Black & White (the god game): Creature Management

Yeah, I know, this game’s so long in the tooth that the sequel’s due within a few months. I’ve picked it up again, though, because I always gave the Creature short shrift and was wanting to explore that aspect of the game more.

So I’ve got a few questions.
Does the Creature acquire and extinguish behaviors in a way similar to what we know about lab rats on a reinforcement schedule? The basics seem to hold true - if rewarded, the Creature is more likely to do that again. If punished, the Creature is less likely to do that again. Reward or punishment has to be immediate to be effective. But do more advanced things hold true, such as random interval reinforcement being more effective than fixed interval reinforcement?
Do realistic patterns show up when you’re trying to extinguish a behavior? (For example, if you had rewarded the creature for eating villagers before, does the creature eat villagers more often for a while after you’ve stopped reinforcing that behavior?)
I’ve been able to train the Creature to do multi-step things, like pick up a tree, plant it somewhere else, and then water it. I trained it to do this by reinforcing each step, and then reinforcing only the entire series of actions… and we worked out a way for me to tell him to do this, and he’s getting better at responding to other ingame signals (like an empty wheat field) spontaneously… so it seems the AI is at least in that way consistent with the observations of Mr Skinner.

Couple of other, even less profound questions:

  • how do you get the creature to use miracle wood to supply the workshop? At first, he would only toss trees into it when I modeled the miracle. Close, but no cigar. Thought maybe the two behaviors were considered interchangable to the AI, but after I got rid of all the surrounding trees, still no dice. The usually very bright Creature just stood there and said he already knew how to summon wood from thin air.
  • What do I need to do to get the Creature to supply food at the Worship Site? No amount of modeling, begging, or threatening has ever got any creature to do this even once.
  • what really causes the Creature to get bigger?
  • does it matter how much the Creature poops?
  • If the Creature always does very nice things for my own villagers, but occasionally does nasty things to enemy villages, how does that effect his alignment?

Any Creature wisdom is appreciated. Really interested in finding out how this works… before Black & White 2 comes out with a completely different Creature training model.

I’m afraid I can’t actually answer your question, but I would like to point out one fact.

I got my creature to eat it’s own poo.
Then he threw up.
Ha!

I’ll try to answer as much as I remember, but bear in mind I could never get my creature to grow any taller.

The problem I always had was in actually getting the reinforcement in time to reward the creature for what I wanted to reward him for. That sentence doesn’t really work, but I’ll explain. I would see the creature do something I wanted him to keep doing, but before I could actually get down there and pet him, he’d start doing something else and I’d end up reinforcing that instead. Often I’d pet him for drinking from the ocean when he’s thirsty, and he’d get the idea that I wanted him to go throw a fisherman into the briny deep - because he was heading for the fisherman when I caught up with him. So then I’d have to smack him around a bit to tell him not to destroy my flock, and he’d get confused because I was just praising him a moment ago.

Did you try making the miracle wood (why am I thinking about that Enzyte thread?) next to the woodshop, and then placing it in manually? If the creature sees you pouring the miracle directly into the shop, he may be thinking you’re trying to teach him the miracle. Teaching him that he can do the miracle and then put the result in the shop adds a step to the process, but it breaks down the problem.

The most important thing to remember is that you’re often influencing many behaviors, not just one. For example, if you tell your Creature to pick up and throw one of your male, adult villagers against a big tree, and then reward him for it, he’ll associate that reward with the following:

  1. Picking up things.
  2. Picking up villagers.
  3. Picking up your villagers (different from your enemy’s, or neutral, villagers)
  4. Picking up male villagers.
  5. Picking up adult villagers.
  6. Picking up male, adult villagers.
  7. Picking up your male villagers.
  8. Picking up your adult villagers.
  9. Picking up your male, adult villagers.
  10. Throwing things.
  11. Throwing villagers.
  12. Throwing your villagers.
    . . . .
  13. Throwing things against other things.
  14. Throwing villagers against other things.
  15. Throwing your villagers against other things.
    . . . .
  16. Throwing things against trees.
    . . . .
  17. Throwing things against big trees.
    . . . .
  18. Throwing your male, adult villagers against big trees.

