AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

There's a fundamental flaw in all of todays strategy games, including Dominions (3) :

The games getting more and more complicated - several orders of magnitude, actually, if you want to put down the mechanics into formulas for an AI to use.
And we all want "smart" AIs, don't we? AIs which at least somewhat understand whats going on and can play the game on roughly even ground without cheating too much (able to see through for of war etc)

But does it get the 'power' to do so? Hardly.
Yes, o.c., CPU 'power' has grown enormously.
But power = work * time, or something like that, I was told.
And obviously, there's lots more time needed to reach to 'power levels' we want to see, resulting in long waits between turns.
Have seen those complaints about Dom3, SE5 and the Civ series lately

But there's an easy solution to this:
Atm, the AI programming is still following the concepts of the '80 .. but instead of giving the AI only some seconds to "think" between the player hitting the "end turn" button and him eagerly awaiting the results of his orders, the AI(s) should do its(their) turn(s) while the player does his.

That shouldn't be too hard to implement, with all those games being TCP/IP-enabled MP games .. just plug the AI(s) in like any other player in a MP game, and you wouldn't even need big changes to the game mechanics to make it work.

And with all those multi-thread, multi-core and multi-CPU equipped PCs out there, I doubt anyone could complain about the AI slowing down his PC or endless "end turn" waits ... .

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I think you don't have an impression of how much is involved in writing a successful AI.

Read the wikipedia article on Deep Blue and see how much was involved in writing an AI that could play Chess well. (although this is a bit of an extreme example) And chess only has 32 pieces on a relatively tiny grid.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Arralen didn't mean that kind of AI. He basically suggested giving AI more time to think.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I think I have.
You know, I have minor degree in programming. Ok, its only "for engineering purposes" .. but maybe they should let the engineers work on AI development, not the computer scientist, maybe we would have gotten somewhere by now http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
Anyhow, while its been quite some time since, and I'm only fiddling around with some script language for small tools now and then, I think I have a pretty solid grasp on how hard it is to do AI programming. Not on it itself, mind, but about the complexity involved.

A Deep Blue - like AI wouldn't work for dominions IMHO, and -surprisingly- a game like Dominions might be easier to do AI-wise than chess!
Why? Because of the random element, and the high complexety!
Chess is over-analyzed and at the same time highly deterministic. If you want to do a good AI, you must factor everything in exactly, up to the quite complex moves and tactics the human mind can conceive - at least those which are commonly known, and those are quite a few with chess.

Dominions, on the other hand, is ever-changing and, to a degree, random. Arbitraty solutions will work ok, and might be the only one which make sense.
E.g.:
If Dom would be deterministic like chess, you could pre-calulate how many HI you would need to run down and slaughter a given bunch of shortbow archers on the battlefield. Every possible option and event would be known beforehand - but in Dom, you don't know how many arrows will really hit, if some adverse weather would give added encumbrance or restrict archery, or even where the pieces will be placed on the battlefield.
Like in chess, an AI would have to pre-calculate every possible move several turns into the future, weighthing the possibilities for each "branch". That's not only eating up computer ressources like crazy, it's also very prone to error if some detail is missing in formulas describing your "AI model" of the game. (e.g.: computer generated weather forecasts...)
A human player would draw from experience, and (as commonly in chess) known 'optimized' solutions he learned by heart.
They're doing the 2nd with Deep Blue (vast libraries), and don't have a clue how to do the 1st ...
That's what Deep Blue is: a programm the calculates every possible move serveral turns into the future and compares the result to some pre-made libraries which contain lots of possible positions and human-made estimates about their "worth". I wouldn't call that an AI, as it depends on human assessments on every move it makes.

But dominions doesn't work that way: a player would make a guess (from experience), and bring some more just to be sure. And he might end up wrong because of something that he didn't figure in or didn't know beforehand.
The AI could do very much the same: Do a quick guess (easy calc), bring some more, hope for the best - and it would behave pretty much human-like and play equally strong.


