2 AI Questions
 

1: How does the AI design its pretenders? That is, what factors does it value how? Having seen a variety of AI pretenders in SP (including one fantastically-amusing Great Enchantress on MA C'tis who died repeatedly from Miasma over the course of an epic war), I am quite curious.

2: What nations does the AI manage best and worst? From my anecdotal SP experience, it is very good at Vanheim/Midgard, pretty good at MA/LA Ermor, and supremely crappy at Pangaea. Is there some kind of pattern, some type of units/strategies it is better at?

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

1: Essentially it's random. Whether or not the processes behind it are random, the end result certainly doesn't resemble a design of any kind. At anything higher than normal difficulty they get so many free design points that they're bound to have lots of magic on anything they pick though.

2: It kinda depends if you mean with CBM on or not, NI or BI on also. It's pretty terrible with all of them regardless, however. It's especially bad with ma and la mictlan, capable of dying after a few turns and with caelum, since it has no idea how to use flying troops. I think it's best with Jotunheim and the roman nations, personally.

Basically the only AI 'strat' is to build as many troops as possible and throw them at you. So anything that has good basic troops and good pd is what it's best with. Magic, thugs etc mean pretty much nothing to the AI.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

1) The AI represents ultimate variation. Any kind of "good choice" would be quickly learned, documented, and step-by-step instructions how to beat it would be posted. Not much replay there. Unfortunately, it also means that the AI often selects gods and scales that are bad for it.

HOWEVER it is possible to design good gods and scales for each nation and use those. But then you know whats happening.

If you want the best in-between take a look at the SemiRandom program. It uses pre-created surprises in both AI pretenders and designed provinces but scatters them in so you dont get to know them too well.

2) The AI instructions are linear. In other words its one AI for all nations with very few "IF Nation =" in it. So the more specialized a nation is, the worse the AI plays it.

There are ways to improve that. There are mods, and maps, and again the SemiRandom program all meant to improve the AI. The devs might not have done as much there as we would have liked but at least they granted us the tools to do what we wanted.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

No they didn't. They haven't granted anything people actually want for AI improvements. There are also relatively few mods or maps dedicated to improving the AI. Those that have been made have been largely ignored. Stop sugar coating everything.

I'm sure someone is going to try and take me to task over who 'people' are. I would classify them as those who actually had an interest in improving the AI and were willing to make mods/improvements. The ability to change the weighting of the AI, its scripting, decision making etc has always been a wishlist item and something many people have asked about.

Edit: This is no criticism of the devs. AI tools are obviously not a priority, which is cool. They'd probably be a total pain to implement.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

The AI isn't actually bad at using straight-forward battle mages. Some buffs, artillery, that kind of thing. It's not good at summoning, forging & equipping, communions, anything that requires planning or adapting to circumstance.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

Oh the battle AI is pretty good, considering, yeah. It uses evocations etc in a sensible manner.

But the AI doesn't deploy battlemages strategically or anything, it just chucks a few mages along with every stack of guys. Or sometimes just randomly chucks the mages at you without the army.

And does the AI actually script mages? I don't think it does. Other than hold and cast spell, hold and cast spell, attack for those it has deemed to be thugs. If you never script any of your guys you'll find they act exactly the same way as the AI mage support.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

I've never been quite sure whether it doesn't script them, or whether the algorithm for scripting is just close enough to the battle AI that it's hard to tell the difference.
I suppose a debug log would tell you. Just look for favspell.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

You can always turn on the comptrn switch and look at the AIs turn files. It doesnt script specific spells but then that would be a duplication anyway since the spell choices are written into the code and used to overwrite scripts. Be dumb for the code to argue with itself that way. But it does script. Im not sure how it decides but some units it prefers "stay behind troops" for major mages which makes sense since it allows the other code to just do spell selection. Then another mage is cast, cast, attack which made sense since it was an SC. And yes another would be just cast once then attack which made sense since it was a clerical giant.

It is fun to see the things that the AI can do that we cant. Ive seen scripted instructions such as cast, cast, fly attk rear.

And I wouldnt say that the AI efforts have been ignored. The devs have a number of AI items on the progress page including one we have yet to receive. And player-done items are available. NI maps are well known and seem to get a fair amount of use. Large maps get downloaded fairly often. And there is always SemiRand.

Besides, dont knock me for upholding the title beneath my name just as I wouldnt knock you for always upholding yours. :)

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

I use that one quite often, since it's one of the standard scripting actions available to all commanders.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

Oh. :) guess Im really rusty on my flight commanders. Should play Caelum more often.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

Neither would I, that's why I didn't. I called you out for saying we have been given all the tools we want to mod the AI, which isn't even close to the truth. It's pretty generous to consider it sugar coating and not straight up misinformation.