Because the Creature has many different divisions for objects and actions, getting him to do one thing, but not this other related thing, can be very hard. You can’t just train your Creature to go to sleep at night; you need to train him to go sleep at night, when’s he low on energy, and only inside the pen. Otherwise, he’ll fall asleep in the middle of the day, or whenever he wants, or wherever he wants.

It sounds complex, and it is complex, but it can be very rewarding when you train your Creature to do a series of actions correctly. Seeing the little guy catch a fireball and toss it back into the enemy’s village is priceless. (Seeing the little guy catch a fireball and toss it into your village - not so priceless.)

Now, for your questions (from what I remember):

Yes, but the Creature suffers from infinite memory - he’ll never forget anything. You can heavily bias your Creature against an action, but you can never erase it.

Say you accidentally reward him for eating a villager. Even if you discipline him 1,000 times to not eat your villagers, some small part of your Creature will always associate “villager” with “snack.”

Yes. From above, the more you tell the Creature, “this action is good,” the more likely he is to do it. Even if you stop reinforcing it, he’s already learned that eating villagers is good. You have to actively discipline him against an action if you want him to stop doing it.

Try putting him on the Leash of Kindness (or Learning, maybe - try both), then attaching the other end to the workshop or to the food desire flag at the Worship Site (not to your own hand). Cast the miracle a few times in the appropriate place, and he should follow suit.

Sleeping in his pen seems to make the Creature grow faster, but it’s mostly time. Lots and lots of time. Or a trainer program.

It doesn’t seem to, but if your Creature is overeating, it will poop more. If it really annoys you, teach your Creature not to poop at all (slap him silly whenever he starts to squat). This may or may not affect his health, though. Otherwise, just teach him to go in the fields (although a Water miracle is much faster).

If you’re an evil god, teach him to poop, pick it up, then throw it into an enemy village’s stores. There’s a good chance you’ll wipe out the village.

Not sure, but I think an evil act is evil, regardless.

Thanks for these very informative replies. Beats having to shell out for Creature Obedience School…

One of the mushrooms, I think blue makes the creature grow faster. Look for Kilroys training grounds as a multiplayer map to teach your creature.

Thanks for bringing this up. Although I’ve had the game since the summer of 2001, this past weekend was the first time that I’ve ever played it (I didn’t look closely at the system requirements and found out when trying to install it, I found out that my RAM was too small. Since I opened the package, I couldn’t return it. I just got a new computer on Friday).

Reading this, I realize that I’ve trained my creature to do the most rudimentary things–bring food and wood to the stores, and every once in a while pick up a villager and pet them. Though that had the downside of producing a lot of breeder disciples, as it usually sets them down next to a villager of the opposite sex.

Dear lord I hate this game. I could never manage the controls. They were abominable.

My problem was, with my tiger, that he was so cute I could hardly bring myself to punish him. It made it worse when he started crying.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; I have yet to see anything more heartbreaking in a computer game as when that damn cow cries when you don’t pick her as your creature.

I really, really wanted this game to be good, but I got tired of it after I couldn’t seem to get my monkey to pick up all the drowning fishermen. That was mostly due to problems with the controls, I know, but it was irritating and frustrating.

HAH! Try picking the tiger and the damn thing EATING the god damn drowning fishermen. Now THAT is irritating and frustrating.

Enjoy,
Steven

More annoying is needing just 100 more belief in a town on the far end of the map, and then hearing your annoying villagers whine about needing food, or housing. It was hard not to take care of the problem the easy way. ( just toss all the extra villagers into the belief pot).

What in god’s name have I stumbled upon?

I can’t beleive I’ve never heard of this game.

I… MUST HAVE!

Neither could I. My creature was only praised - it wouldn’t let me smack him around so no negative reinfocement at all - and a lot of positive reinforcement given accidentally. I was a bad enough god, because I couldn’t do what I wanted to do with an out of control creature running around. The moment you realize you’ve praised a creature for eating a villager, well, it’s just time to stop playing.

Brilliant idea, but spending 3 hours doing nothing because it won’t move is just frustrating beyond belief.