Actually, I meant something more like an AI then a turn-precalculator ;-)
But you're right about the 'thinking time'. With moving the AI turn processing from between-the-turns to during-the-turn, the standard Dom AI wouldn't benefit, unless the devs add some more sophisticated routines. But the player wouldn't have to wait that long for the turn to finish.
And there would be the option to add some more advanced AI which would result in prohibitive turn calculation time with the current setup .. .

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I don't understand AIs very well, atleast the kinds of AI that manage computer games, but I can vouch for what Arralen is saying about the use of arbitrary moves. What you don't want is the AI doing something stupid, atleast from the viewpoint of the AI (and for this purpose, you want an AI strong enough to see what the "average" person is going to see, atleast at a glance). So, if you create an AI that can eliminate the obviously stupid moves, and then narrow down the possible remaining moves to the point where whatever it does isn't going to be hideously disastrous, then a nice random choice isn't too bad. Then you start feeding it basic, general strategies that it can follow with it's simple, simple computer mind, and reference against what the player is doing, and then you leave it alone. It doesn't require a mainframe, because all you're asking from it is to put limited options into limited categories and then flip a coin. The computer doesn't bother looking at every move to the 10th place, it just looks at what's apparently bad and apparently better, and compares that to what you're doing, what the other players and AIs are doing, and makes a solid decision. People and animals operate in somewhat similar ways, which is why we call AI AI. Knowing that the world is too complex of a place to know every detail of what's going on, what's happened in the past, and what the consequences are for every action, sometimes you just have to do what you think is best, while trying to avoid hideous disasters.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Note that almost all the current turn processing time is battle calculation. Very little is spent on generating the AI orders. Maybe 10%?

I suspect most of the AI improvements fall more into the category of lots of programming time, rather than calculation time.

A lot of simple things could improve the AI difficulty drastically. Better pretender design being high on the list. Better use of sacred troops. (Buys expensive sacred troops, even when the pretender has no bless. Takes a bless not suited to the units. Gets a good bless and then doesn't send a priest into battle to bless the troops.) Some ability to make basic SCs.
I doubt fixing any of that would require much calculation time, just better design.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

The problem with AI is definitely design, not calculating time.

If time was the problem they would use multithreaded approach, I'm pretty certain of it.

You have a pretty good idea how AI works, in theory. Putting what is said in this thread into reality is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT. Creating even a semi-intelligent AI for a strategy game with any complexity is _EXTREMELY_ hard. Or, why do you think no one has yet succeeded? I can't think of a single game, no matter the budget(Civ4 had a huge one) that would be the least bit smart.

It's VERY hard to code intuition and judgement for computers, and that's what you need for strategy games. Also learning is very hard to do. It's easy to tell the computer what YOU have already learnt, but it's hard to make the computer learn from it's own experiences.

It's just, hard.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

thejeff makes a lot of sense. Some basic decision trees need to be created, added to, and pruned based on the pretender chosen, then the race, then the enemy being attacked. It would be cool if there were some fundamental personalities as well: turtle, aggressor, 10-turn turtle then 10-turn aggressor, etc.

E.g. First decision: have 30 pre-made, effective pretenders to choose from. Second decision: based on the pretender, choose one of 5 appropriate races. Third decision: choose basic AI personality based on Pretender and race. Then move on from there.... This is drastic oversimplification, I know, but this is where it starts.

Just to throw this in the mix, OS/2 WARP was a fully multi-threaded operating system back in the dawn of time. A little game called Galactic Civilizations came out that took advantage of that multi-threading to think while the player did his turn. Award winning AI, not because it was so much more clever, but because it was so much better at brute forcing. Now, with the multi-core CPUs we have, the fully threaded OSes we have, and the librairies available, it should be easy(ier) to implement....

