Future of 4X games?

I doubt that the 4X niche is growing at all.  It's a niche, it will always be a niche, and if anything it's probably slowly, slowly shrinking.

Insofar as it's profitable, it's because market penetration inside that niche will tend to be high.  Sure, they may only have 1% of gamers as a whole as eligible purchasers, but unlike FPS's they'll probably get better than 90% of possible buyers to buy.

It is hard to tell if the niche is shrinking or not. The overall player base is probably getting bigger when you consider that more people than ever before have PC. But the ratio between the cost to develop a modern game vs. potential buyers maybe slowly shrinking as you said. I would not be able to say.

Some 4x derived franchise like Total War are doing fairly well on the market.

it can grow as long as developers keep transitioning away from strategy and towards more casual / accessible concepts (like "look at the pretty spaceship" or "shoot lasers and blow up that planet")

in terms of the actual 4X genre and its original target audience, it has been downhill for quite a while, mainly because of there being negative progress since civ4/galciv2

the money (eg. civ5's customers) comes from people who want to run an empire or look at cool things, not people who actually have a clue about the decision-making involved in any of the 4 X's

This is my great fear. Civ V I think was a huge step backwards for the genre as a whole.

Nobody really knows. Figuring this out requires sales data from a lot of games and publishers, which doesn't exist. 

There is a market for these games, but the audience is pretty demanding and a lot of them bomb by trying to do too much and not doing anything overly well. 

GalCiv2 and Civ4 are my two favourite 4x of all time. Its pretty sad to think that both games are about 8 years old and that nothing better was released after. Not that I know of at least.  

I was a Day 1 purchaser of Civ V but I found it to be a let down compared to the greatness that was Civ IV. I never replayed it after my initial few games. Maybe I should get all the expensions and give it another go. Ive heard the game got much better with all the additions.

Up till a few months ago, I would have argued that I think the future of 4x isn't likely to grow very much.  Then I bought a Lenovo Yoga, with the i7.  Its one of those laptops that turns into a tablet.  I loaded Civ V onto it and played the touch screen version for the first time... I just about died!  It felt so natural.  Like 4x was destined to be played on a touch screen tablet!  For now, my i7 is only just powerful enough to handle Civ V, and will probably have a hard time with new games since it has no dedicated graphics card.  However, I am hooked!  Once you experience a REAL game on a tablet... all of a sudden my desk top gaming rig just seems dull and inconvenient.  Maybe that's just me, but I think the future of 4x is going to be in the direction of high performance "gaming tablets" if that makes sense... They don't exist yet, but when they do Ill be standing in line... 

Screw them tablets. I much prefer gaming sitting comfortably with a cold beer in front of my 26'' monitor.

Anyway, I have terrible farSighted vision problem. So anything that is not a big screen at a reasonable distance is synonymous with eyestrain for me. Even with glasses. So portable gaming has never been an option for me.

I just hope Galactic Civ 3 stays true to its roots and stays complex.  

I hope the upcoming Nitrous engine (not in GC3) can do for strategy games what the Unreal engine did for FPSes.

^ 

I agree fully!

It seems the culture of gamers has changed.  People don't like challenge.  They like progression.  They enjoy repetitive, mindless tasks that give the illusion of getting better without actually getting better at the game.

In age of wonders 3, for example, it was suggested that in order for AI to be acceptable, it only needs to "present a credible threat".  That is setting the bar pretty low, as I would only consider the AI acceptable if I couldn't beat it without it cheating.  I don't ever consider an easy win as a 'good game'.  But I seem to be in the minority in that opinion.

No, not the minority within these walls.  We support you in this my lad!

^True, no challenge, no fun. ( Well, mostly )

That's all every AI has had to do, ever.

You act like this is some newfangled thing, but people learned this with billiards games 20 years ago. It was possible to make one where the AI played the best game possible, because the foundation of the game is geometry and computers are really good at that It wasn't very popular because it was basically unbeatable. The AI had to be changed to occasionally make mistakes to give the human player a chance.

Then if you look at Brad's recent comments on the Elemental AI, he noted that people were saying the AI was playing badly when it was actually just using the information it had, instead of cheating by knowing things it shouldn't.

