 Gandhi thing is an urban legend.  Everybody likes to blab how "oh Gandhi goes nuts and nukes you" but nobody actually has any firsthand report of it actually happening in a game.  There's never any corroborating details like, what civ were you, how many cities got hit, who won afterwards and how.  Fake news.

It's more that Gandhi will nuke you (there are genuine screenshots of this) -- but so will any other AI, if you upset them.  I mean, the Civ 4 Montezuma or Isabella or Tokugawa AIs are all legendarily insane by Civ 4 standards -- and are all still far more sane than any Civ 1 AI.

Speaking of Montzeuma, he's actually a relatively peaceful builder in Civ 1/2, not the nutter we all know and love in Civ 4/5.  (Think of Civ 1/2 Aztecs as more like the Maya.)

Cite: Wilson, JL and Emrich A (1992).  Sid Meier's Civilization: Or Rome on 640K a Day, p. 249, Table 7-1.  Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing.

Nice, I had that same book!  (Probably still do, somewhere.)  It had its share of made-up stuff too, but one point stuck with me.  About the aircraft units, it says "Forget using fighters to escort bombers, it just doesn't work."  Fighters have to return to a city every turn, bombers can stay out on the map for one turn interval... during which they're exposed to attack while your fighters are grounded.  That was probably the first time in any game I realized that mechanics don't always work out as they seem to be designed.

That book was great information in the days before the Internet opened up.  Most of the numbers and formulas are genuine; the exceptions I can think of are (1) things that changed in version 3+; (2) Copernicus's Observatory not actually expiring, which is a bug; and (3) the way combat actually works, though the description in the book is close for most practical purposes.

Civ 1 information is getting better, actually -- someone posts new data at CivFanatics every now and again.

TLDR: So as far as I can tell, the origin of Nuclear Gandhi meme was due to a typo (programmer typed 1 and then changed it to 2 without deleting the 1 for example) or intentional joke (possibly even a reference to one of the two spoilered things) in Civ5 where they gave him 12 on the nuke scale of 14.  The Civ1 explanation is inaccurate because the scale for aggression is 1-3 and it only became popular after people started complaining about Gandhi giving the nuclear smack down in Civ5.

Oh, thanks for looking into that more!

I don't think there is anything specifically for nukes in Civ 4 AI settings.  The Civ 3 AI settings do have a checkbox for "likes building nukes".  In Civ 1/2, the AI is specifically programmed to be more hostile if it has nukes, and less hostile if its rival does; this applies to all AIs equally.