[Graeme Dice]

MStavros said:
16 AIs on 160+ province maps. I usually played smaller games, and some bigger games too. I NEVER ever had a hard time to beat the AIs. Hm, as for time, I think after 2-3 weeks of playing I was beating the AI in all games, except in a very few where I had some horrible luck or 4+ AIs were constantly attacking me.

You got several weeks out of the single player game. That's all any person can realistically expect from an AI even with current state of the art AIs. I still assume that you've never played a game against 16 AIs all allied against you, and I also assume that you deliberately use cheesy tactics to defeat the AI.

The thing is that if a player can beat 3 AI players 1v3!!!!, what can you say about that AI? Just go and try to beat 3 AIs in Galciv2 on harder settings, you will loose very fast.

The Gal Civ 2 AI cheats far, far, more than the Dominions 2 AI on the higher difficulty settings. That's the only way that it is possible for it to have a chance of defeating a human.

Yes I know that Galciv2 is a singleplayer game. My _ONLY_ complaint was, that the Illwinter team _NEVER_ fixed the major AI problems at all, like the castle building and the correct use of troops/summonings.

Those "problems", as you call them, are only noticeable to somebody who has already risen far above the capabilities of the AI.

This is why I said that this is a bad support. They supported the MP part, thats pretty good, but they released a SP/MP games, I bought it because I've seen "VERY GOOD AI" on the feature list. Do you understand what I am trying to say now?

You _got_ a very good AI. It's not my fault that you're whinging about it not being able to defeat a human opponent. There are virtually no AIs that can accomplish that for any games that incorporate even slightly random elements. You'd notice, if you weren't ignorant of the field of AI research, that computers are just barely beginning to be able to play Poker competently against humans. That's another game that's orders of magnitude simpler than Dominions, especially when a computer is capable of determining the exact probability that any given hand will win in a atter of microseconds.

Please, drop this idea "how hard is to script AI" topic, if a company cannot do it properly, they shouldnt add a singleplayer part then.

I'm not going to drop an argument when my opponent is clearly ignorant of the difficulty of the tasks that they are demanding. I assume that you must just be barely out of high school from the immaturity and general lack of information displayed by your arguments.

Once again, take Galciv2 as an example. Try the AI on the easiest and on the hardest setting. IF you aint exploiting the AI, and ur using normal tactics, you will barely win against the hardest AIs.

Of course not, because you don't have the AI's perfect understanding of the rules, and the AI starts with massive information and production advantages over you.

If you want to say that its a SP game, and that the developer team is much bigger then Illwinter, all I gotta say is that the product prices are the same, thus we deserve support for our money. If I buy the game to play singleplayer, I expect fixes in patches for singleplayer if it is needed.

They weren't needed, nor would any fixes provided be capable of providing you an opponent that is the equivalent of a human. If you want to give the computers a chance to beat you, then there are numerous changes that you can make through mods, map starting locations that will give the computer the massive production advantages it needs to be able to defeat a human.

I tried out the latest Dominions 2 patch btw, and the AI is the same, so I dont know that what singleplayer support are you talking about Graeme.

Thanks for admitting that you aren't even interested in taking any of the easily available actions to "fix" your game, if you think that playing with the most current patch is some kind of rarity.

Crapload of months passed, and I havent seen a single fix for the AI in Dominions 2. So yeah, this is why I am gonna wait the Dominions 3 demo, and see how it turns out, I am just very cautious with Illwinter now.

Perhaps you should develop realistic expectations of an AI, rather than complaining that it doesn't reach your impossible requirements for performance.