Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Lol.
I've seen the very opposite.
AI researching to half of that school and then swiching,. Which is the worst thing to do.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Are you using --superhost with it? That creates a superstats file which will tell you which type of AI is being used. 1=standard, 2=defensive, 3=aggressive. That might affect the research (I dont remember). There are also other randoms involved. It would also affect how often the armies march out.

I do remember some discussions about it. But it was hard to come up with an agreement. Its like everything else about the AI. If its generic then ok. But if it breaks down too much into IF's (if this nation, if early game, if losing provinces) then it could not be easily worked into this version of the game.

In general, we wanted it to have a purpose. But not so specific that it could be guessed and counted on by the players. Its easiest to make things random, and then tighten the randoms abit.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

I've seen them abandon the school partly through, say at level six, and I've even seen them abandon a research level partly through--but because of the increasing cost of extra levels, charging straight through to level nine in a school isn't necessarily a good thing anyway. You'd like your mages to have *some* basic capability at both Evoc and Alt, for instance, and some ritual capability in Conj and Constr.

I am not using --superhost but I was able to see the AI type anyway, I think by clicking on the pretender name on the main game screen or something.

-Max

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

I can see the usual AI setting (which for --allai is always "normal") but not the AI type as far as I know. The only place Ive ever seen that was in the superstats file which drove me NUTS for not ever being able to mention it in all of the ai discussions we have had here.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Very interesting and great stuff!

It's too bad there's no current method the community can modify the scripting for one of the three existing AI personalities. Allowing the community to stop the AIs from sending their pretenders into the arena death match, allow the AI to properly place items such as magic boosters, ability to raise and lower the casting value of specific spells & globals, adjusting importance of province defense, etc., etc., .

Hopefully adjusting the AI scripts will be possible within DOM_4.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Actually Id prefer that AI scripts fall entirely into player territory like MODs rather than adjustments to the vanilla. Id love to see versions of AI for playing styles. Defense, offense, turtling, starcraft horde style, stealth, checkerboard, diplomatic, ally, flanker.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Is there a summary location which gathers the total winnings of all games?
I can see the most common winner after viewing 20+ results, but I'd like to better know who came in second place, third place and fourth place.

Also I recommend doing testing on maps without water and with only land nations since it's well known the vast majority of land nations have almost no skill for attacking water provinces. Is this type of testing planned in the future?

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Right now I want to gather new data for all vanilla settings. I havent done that for a long time and there are many new nations, and changes to nations, which should be taken into account.

The best place to get an idea of the 1,2,3 placings would be to look at the superstats file. At turn 200 many of the earlier tests were canceled and were considered to have given generally acceptable data without going all the way to end-game. Of course it wasnt an absolute answer but it was close enough. The second to last score file (set the directory view to go by times) should show 1 and 2 place.

I am keeping and building up the data. But for now I dont have permission to reveal everything.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

No, and I didn't do any extensive testing, I just watched the first 20 turns of one AI manually. And probably I had difficulty at normal so that's maybe not saying very much about the highest difficulty levels.

Yep, the abandoning halfway before the next level is reached was the problem though (sorry, that was what I meant not going to level 6 and switching).

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

I dont remember, and would probably have to test, but Im not sure that the AI switches at "levels". Most of its actions are rechecked on turns.

So if research is done that way also then sometimes it might research to level 6 by turn 50 when it decides to reselect, and sometimes not. (50 was a guess, I dont remember the critical turn numbers)

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Interesting. This latest Late Era test has Caelum the winner with Atlantis second.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Randomly chosen scales by the AIs can play a huge factor determining the winner. Any AI land nations with bad scales and a weak dominion will probably lose 98% of the time verses an AI nation with good scales and a strong dominion.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Well if that turns out to be true then we have no problem since thats the desired result. :) Mictlan showed problems when I did the tests long ago but that seems fixed now.

I was originally worried about Arcos since some minor tests did show a tendency to die early. But it doesnt seem to be every time. Possibly just one age or one AI type.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

GP: I'm not sure what NTJedi meant, but I can say that I would prefer if the AI did not choose scales that would cause it to self-destruct.

