Improvements for AI Opponents
 

From what I've seen the computer AI opponents haven't been improved in any patches despite having multiple problems. Some of these are probably difficult to fix yet I'm sure others are not so complex.

1) EASY FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents sending pretenders into the arena death match. Pretender tag should make it easy to stop this unit from participating. It's so sad to see 10+ AI pretenders getting killed because the AI doesn't know better.

2) HARD FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents starving its own troops. This causes the AI opponents to lose battles, even important battles. This would probably be more difficult to fix, yet at least the human player can set supplies to 300 as a semi-workaround.

3) HARD FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents blindly drop items on mages/commanders. This causes AI opponents to severly hurt its own mages as it places full steel plate on a low hitpoint caster. It's rarely able to use important magic item boosters as well. This is another task which would probably be difficult to fix.

4) EASY FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents lack knowledge of which globals it should NOT be casting. Globals such as Utterdark and Perpetual Storm will do more damage to the AI opponents 99% of the time. If given a high astral and blood pretender I worry whether it may even cast Astral Corruption which would totally devaste any AI opponent. It should be very easy to prevent AI opponents from casting specific spells since it's already done for spells such as Wish.

5) AVERAGE FIX DIFFICULTY: AI opponents choose wrong scales causing even an Impossible AI setting to choke and wither away. The higher difficult settings should include wiser scale/pretender builds. Poor scales and dominion has been known to cause AI opponents to die very very early... such as Mictlan. Some nations already have programmed scales such as Abysia for its heat so the difficulty is probably average.



Hopefully one of the DOM_3 patches will provide improvements for the AI opponents.

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

Hopefully the current (secret) Illwinter project will turn out to be as much fun as Dom3. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

KO is always hinting at the current project and I want to know what it is. Hopefully within a year or so.

-Max

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

Illwinter doesn't even need to improve the AI themselves, we just need the tools to program it. I'm completely confident that there are people in the forum who will positively salivate over the idea of improving the AI.

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

Yes a scriptable AI would be a huge improvement and it's worked wonderfully for many other games. Unfortunately we probably won't see this feature until DOM_4. With JK and KO working another project it may take 5 years or more before we see DOM_4, but I believe it will arrive. Stardock is releasing a fantasy TBS game during 2009, the developer responding to my email shows this game has a bright popular future.

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

While these 3 points do indeed (to my uninitiated mind at least) seem doable to change the programming for, I think it's a conscious design decision by devs not to do so. If I read their (well, KO's especially) various posts it seems to me they want the AI to do various random, not strategically optimal, even potentially harmful things, simply because the various pretender gods might feel it was fun to have horrors randomly popping up everywhere, or believed a productive society was the one and only road forward in this world, even if they happened to be ruling Mictlan.

I'm not saying you have to agree with this reasoning. I do even agree that these (comparatively) easy to implement changes would bring a welcome improvement to the challenge level of SP games. In the end though - at least if I interpret the devs correctly - these issues are about the very philosophy of the game, and as such transcend prosaic considerations such as AI competence. And I, for one, am very excited about the philosophy of the game. And while I would be very happy to see AI improvements, I am also more than willing to follow the devs overall philosophy of possibilities, options, and diversity, as this is one of the main reasons this game is so exceptional.


********* DISCLAIMER *********

I have no special connection in any way to the devs, and am most definitely not a mind reader, so the above just is my own guess of the devs point of view, cobbled together from their various posts over the last ~2 years.

If, in fact, my interpretation is drastically wrong, I appologise to the devs for being a socially challenged individual who isn't capable of understanding my fellow men. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif


******* END OF DISCLAIMER ********

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

We would like to think so but many offers have been made for AI improvement projects by "the AI sucks" experts. Few have ever bothered. They mostly just want Johan to fix it.

On lists of AI fixes about half tend to be "we can do that now", then theres a bunch of "can you lay that out more exactly and maybe Johan can look at it", some that are IMHO not even good things to put into the game, and then a few possibly workable good ideas.

Maybe the problem is that Im not sure what list such things should go on to get Johans attention. Maybe the AI needs its on wishing shortlist.

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

Gandalf,

What does this mean? I've never seen Illwinter offer to let anybody else touch the AI. Are you talking about the map-editing projects like SemiRandom, for giving AI pretenders better scales?

-Max

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

Well that would be one.

Also calls to lay out specific AI instructions the way its in the game. We gave info on looking at the debug code, then giving specific suggestions. The AI is linear and general so most peoples suggestions tended to be too specific. Altho I do remember one that gave very specific suggestions for better castle building which seems to have been put in. Also some suggested changes to spell sequence, and unit building.

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

Hmmm. Did these discussions take place on the mod forum or here in the main forum? If the mod forum I must have missed them.

I've been thinking lately that the AI seems to be better than it used to be, and I wonder if this is why.

-Max

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

*PART* of #3 could be implemented easily:

Check to see if the commander will benefit from the item. When I take an air-breathing item off an air-breathing commander, something's wrong.

I would also divide all commanders into caster or non-caster. Items would be flagged as to whether they are for casters/non-casters or both.

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

Well that's a fine idea, but how do you define casters? I mean, giving a staff and a robe to a Dai-Oni would just be a terrible SNAFU. In fact many of the best SCs have magical ability, and some of them have much better magical ability than the "mages of the line" that one might recruit in large numbers to spam buffs and minor evocations. It could prove very tiresome to try to work out rules to define what type of commander one is, on the fly. I think a better bet would be to have a flag that can be set to caster-only, combat-only, or left unflagged for those units who are thuggable, but also are perfectly worth having just casting.

And then it comes partly down to research as well..... Most thuggable casters are only viable if they have very specific buffs researched. If they don't, then they would be better used standing back casting whatever else they have access to in a support role.

Such is the conundrum of AI programming - there are so many potential variables, that you get worse results the more specific your rules are. Of course, one could argue it's hard to get much worse than a Fish Pendant on a human commander, but maybe he only had it because he picked it up, the AI never removes magic items AFAIK.

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

You define casters as people who have magic paths. More importantly you define non-casters as those without magic paths. You don't give the non-casters path booster items (with exceptions for those have other boosts) or penetration items etc.

This is a much more basic fix suggestion than trying to build SCs or thugs. Just don't give commanders items that are useless to them or actively crippling.

Re: Improvements for AI Opponents
 

Any AI suggestion which gets into too many IF's is out of the category of easy, and is unlikely to get done. The AI now is rather linear and general. In other words it does have an instruction on whether to build infantry ahead of cavalry or mages ahead of priests. But not IF Ermor and IF less than turn 10 and IF you already have the local provinces captured etc etc. It also has a list of spells to cast and a rating system to decide them but not alot of IF Ctis and IF your army is poison resistant and IF etc etc.

Hosting would get 5 times as long if all of the nations had a bunch of IF checks. The code-base is just not structured for doing such checks in a database manner. The only IFs that might get inserted are the real game-killers. The latest I would like to see put in is to keep Mictlan from killing itself out of the game in the first few turns by not choosing a scale and dominion setting that it needs to get started.

On the other hand, many of the IF this and IF that changes that people want directed toward a specific nation can be done by mod or map commands so we can "fix" individual nations the way we want in most cases.