Game AI has always been intended to challenge the player, but not to curbstomp them. If it played like Deep Blue, the game wouldn't sell because most people wouldn't stand a chance. On top of that, most games don't have the budget required to make an AI that can actually play at a super high level, so the goal is to make something that's effective with the budget available, and then give it advantages for better players.

This has always been the way it is. All that happened with AoW3 was someone admitted it.

4X games will always appeal to those of us who enjoy taking our time and thinking about the challenges the game presents rather than being forced to react in real time. The turn based nature allows a much greater scope without overwhelming the player and grants the player a lot more control over initial conditions in the sandbox where the games are created. 4X also has the benefit that you can abandon a game to deal with some other life event and it will wait patiently for you to return. This style of play doesn't appeal to everyone but those who like it, like it a lot.

The biggest challenge I see for a new game is to maintain a consistent level of challenge from start to end and to allow the player a reasonable level of control over the details without getting bogged down in micromanagement. I find most 4X games, including GalCiv2 and Fallen Enchantress, very challenging at the start when I am weak and other actors in the environment are strong but, by mid-game, I am strong and the AI hasn't kept pace. In most games - unless some random event alters the landscape drastically - I reach a point where the outcome is guaranteed, it's only a question of how many times I need to click the turn button to get there.

I don't necessarily want the AI to be more powerful - I do want it to evolve as a game progresses so I face the same level of challenge at the beginning, mid game and end game. This would greatly increase my enjoyment.

don't compare billiards or chess to 4X games... they are leagues apart in terms of complexity and thought-requirements. strategy game AI has to be more than a simple search algorithm... that's what makes the games actually strategic instead of just brute force computation.

4X game developers always make excuses to justify their incompetence when it comes to AI.

at first the excuses actually had some validity. up until 2010 people could at least be tricked into believing that there just wasn't enough available processing power to have any sophisticated AI behavior if they also wanted all the other features they put in the game (fancy graphics, effects, etc.)

here are the wide variety of excuses I've heard since then:

• most of our players can't beat the AI, so it's not important (I must have missed the memo where strategy gamers stopped being the target audience for strategy games...)
• <insert random 90s game name> had an AI that needed to cheat. ours doesn't cheat! (yet their AIs never pose any threat at all until they get bonuses like 300% faster production/research, which is the definition of cheating)
• but if we had perfect AI, the game wouldn't be fun (as if they are anywhere close to that point... how fun is the game when every decision a player makes is basically a "win button"?)

most 4X developers just mask the fact that their AI has no clue whatsoever how to play the game by throwing endlessly complex mechanics, rulests, and sub-systems at the players. the only reason people don't start dominating immediately is that they also have no clue how to play the game until 50+ hours in

if the subsystems were designed cleanly (eg. civilization games), people would see how poor the AI was very very quickly

Thankfully I don't lump the Devs at Stardock into this category.  I find they have always done a great job with the AI.  Obviously there are always issues that can be improved upon, however their engagement with the community is a huge plus when it comes to balancing the game and the AI. 

Lets try not to over generalize our negative opinions in a way that could sound insulting to those hard working individuals creating the game we are all so eager to play! 

Bottom line for me on AI is i desire a real challenge, the real possibility (even probability of losing) yet the possibility of winning if I am clever, sneaky, and/ore creative enough with the suite of tools I have.  I hate attrition games.  Love it when the AI out maneuvers me, or pulls a combo I did not expect.  Hate being  attacked with 300% of the forces I could make on my best day.  That is a cheating AI.  In my younger days I played many historical scenarios.  I might lose the battle.  But the measure was, did I do better than the original commanders?  Challenge.  I agree!

Comparing AIs for chess and Billard to 4X AIs make no sense, they are too fundamentally different.

I think AI developers should focus more on trying to mimic human players.  Why is it that we can win against AIs who have strong favorable bonuses?

In part because we exploit anything we can in the games and are complete bastards about using loopholes against them.  As loopholes are found, I think the AIs should be programmed to use them too. Just this simple thing would make them really more interesting  and lower the " bonus cheat " requirements for hi level play. 

Another thing that should be considered when making AIs is making a list of the stupid things they do over and over again and program them to NOT do them.  For example, in endless space, once you had defeated an enemy main fleet, the AI would send you his new ships as soon as he built them,  Which is a completely stupid thing to do.  You would defeat a 2-3 ship fleet every turn which did not even make a dent in your fleet. A human player would fall back, regroup, and counter-attack a few turns later with a decent fleet.

