I am fairly confident a team of DeepMind's calibre could put together an AI in fairly short order that would demolish top-level Civilization players. Despite my confidence, I still would love to see such a thing made.
DeepMind made a good effort with AlphaStar at building an AI that could compete with top-level humans in Starcraft. It wasn't superhuman; it could still be consistently beaten by the absolute best Starcraft players, especially as Zerg or Terran. However, as Protoss, AlphaStar was truly a pro-level player. I'm somewhat surprised DeepMind didn't go further and try to optimize AlphaStar to truly be superhuman. I'm not sure if that indicates a fundamental limitation of their approach or whether it was a shift in approach. This was with successively refined limitations on AI action speeds that caused AlphaStar to really rely on strategy and tactics rather than brute force speed.
Regardless, real-time strategy games feel much more difficult than turn-based strategy games to develop a good AI for. Just being able to split things into discrete turns seems like a massive simplification.
DeepMind made a good effort with AlphaStar at building an AI that could compete with top-level humans in Starcraft. It wasn't superhuman; it could still be consistently beaten by the absolute best Starcraft players, especially as Zerg or Terran. However, as Protoss, AlphaStar was truly a pro-level player. I'm somewhat surprised DeepMind didn't go further and try to optimize AlphaStar to truly be superhuman. I'm not sure if that indicates a fundamental limitation of their approach or whether it was a shift in approach. This was with successively refined limitations on AI action speeds that caused AlphaStar to really rely on strategy and tactics rather than brute force speed.
Regardless, real-time strategy games feel much more difficult than turn-based strategy games to develop a good AI for. Just being able to split things into discrete turns seems like a massive simplification.