Finally, my own wish: I wish games would come out with a common API that allowed swappable AI modules. This would allow people to develop their own AI libraries for their favorite programming languages (perl, python, lisp, c++, forth, smalltalk, ruby, etc.), swap them with eachother, and compare code. I think this would produce a rennaissance in AI. Imagine what would happen if you didn't have to re-program path-finding for every new game. That one simple thing would speed up game development significantly. Imagine taking the AI module from your blackjack game and putting it into your chess game just to see how well it would do--the SYNERGY of LEVERAGING your Existing Infrastructure could REVOLUTIONIZE the future. But seriously, it would rock if we could do it. Instead of reinventing AI anew for every game you could mix and match. Probably the better AIs would have self-learning routines. I know I would have a lot of fun swapping an ai in and out of different games.... And messing around with basic routines in the AI modules would be cool.

Yes, I did some ai programming for a comercial game back in the 90's. It was tedious and frustrating, and I came up with a wishlist at that time that goes on and on and on....

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

One problem with creating good AI is that humans operate on very high-level concepts. Computers don't understand very high-level concepts. Computers merely do exactly what they're told. You have to struggle hard to make it seem computer produces random numbers, for example.
--------
I'd prefer something more realistic, and within the reach. I don't have the decades of spare time to wait for someone develop good AI, and someone else design powerful enough and affordable processors.

For a start, let's forbid AI doing obviously stupid moves. The first thing would be forcing AI scales into (-1, 3) range except for races with preferred cold/heat values and bad scale tolerance (Ulm, Pangaea, mid-late Ermor, Abysia, Atlantis(cold) etc)
Very bad scales on ordinary nations can be worth it, but NOT if the nation is controlled by AI. Let's not pretend AI understands consequences of very bad scales. Simply lock it down to (-1, 3).

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Personally, I would love a way to create a script-client so we could write our owns AIs. I think I'd take a shot at doing it as a LP or maybe a MIP problem http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

No matter how much you struggly, computer does not generate random numbers:) (except perhaps with an outside source of randomness, which also most likely is just pseudorandomness:)

Yea, offtopic, I know, just had to say it!

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

So, what if more than one player is participating in the game? The AI needs all turn files in order to calculate battles. Your idea would work for a" One player VS AI game", but not for multiplayer, which Dominions mainly is about

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I would love scriptable computer opponents but the handles needed for that have to be written in from the beginning.

And yes, as its been stated, "human" computer players are hard. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is actually easy, but artificially human (AH) is much harder. Its a common subject in the AI newsgroups.

An AI would figure a path from A to B as the strightest and easiest route. AI is simple and gets done often in programming. But always taking the straight line in a game would quickly be abused by human players. To be more human would have to include concepts like flanking, sneaking around behind him, multiple fronts, etc etc.

The closer to AH that programming gets, the more obvious it is that the easy route is just to add more randoms. Now it becomes deciding whether you can get closer to the goal by starting with AI and adding some randoms, or starting with totally random actions and weeding out the most extreme ones.

I do agree that this game could make good use of "thinking" time. As a hosted game it wouldnt bother me if it took hours to think out its moves. As a solo play it might be able to use spare CPU cycles while Im doing my turn but games that do that tend to become games that take over your machine. I dont think Id like that. I like Dom because it lets me keep all my work windows open and skip back-and-forth

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I was surprised, yesterday, to see AI using Terminus the mercenarey assassin to conquer my weakky-defended provinces. The first one had PD of just 1 or 2, and he killed the Markata and the Bandar Commander pretty easily. In the next battle, one of the markata happened to score 7 damage to him in the very beginning, and he died. Still, I didn't think AI would consider attacking with a lone commander.

It's still far from being able to build thugs or combatants, but not quite as far as I had thought.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Yes scriptable computer opponents would be a great improvement. And with random multiple personalities gamers could examine these personalities as a starting guideline to creating their own AI personality or attempts at improving an existing AI.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Pardon? Where's the difference between a human and an AI player, if both do their turn at the same time?
Actually, the kind of AI I described is easier to do in Dominions than Civ or Space Empires (but IIRC both have a 'simultanious' mode now, too) - exactly because the AI does not need any player file to do it's turn.

