Important AI Improvement
 

Hope it's not too late... but this needs to be said.


In most games I've seen the computer AI setup to always attack the weakest. This is fine for the early stages of a game, but it should be improved for the later stages.

Within multiplayer games humans know to join forces against the strongest opponent on the map. I recommend the AI opponents do the same... it's sad watching the weak AI opponents fight among themselves or attack a weaker human opponent while ignoring the greatest threat within the game.

This would make the singleplayer games more interesting longer because once a gamer starts winning the AI will recognize this and join forces to try stopping the expansion. On the same note once the human player is no longer the biggest threat the new biggest threat should be targeted.

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Determining the strongest player... well Illwinter would probably identify the best formula but here's my example:
Percentage of provinces on the map + Percentage of total army size compared to all armies + Percentage of total gem income compared to gem income of all players

I'm sure I missed an important variable or two... in any case I hope this has been taken into consideration for the computer AIs.
This would make the computer AIs more reasonable to use in multiplayer games as well.

Re: Important AI Improvement
 

That would be interesting. In Dom2 you can ally the AI's against you but it has to be done from the beginning of the game with a .map command. But I like your suggestion

Re: Important AI Improvement
 

Yeah it sounds good indeed. I just hope that the AI gonna build much stronger heavy armies in Doms3 then in Doms2. Also hopefully the AI gonna research/summon the most powerful creatures too.
I think almost all of us playing singleplayer still sometimes, since Doms2 is a PBEM game mainly, and we all know that 1 game can last for weeks/months. I was lucky however, since I played tons of TCP/IP games with my friends, so I wasnt playing that much SP games thanks to that, but I guess the majority of the players cannot play TCP/IP, since 1 game takes like 2-6 hours usually. [with 4 players on a medium sized map.]

Re: Important AI Improvement
 

Replace "army size" with "army gold/gem" value, counting items and empowerments, and I suppose it's a start. Should probably factor in globals, hoarded gems, dominion, forts, temples and whatnot, too.

Re: Important AI Improvement
 

Bumping this topic because this is an important AI improvement which I pray gets placed into the game. With this AI implementation the computer opponents will fight more like the human players.

Re: Important AI Improvement
 

As someone who isn't at the top tier of players and who when he comes back to dominions 2 still occasionally LOSES TO the AI, let's not make it a whole lot better than it is so that regular people stand a chance against it.

I'm fine with it learning to build castles.

But how about making this AI upgrade an *option* so that top tier players can have a bit more challenge rather than a penalty for finally starting to stand out among the pack. Congratulations, you are now in an advantageous situation. Now everyone will join together and beat you up.

Re: Important AI Improvement
 

My suggestion actually works for even those which are losing the game. In fact, my suggestion actually helps those losing because the AI opponents will target the strongest opponent on the map, thus if you're losing you'll actually do better now. Only if you're dominating the map will you face the joined forces of all AI opponents.
You seem to have misunderstood my suggestion... my suggestion was not have AI always attack humans. That's why this would be a significant AI improvement.

Re: Important AI Improvement
 

I appreciate where your coming from. I personally don't think that it takes into account the nuances of who's a threat and whos not.

Also as a true sandboxer I don't actually need to win a game to consider it completed to my advantage as I may well choose to ally with AI's on genre based grounds.

As an option to turn on for mixed multiplayer it would probably work well but for me as a single or co-op player who goes for particular imagery in my game it would mess things up.

Spiro

Re: Important AI Improvement
 

Reading the Dom3 info on Shrapnel's site, this caught my eye:

"An already challenging AI made even more challenging. If you can't handle the unrelenting computer player, you can always try your hand at playing against humans with Dominions 3 robust multiplayer suite."

Sorry if this has been asked, but what exactly does this mean? Will the Dom3 computers be cheating more than the Dom2 ones or has there really been significant change in the level of the AI?

Re: Important AI Improvement
 

Well, we dont know too much about this yet. We gotta wait and see it in the demo.
So far we know, that the AI will build castles. This one will be a huge improvement. In Doms 2. the AI almost never built any castles, and it recruited lot of weak regular troops because of that.
I dont know about the other AI improvements, hopefully there will be some others as well, like the AI creature summoning strategy, because that wasnt working very well in Doms 2.
The other thing what was a weak part for the AI...the setup of AI armies. Have you noticed that the armies of the AI were totally messed up usually, or that the AI sent out his pretender alone to conquer provinces? Most of the AI players lost their pretenders very soon because of that.
The AI always preferred weak mass troops over SCs or hardcore summoned units.
Hopefully these will be addressed in Doms 3, or in a later patch. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif