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From what I've seen with projects like this, the successful ones do a good job of 'sticking to the mission' of faithfully recreating the original game in a modern engine (openMW, daggerfall unity, all my points of reference are TES related)

The neat part is that they are open source, so anyone who wants to take it in a different direction can fork it. The multiplayer version openMW being a great example of this.

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you may be interested in https://www.paxhistoria.co/
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No information on the website, but a login. Suspicious.
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You are getting downvoted, but this is a cool idea. Diplomacy has historically been a weak part of the series, and being able to shore that up may be a lot of fun to play against.
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I would say diplomacy is the most misunderstood feature of the series. Players constantly say they want a stronger AI that's smarter at diplomacy. But whenever they have built an AI like that, their play testers complained that it doesn't behave like a real world leader (too ruthless).

This experience led Soren Johnson (co-designer of Civ III and lead designer of Civ IV) to the realization that Civ AIs are supposed to "play to lose" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcuQQ1eWWI

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That makes sense, but at the end of the day, it may be more fun to play around with opponents that act more relatedly. This could take the form of in-game/session-appropriate diplomatic responses that don't read like pre-canned text, or, having explanatory text for why the AI is acting perhaps in goofy ways (which comes up a lot).
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I am so tired of game designers/developers being so pathetically wrong about stuff like this. Modders have to CONSTANTLY fix these boneheaded, user hostile decisions in nearly every game. A lot of game developers are not the people actually loving/playing their games in the same way that the cello maker is usually not the cello player.

Even many popular mods fuck this up! DEI in Total War Rome 2 needs submods to make the AI play by the same rules as the player!!! This is top of the most subscribed list right now FOR A REASON!!! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=36258...

Make the AI play by the exact same rules as the player. Make a scaling AI difficulty slider which goes from "piss easy" to "insane grandmaster" but without cheats. It's not that hard to do this, the chess engine crowd figured it out back in 2001. FEAR figured it out in 2004. Game AI has straight up not improved and at many times gotten worse in the ensuing two decades.

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It's not that hard to do this, the chess engine crowd figured it out back in 2001.

They really didn't. No one likes playing against weaker chess engines. They play perfectly like a higher-rated engine and then randomly make an obvious blunder. They don't play naturally like a human player of that rating.

The weaker AIs in Civ games do a far better job at "playing to lose" than low rated chess engines. It's not even close!

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Maybe ask Ghandi for his favorite scone recipe, so that he won’t nuke you.
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Gandhi*
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not sure if serious...
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Even if you don't want an LLM for the actual functionality of negotiations, LLM-generated text would be neat. As-is, the text becomes irrelevant, "Our words are backed with nuclear weapons" is just "nukes = true" - letting an LLM tell you the AI has nukes seems like harmless fun.
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Lifelong Civ player. I have always felt the negotiations part of the game is laughably bad, and a huge missed opportunity. The ability to use language as a tool -- diplomacy, but also rhetoric, veiled threats, etc -- is something I excel at, and I would love the chance to test my mettle against an enemy in an imaginary nuclear war context, because when else do you get to play high stakes games like that with words in real life? Civ is the perfect venue for it, but the game designers are extremely boneheaded about how they executed that particular part of the game.
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