Think you're confusing the game server (who executes the orders and computes the results) or maybe the tactical (battle) AI with the "artifical players", which I'm talking about.

And, Gandalf, if done multi-threaded those AI players wouldn't take away anything from your computers usability, because the AI threads would run with low priority (even Windoze can do that http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif ) and would use only those CPU cycles which are not needed elsewhere.

And if you're concerned that you won't get anything done anymore http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif - just set the calculation time for the AI higher, and it won't have its turn finished before you. And don't forget, there are still the end-of-turn calculations to do, which will take some time, too.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Just wanted to interject and say that currently, the "end of turn calculations" are what takes the majority of time in my turn hosts. The AI "thinking" time is minor and mostly almost unnoticeable.
So atleast in my experience, Gandalf won't need to increase the calculation time just to artificially increase turn hosting time so he could get anything done http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

You seem to be of the impression that throwing more time at a problem gets it solved, which it doesn't. Your right that the game could spend free CPU cycles working on the AI, but that's sort of a 'cherry on top' to the main problem, which is actually MAKING the AI.

Making AI is hard to begin with. Making a smart AI for a game that is complicated like this would be even harder. Being able to analyze the map to decide which provinces are good to attack, which are important to defend, where build buildings, where/when to research, what to research, how to budget their money.

Having a dynamic and 'smart' AI would be pretty much impossible with so many variables. The easiest method would be a scripted AI (what most RTS/TBS games use), with which you give it a template to follow and it does so to the best of its abilities. Such a template could contain things like what order to research magic schools in, what percent to budget to defense/buildings/troops, whether to be risky or not, all of those things. The problem with templated AI is that it either ends up being predictable (you KNOW it is going to follow a pattern so you just plan around it), totally unpredictable (meaning it's completely random and therefore, very unhumanlike), or incredibly boring (it always plays the 'best' strategy and always wins. This doesn't really apply to any good strategy game because there shouldn't be any 1 plan that always wins).

Throwing time at a scripted AI is pointless. It makes decisions pretty fast and doesn't need more time. It doesn't think ahead, it just looks at its script and makes the best choices given it.

That's very much different from a 'look ahead' AI (which is what chess AIs use), which basically look at ideal moves, and see what resulting games could happen based off of that move (a branching tree of moves). The idea is to pick a move that has a high degree of success. You can't really do that with Dominions because there are far, far too many variables involved in a turn. Chess is a game with a few pieces with a few limited options. It's easy to look ahead in a game like that. You can't do that in Dominions because there are literally thousands of different potential 'moves' you could make. How do you decide what strategy to test, and then how do you decide what the possible outcome of that was so that you could test the next turn's move? You can't, not only because there are tons of unknown factors involved (such as the outcome of battles) and a ton of decisions to be made, but there are lot of random numbers involved as well. How would a dynamic AI determine what is a good magic school to research? How would it determine how many units to put on Research? How would it decide that it needs more mages to research as opposed to more priests or commanders or elephants?

Assuming you could even answer those questions with a formula, then you have to worry about other players. The AI has to look ahead turns to see what other players are doing. Each player has 1000s of possible turn choices they could make. There can be 16+ players, each who could make any number of choices. There's no way the AI could look at a game with that many possible choices and make a decision as to what to do.

In short, the general problem with dynamic look-ahead AI is that there are too many options for each player to make, and too many different outcomes.

The best possible choice would probably be to run the AI mostly on scripts to give it a general idea how to play its turn. The only dynamic-ness to it would be to have a very abstract view of troop/province power, so it could determine what would be an idea province to defend/attack. Breaking down enemy armies into 'offensive rating', provinces into 'valuable-ness', that kind of thing. Basically, just taking the game and stripping it down to a much, much simpler level so the AI can make some form of plan based on it.