That is, if I choose to play a game against 10 AI opponents, I want to play against 10 opponents, not 3 opponents and 7 'never expanded out of home base because they had Misf-3, Turm-3, Death-3, and got locked in'.

It's one of the reasons I don't play the game more.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Everything has its pros and cons. The AI has gotten better at not self-destructing. But if taken too far then it becomes predictable.

By the way, the SemiRand program fixes that by assigning semi-random gods and scales to the AIs. With a large enough collection of pre-made gods for each nation we should be able to achieve much more playable games without being predicatable.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Gandalf maybe you should use fixed scales and dominion. like O3, L1, M1 P1-2 and Dom at least 6 for most nations and special adaptations for nations with special requirements.

Or you could just use any setup mentioned in a decent guide (should be at least adequate) though guide depending on pretneder magic might not be as succesfull for the AI

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

Once I have a base of the standard data I do want to play around with it abit. Maybe give all of them monolith gods and neutral scales. But Id also like to have a standardized map

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

I like the monolith god and neutral scales test... since scales do play a huge factor.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

GP: Regarding RanDom, I have never been able to get it to work. If someone could help me with that, I'd be appreciative.

And while I agree that you shouldn't make things too predictable, there could be a simple AI to determine how they 'pick' their God.

Something like:

(start with Ermor special case)

(temp scale)
(if preference exists for nation, choose scale 1 higher than needed; else, if nation is cold-blooded, choose heat 1; else, randomly choose between heat-1 and cold-1)

(randomly select other scale to continue)

(order)
(if luck scale >= 0, randomly determine Order scale between -3 and 3)
(if luck scale < 0, randomly determine Order scale between 0 and 3)

etc. etc.

That way, you'd at least have scales that 'go together' actually seen together.

To get the data for the AI, I'd mine the God creation of MP games for correlation.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

The AI wasnt built to do well with lots of "if" in it. And the code for such would be pretty intensive. For instance, in your example there would be many things to affect the selection of Order so the sequence would have to be well tested.

Personally Id rather see better AI impacting the hosting portion than the setup portion. Hosting lag is easier to live with for some reason.

But it wouldnt be difficult to do if someone wanted to create such an AI. Ive attempted a couple of times and got bored. If someone wants to develop the logic-tree for it then it would be really simple to create a stand-alone program to add it.

Here is an example of a god-build for mid-Pangaea (nation 40) which I did for SemiRand:
This one is more extensive than is needed for an example but I had it laying around. It simply gets appended to the end of the .map file. A program could easily duplicate the .map file, change the name slightly, generate and append the AI god-builds, then start the game.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

OK if anyone has been watching, the last couple of tests have been messed up. Im trying to get the test runs to the point of being fairly automatic, and not getting in the way of other programs that are running.

Two things added are MiniScore.txt which gives that turns active nations, their provinces, and the real turn number (since the scores.html stops counting at 250). Also a results.txt which will record the turn that a nation drops out of the game. I will be cleaning that up abit such as not having it record each turn number but just the ones someone dropped out. And possibly ignoring Indepts and Special Monsters since they can drop out, come back, drop out again, etc.

We may get some test runs that have to be trashed as I try to find a way to get them to play nice with other programs. I will try setting a "nice" setting. If Dom3 doesnt recognize that then I may have to have it shutdown at night and restart in the morning. The scripts for all this are getting pretty messy so I might start over to try and consolidate them all into just a few scripts with many options in them.

Re: Curious about Dominions? how the AI thinks? which AI is best/worst?
 

As much as I like providing game logs for people to look at who otherwise would never see one, Im afraid that I will have to kill that part of this project.

Last night this latest test created a log 29 gigs large and was still trying to continue. It got in the way of other things on the system (the people in the online worlds are VERY unhappy at lost saves).

Again I will mention for people to be careful with using the debug switch. This was on a medium sized game and the lowest setting (-d) that this happened.

I will look into having the game logs write to the backup drive since that filling up would not cause the same problems. I can do a check on the size before copying it to the view directory and just write a tiny game.log that says "File Too Big" if its too big to move to the active drive. Then at least people can view the logs for most of the testings. But it might take abit to iron that out and get it into place.

Gandalf Parker