Neither of which has anything to do with efforts to improve the AI. Are you just stating facts at random or what?

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

Do SemiRand works with CBM 1.6?

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

Yeah, should work fine with it. CBM doesn't really move IDs around or anything, just tweaks stuff.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

Yeah, I've asked for AI improvements for quite some time, and offered some hints, tests and further help, but I gave up on that some time ago, when I realised 2 things:

The AI is broken by (its) design.
Though there have been some minor improvements, in general it still does not really have "a plan", but mills around randomly from turn to turn (that's why you see those suicide attacks). This is because it grew from being a very simple ruleset for moving pieces of a very simple game: The first "Dominions" iteration had only a handful of nations, and no "specials", so it was basically grunts only. From PPP to Dom2 to Dom3 literally thousands of "specials" have been added to the game, but the scope of additional "if-then" clauses you could cramp into the AI turn generation is limited - and while it was sufficient to look at the available armies each turn and roll a dice to see into which of the neighbouring provinces they'll go, very obviously this cannot really work with move-3 units, flyers, stealth, teleport etc etc any more. Basically, the "understanding" the AI has of the game came to a standstill somewhen "around" DomPPP, while tons of features got added along the way.

There's no way any kind of "external" AI (help) can be implemented
.. simply because turn files/generation is closely interwoven with the copy protection scheme and cheat protection. It is simply not possible to read & write turn files with an external application (otherwise one could write an "automated player" which would appear to the server as a regular human player). Likewise, in-memory manipulation of the server, to alter the between-turn AI routines, wouldn't work either.
Best bet would be some kind of "API" that lets your dom3.exe itself dump the info, and read a turn script to make a turn file from it. But that would be a major code addition, and therefore will never happen - even small GUI changes won't be made, and that project would be several magnitudes bigger ...

So, to me the whole subject "Dominions 2.5" is pretty much over for quite some time now, because SP plain sucks, and I don't always have 8 friends around to play with, and I don't like either playing with 2 players + AI (or head-to-head), nor the fast paced blitz games which focus more on squeezing everything out of an unbalanced game and its poor engine, then strategic decisions.

Oh, before you ask (me) ... ask google for "Fall from Heaven 2".

cu there

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

Why not just play (non fast paced) forum games? Those are the majority of games available after all.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

Because if I have 1 hour, or 5, and want to play a game, I want to play it. Not do a turn, wait a day. And, o.c., simply save & continue another day if time runs out. That's what SP normally is for, and maybe computer games in general, at least for me, and that doesn't really work out with Dominions.

Back to the "AI" topic - have a little bit to add which I forgot:

Another hint that the AI design is stuck maybe even before DomPPP,
is that in the beginning, when it is forced to build up its first army to break out of its home province, and it has one clear target (the home province of a neighbouring player, which it can see because it always knows all province ownerships) - then it can head straight for that target until it runs out of units in that army.
So as long as it has 1 army, and 1 target, everything is fine. No idea about reinforcements, though, and multiple armies and targets seem to confuse the algorithm completely ...

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

You could arrange to play a weekend game with some people. Every weekend play for 5 hours straight at a given time, then save the game to continue next weekend.

That doesn't seem any less feasible than coordinating with 4-8 friends to do something.

It sounds like dom3 isn't the right game for you though, for sure, due to the SP being rubbish.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

There are also people who will always search for a better AI just to avoid trash talk. Even light-hearted trash talk. Im just not a confrontational or competitive person. Not in games, sports, hobbies, not in conversation, etc. The AI might suck but I still find the games more enjoyable. Unless of course the MP has some RPG variation in its setup.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

Non reciprocal trash talk is very uncommon in dom3 forum games and easily avoided (just don't post in the thread). I've never heard of people trash talking via the ingame messaging system.

If you are always searching for better AI I'm amazed you play dom3 at all.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

What would you recommend instead? VGA Planets? C-Robots? GalCiv?
Better AI doesnt necessarily provide the variety and replay that Dom3 does even with its "crappy" AI.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

And this would be so bad how?? It's not like it's a game where the AI can outperform a human!

While it's not trivial it would not need to be at all hard to implement. All that needs to be added is the name of the file to be called to process the turn--a separate setting for each race so you can have multiple AIs in the game.

We already have virtually everything we need to do this--the needed files are already being exported and it can already read an import file with the orders in it.

I would *NOT* expect them to write an AI for it.

The only issue I see is how to do this without leaving a hole in the copy protection.

Re: 2 AI Questions
 

He wasn't saying it was bad, he was saying Y isn't possible because of X, otherwise Y would be possible.

NOT:

Y isn't possible because of X, which is a measure put in place to stop Z from happening (oh noes! Z!!!)