Every aspect of the AI is complicated and a huge headache to program and develop well. The real reason why Dominion's AI is not very good, however, is because it's made by 2 people who are not really conserned with it so much as they are concerned with making a FUN game. Besides that, human players are the real point of a strategy game in the first place. There's not that much reason to focus on something that is largely secondary to the point of the game.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Quite true.
The only thing I would point out then is that for THIS game, time should not be a consideration. I know that in many games the AI gets restricted because its "thinking" time is too long. But for this game, that should not be a factor which should release us for some more extensive AI thinking.

But you are right, the programming of that thinking is the rough part.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Radioactive source seem to be a good source of true random
==> http://www.random.org/

Anyway, have anybody here ever seen a good AI in a game (others than chess) ? Personnaly, I see none. Scripts are limited and once understood easly cracked. A true good AI is probably far beyond the focus of a game.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Well...

I, for one, do not want to see any AIs more sophisticated than the one that we have in Dom 3. If they get too smart they'll start posing a serious challenge even on lower settings and they inevitably try to take over the world. Furthermore, I don't really want John Conner to end up as the leader of the human race. He was a punk *** kid. So just say, "No!" to better AIs. And keep them the hell away from our thermonuclear devices, please!

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Yeah, and electronic noise should be another good one, potentially with higher rates. If only we could get some electronics into computers...

I did some quick searches on the subject (as a side line to some "randomized algorithms" lectures I give), and I seem to remember reading that CPU makers (Intel et al.) typically have the means of including pretty good, unpredictable, irreproduceable random number generators in their chips, only it doesn't look like the demand is really there (since space on chips has to come at the expense of some other functions, the integrated RNG has to compete with other, chromier stuff that will make them sell a few more units.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Yeah, but scriptable in-game is way too dangerous - either the scripting language would be extremely limited, or 99.99% of scripts would just crash the game 99.99% of the time (though, Neverwinter Nights' toolset scripting language seemed to be a pretty decent sublanguage of C, and that didn't seem to cause too many stability problems; but then, the development team of NWN was orders of magnitude larger than that of Dom...)

What could work would be if the turn file format were more open, so that players could have an external program read an AI's turn, and generate orders. There would be some minor cheating issues (need for a way to have AI nations' files either in encrypted format, to prevent cheating, or unencrypted, to allow AI scripting), and some safeguards to prevent buggy programs from crashing the game through buggy orders files (simply parse the file, and if anything goes wrong, ignore it and have the in-game AI take over), but it would make it possible for all those "how hard can it be to write decent AI, this game's AI sucks" sayers to prove how much better they really are...

But then, this was a suggestion we made back in the days of Dom2, and the devs weren't too receptive.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Scripting languages for AI aren't necessarily hard to write... just depends on how the AI was setup. Kohan series has always had scriptable AI, TA Spring also has it.

Most AIs in strategy games have their AI scripted in some way, even if it's internal. For example, in your average RTS game, the AI generally gets a basic list of what buildings they need to build what units, and then a basic understanding of how many buildings of each type they should have, and then an idea of what relative number of units to produce. Also things like 'how many units should I stock up before sending out an attack force'.

Of course, those AIs are generally very dumb unless a LOT of effort is put into them.


Best example of 'good' AI I've seen is Virtual Fighter 4. Very good AI that is modeled after real players.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I think atleast we ought to be able to have the computer coming up with good Pretender designs. It should be fairly easy to do this without the use of any true AI at all. Just come up with several designs for each and every pretender available per nation. Preferrably, these designs would be influenced by the forum community, because inevitably, it takes a village to come up with truly dangerous strategies. Based on the design the computer randomly chose, the AI could then be influenced to follow one of several basic strategies, such as from building a lot of sacreds to not building any sacreds at all, depending on the bless effect and the specific nation the computer was playing. It would require a significant effort on the part of the programmers, but not much computer time at all, and if done right, should certainly improve the AI. By the way, has anyone noticed whether or not the AI in the game makes better decisions (or seems to) on higher difficulty levels? I'm still learning the finer points of the game, so I mostly stay on Normal setting.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I had that 2A wind mage mercenary conquer 3 of my provinces while i wasn't paying attention. The little bastard took out 10 guys at a time with lightning bolts and air elementals.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

HoneyBadger, I think I said something similar. Maybe what I wrote was invisible though, as nobody has acknowledged it. I will go back to the AS thread and angrily sulk there.