Also, Just implementing some of the cheap tactics that most human players use is a pretty simple way to enhance an AI I would say. In Civ IV the AI was pretty good and they did act in some interesting fashion, like planning attacks the same way a human player would and it made it quite interesting.

If you played Civ IV you will know that when Monty (Montezuma) declares you war, you needed to be ready for it 10 turns before. As the very next turn he appears out of the blue with 8 galleons full of jaguar Warriors and he drops them right next to your capital.  In GalCiv 2 I noticed the AI is not such a Jerk. From the moment they DOW, you usually have time to prepare proportionally to how far they are.  I understand sometimes they DOW because someone else bribed them so they have no way of preparing  then.

The AI in GalCiv 2 was pretty good but it still sucked at some specific things, like evaluating what is needed to capture a planet. It seems they really suck at bringing enough transports for the job. A Human will usually not bother trying to capture a planet unless he is pretty much certain he will capture it.

It makes perfect sense, if you realize that I'm only talking about them from a perspective of what happens when you actually make a perfect AI (which happened in those two cases), and how the market actually doesn't like it a whole lot. A game where the AI is the best player on the board, all the time, would not do very well, even if it could be built (and with the budget available, it can't be built).

Nobody actually said the AI in those games and the AI in this game looks like at a code level, because they don't.

Because we can think, and learn, and the AI can't. We also get annoyed when the AI uses the advantage it should have - being the game, it can know where everything is. But we tend to call that cheating.

Entirely doable, with the budget for continuous AI development as those loopholes are discovered.

They do that already, during development. After development, it's entirely doable with a budget for continues AI development as the foolish behavior is discovered.

hmm, I seem to be using that B word a lot.

Civ IV's AI was a lot better than Civ V's AI, for sure. In part it's because the game is simpler for the AI to play. The AI in IV can launch this kind of attack by building up an army in a stack, figuring out who it wants to attack, sneaking up close, and declaring war. Attacking is a matter of moving the Stack of Death to a target and going nuts. The V AI has to figure out how to position all its units on the board optimally to fight, which it really struggled with.

One of those cases where the game design has a significant effect on the performance of the AI.

I'd expect the transport issue to go away this time, because yeah. The AI really shouldn't mess that up. It's like it was calculating what it needed at the time it sent the transport out, not factoring in that the planet might grow or get fortified while on route.

Anyway... my point in all this is simply that the goal in every game is to make an AI that's good enough to compete. The goal is not to create an unbeatable super AI, both because they really can't afford to do that given the complexity of these games and because if they somehow managed to, it wouldn't be terribly good for sales. You'd wind up having most players playing against an easier version.

All the processing power available to GC3 should help the AI a fair bit. It's going to have a lot more power to try to play a few moves ahead and see what happens when deciding what to do, along with some other tricks that it didn't have in the past. So I have high hopes (but not in the alpha, of course).

To be honest, I think there's a segment that would love for the highest difficulty levels to play like Deep Blue without cheating.

There are several problems at heart - time and budget being the big one.

The other is that the AI is often not left moddable so that good players cannot take a look at it and attempt to make improvements.

Making a 4x AI that is so good it is pretty much unbeatable by any human, like big blue, without needing the usual AI cheat bonuses would be awesome. It would probably suck to play against it unless you are a hardcore masochistic nerd, but it would be awesome none the less.

I do not believe it is possible though, not only because of technical difficulty but it would require insane amount of budget and continued development time, which makes it commercially impossible to realize.

But if it existed, you can bet the game would become legendary and there would be a cult following who would spend their time trying to beat.

In conclusion, i just wish we saw more progress in the intelligence of AIs in video games. It seems not so much progress has been made in my 25 years of video games. Especially when you compare it to how everything else has gotten so Hi-tech.

This is a good point.  The AI is probably highly guarded technology though.  Once you open it up to mod, you also open it up so your competitors can see exactly what you've done.  If the Devs feel comfortable opening it to the community, I think the AI would be stronger and better for it.

If we are wrong in this assumption, and the AI is already moddable or there is a way to make it moddable without Stardock giving away their hand, please let me know.