That just leads to everybody complaining about how bad the AI is in Civilization and Stellaris. Sure, these companies don't care because they have financial incentives not to care, but we're seeing the effects of studios not caring about AI right now. Not sure why you're defending them.
By «everybody», you probably mean the most experienced players, since it takes a good 100 hours for a human player to start being competent at the game, while your median player only has 40ish hours under their belt.
AI doesn't come free, GalCiv2 has been built around the AI being competent, but is IMHO a boring game as a result.
I guess I would agree with you for Civ 5 (and 6 ?) where the decision to switch to the 1 unit par tile system has crippled the AI... (while being pushed by Firaxis wanting to make the game more friendly to those sub-median-experience players !) But then I would argue that this system is bad for Civ itself, and this is an outlier.
(There's also the example of both AI Wars being built around embracing that the AI plays a different game, which from I hear works very well. It's questionable how applicable that is to your average 4X.)
> By «everybody», you probably mean the most experienced players, since it takes a good 100 hours for a human player to start being competent at the game, while your median player only has 40ish hours under their belt.
Nah, I mean everybody as in pretty much anybody I see talking about AI in these games, it's almost always negatively. And honestly, I don't care how experienced players are. If your average player is complaining about your AI, then you've failed.
Experienced players are just better at quantifying and identifying how AI fails and how it affects the gameplay.
Honestly, I struggle to see what your point is. That devs just shouldn't bother with AI?
And how likely is «pretty much anybody you see talking about AI in these games» to be overwhelmingly someone with way more experience than ~40 or even 100 hours ?
My point, trying to restate it in a different way, is that these language models might be low-hanging fruit to make an AI interacting with whom feels more like a head of state (and a specific historic one too !)
Though I'll note that Alpha Centauri has already achieved something like this using a very simple dialog AI (in a specific context).