Quote:
PvK said:
* Ok, so you've figured out some things the AI does or doesn't do that you can exploit to defeat it. Congratulations on your cleverness. Now, can you be clever enough to realize that if you enjoyed that challenge, you could have another challenge by choosing to not exploit that technique? After all, once you learn that the AI can't do something, using that trick against the AI isn't exactly playing fair, is it?
|
To me, that's the difference between between "beating the game" and "beating the in-game opponents".
If you play to "beat the game", you're mostly looking for cheesy tactics and strategies which the AI cannot cope with - actually, you're not playing
the game against an adversary, but
against the game designers: "I'll be able to break you game, because I know
now (with some little help from hundreds others players, maybe) more about the game than You during the concept and development stage."
Great. How anyone can expect to have fun with the game after he succeeded doing this once is beyond me ...
And saying the AI is "dumb" is ... dumb.
And not so nice to the developers - if you play "to beat the game", this statement might as well mean "the developers are dumb":
No-ever is able to programm a real AI atm. Not on Suns Computing Grid, not on single S-Cs, surely not on a typical Windoze desktop PC. So what do you expect? Obviously, even the limited scope of the "Dominions World" is too complex for an "AI" to grasp (at least within the constraints what 1 programmer could do in reasonable time) - there
must be "holes" in it's understanding of what's going on, therefore ways to exploits and resulting "dumb behaviour".
And I wonder if anyone ever thought about the possiblity that apparently (I mean,
really evidently) stupid behaviour of the AI could simply be the result of a bug? But AI bugs resulting in unexpected and/or undesirable behaviour are
harder to spot in-game and
even harder to track down and correct than bugs which are easily "accessible" from the "player side".
Ok. Here's the (maybe) most prominent example:
"The AI is so **** dumb, it's throwing it's troops piecemeal against my PD again and again".
Means: The devs where so dumb to program that the AI should do that.
Reality is:
- In Dominions (and any other game I know of) there is not
real Artifical INTELLIGENCE .. the computer cannot learn. If something goes wrong, he's doomed to try it again and again .. no matter if his enemy thwarted his plans or if things simply didn't work out because of a bug.
- There are bugs with movement in Dom3. Still. Obvisouly, not easy to track down and fix, or Johan would have done that long ago. Why shouldn't the AI be subject to them, and maybe a whole bunch of them which
only apply to the AI?
- At times (more often than not), the AI seems to ignore the defenders strength. Thats not only true with PD, but with regular troops as well. Might be a design error, maybe simply a bug. How can you claim to be able to tell?