Dev Take Tuesday – Obnoxious Gandhis in Civ 6

Like many gamers, my gaming backlog is so long that I’ll likely never play them all. But recently I have been able to put many hours into one game I had my eye on since its release: Civ 6. The Civilization games are all about taking one small pre-Classical Era settlement and growing in technology, culture, and resources until you’re the top civilization in our current Information Age. You play against several other civilizations, each run by the A.I. and each with their own unique advantages, disadvantages, and tendencies. If you’ve heard anything about the Civilization series, you’ve probably heard about Civ’s greatest meme: Gandhi’s tendency to nuke everyone else out of existence.

Don't let that smile fool you. (Image found on PCGamesN)

What started as a programming error became a staple for every Civ game thereafter. Gandhi eschews war for most stages of the game, but gets nuke happy once the technology is available. As I’ve been playing Civ 6, I’ve seen a different take on this long-running joke in the franchise. In Civ 6, every civilization’s leader has one constant, visible personality quirk (called an agenda). Norway’s viking king Harald Hardrada, for example, loves other civilizations that have a strong navy. England’s Queen Victoria tries to settle on every continent. India’s Gandhi has a fairly unsurprising agenda: He rarely declares wars and generally befriends the more peaceful civilizations. But every leader also has a hidden agenda drawn from a pool of more universal tendencies, such as “explorers” or “money grubbers.” Gandhi was apparently weighted by the developers to get the “nuke happy” hidden agenda most of the time.

The result is a rather obnoxious Gandhi who gets mad at any war you start—no matter how just—but who also won’t hesitate to build up and utilize a nuclear arsenal. So what’s my game dev takeaway from the new approach to A.I. tendencies in Civ 6? I love it. One aspect of game development I didn’t consider before starting work on my first game is balancing fun design with work efficiency. A.I. coding gets tricky quick, but in a strategy game like Civ you really want to make sure the different factions feel unique. The relatively simple inclusion of two specific agendas per leader (one static and one random and hidden) allows the A.I. to have a personality that changes with each game and adds depth to the player’s strategic choices. We’re planning on a similar approach in Alkanaur. Enemies will have similar A.I. logic, but their roles on the battlefield (support, tank, assassin, etc.) will give them distinct “agendas.” We hope that those agendas will add variety and personality to the player’s enemies without adding an overabundance of work on our end.