In any case, Total Annihilations had a very interesting AI MOD model. It was a text file of units and weights, different for each race, and different for different types of maps, and completely changeable by the player. E.g. if we were to have this kind of possibility in Dom III, we could have a text file (or xml) that allowed us to say something like (this is simplified):

race 43 (superbadgers)
pretendertype;SC,Magic,Lucky,Random
turns0--24;StratMagicTurtle (slow expansion)
turns0--24;regunit456;30% (badger militia)
turns0--24;regunit457;70% (h inf badgers)
turns0--24;cmdrunit466;90% (badger mage scholars)
turns0--24;cmdrunit465;10% (reg commander)
turns25--48;StratMagicDragon (rapid expansion)
turns25--48;regunit458;50% (sacred badger unit)
turns25--48;regunit459;50% (badgersamurai)
turns25--48;cmdrunit459;90% (badger battle mage)
turns25--48;cmdrunit460;10% (badger priest of light)
.
.
.
etc.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I think you did, Uh-Nu-Buh. I acknowledge it. Sorry, I try to read the posts that have been submitted in a thread before I post, myself, but I skim through and I must have missed it.

Ok, Uh-Nu-Buh has a very good idea!
I second it.

There. Squish.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

It's a long step from a fully customizable AI, but could still mean great improvements for dominions.

Semi-related: is there a way to set a 'difficult' AI when changing from human to AI, for example to set up a single player challenge? Would be potentially bad for multiplay though.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Once upon a time I was playing Wesnoth as the Undead. My leading troops were ghosts with a chill attack. After driving the Imperials back most of the map I noticed he had started recruiting mermen. I thought that was odd since Mermen aren't that good on land and there wasn't much water then I realized they were strongly resistant to cold damage. The AI was paying attention to what I was doing! I felt so validated as a person! ;-) I also thought he should be recruiting mages that could actually hurt my ghosts instead. :-(

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

You might try to re-start the server with one of the following command line switches:
--easyai X Nation ai controlled X=nation number (0-79)
--normai X Nation ai controlled X=nation number (0-79)
--diffai X Nation ai controlled X=nation number (0-79)
--mightyai X Nation ai controlled X=nation number (0-79)
--impai X Nation ai controlled X=nation number (0-79)

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I agree with Arralen. In fact imo we will see very good AIs in a couple of years, when most of the players will have a decent PC to run the AI processes fast enough.
Right now, many people have some low end machines still, running complicated AI processes on those would take enormous amount of time. My brother is playing a football manager game [his kids are also loving it, but they are too young to play, so mainy they are only watching their father as he is playing.. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif], and in that game, he can choose what leagues to play in. When he runs 60+ leagues for example, even on a dual proc. high end pc, it takes 10-20 mins to process 1 weekend "turn" in the game. I guess the present day comps are still not ready to run these huge processes.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I thought those only affected game creation, but I guess it would be worth a try...

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

In general there are three kinds of AIs, neural networks, smells and scent, and Brute Froce.

Anyone played Fields of Battle? That AI is quite powerful and selflearning using Neural networks.

Problems with Dominions is that a Game would have to be played til the very end before the Neural Network could be updated. After programming the Neural network, which will be a pain, you will have to play plenty of game before the neural network would give a good AI. If the programming was powerful enough. In general this would probably be the optimal AI for dominions as it would learn from human players. But the amount of cells and how to program them seems to burdensome.

Anyone played Galactic Civilization or any modern chess games? Those games give good AIs given brute force.

Brute force is about calculating as many moves as possible to find an optimal move. Given the amount of possible moves in dominions, the computer would never be able to calculate far enough to separate move from eachother in terms on how good they are.

Smells and Scent is the easiest AI to implement. You just give the AI some rules to follow and let it react on it's surroundings. I think this is the only way to go with Dominions, so all you can do is give better and more precise rules for the AI to follow.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Well, a comment on Brute Force. Brute Force is effective if you have a good algorithm to calculate strengh of positions.

In other words, How strong is my position now? How strong will it be if I recruit one mage?

Perhaps smells and scent should be scent and shouts.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

Most chess games have a good opening library, position library for mid game, and position library for end game manuevers. They also use brute force, but without the opening library etc. they are garbage....

IOW, without a good starting rulebase (e.g. 10 preapproved good pretenders for each nation, etc.) then Dom III would still have problems.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I think that AI switches affect only the starting points for creating the game. The impossible AI gets more points to create its scales and god than you do. So Im not sure that any switches would affect a human that is turned AI. Its basically already in a better position than the AI anyway (smarter creation and better start position than if an AI had gotten that far)

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I think it's possible to solve the problem of the AI designing good pretenders, or just not-obviously-stupid ones. Certainly, an "openings book" of ten pretenders per nation would do that. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif It may be enough to write an AI that makes pretenders based on common strategies (blessing, etc) to provide much more of a challenge for SP.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

I seem to have misunderstood your original post, sorry. But imho the AI thinking does not take so much time. That comes mostly from calculating the battles and generating the next turn. At least that how it looks on my Macbook.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

True. The AI seldom requires more than a second or two to think, so it really has all the cpu power it needs.

Re: AI concept of the \'80ies ... why?
 

So, what kind of strategies are there that the AI should take into account? Let's choose two examples: LA Mictlan and MA Mictlan. Pretty similar nations.

LA Mictlan

1) Bless
- choosing a bless and a form
- choosing how to pay for the bless (dormancy/imprisonment/scales, [what scales?] )
- making sacred units to be on the top of the recruitment queue
- accompanying each group of sacred units with at least 2 priest-levels (2 Holy 1 priests, or one H2 priest, or more/better priests)
- what others units to build?
- does bless change the spells the AI should research/summon?

2) fast research/ battle caster?

3) SC pretender?

4) blood hunter/summoner pretender?

5) rainbow pretender?






MA Mictlan

Bless - same questions as for above, probably similar answers

Formations?
 

Formations get ugly.

The AI does not deal all that well with damage-aura effects on two levels:

(1) initial unit placement and selection, and
(2) dealing with them on the battlefield

ex. (1), I've seen a Sauromatian army with hydras placed in the center front, with other living non-immune troops. When they fought my Ghost Riders, there was massive own-goaling through poison because it took them a while to kill the wraith lord.

ex. (2), I'm inclined to think that a non-mindless, non-immortal unit should be reluctant (morale check?) to run or stay in a damage cloud to which it is not immune. If it's not in the cloud, it may make more sense to either go around, or hold.

Re: Formations?
 

There are two games that have elements of what's being discussed. The kohan series has AI personalities that are unique and users can build their own; a nice feature. Age of Wonders has the option off a simultaneous move for the AI, which can give the AI more time to make up its mind. In the early turns of that game, the computer is usually done wwell before you. In the late stages when there are a lot off units, I ccan normally beat the AI in time to complete turns.

As a newbie to Dominions, I'm not having a problem with how tough the AI is, it's eating me alive and I think the various AI kingdoms are meeting somewhere offfscreen and constantly plotting my downfall.

Varangian

Re: Formations?
 

Well once you improve your skills you can edit the .map files and setup all the computer opponents as allies. That's what I currently do for my games.

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