Quote:
Evil Dave said:
But I look at the AI from a different angle: I've written AI.  Yup, actual pieces of software to play games (no, none you've heard of). It's not an easy problem, especially as the complexity of the game grows. Dom3's AI doesn't do so badly, actually. While the tactical AI needs spell blacklists (or at least player-selectable hint lists), it's generally pretty clever. The pretender-building code could be improved, tho.
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In the AI forums its often joked about the difference between AI and AH. Doing AI (Artificial Intelligence) is actually fairly easy and common. Writing artificial intelligence is to get it to go from point A to point B by a straight line. Of course for games that would be too predictable and exploitable. AH (Artificially Human) is much harder. The usual AI line of programming would be to start with absolutes and then gradually add randoms. The usual AH line for game opponents is to start with total randoms and then gradually add intelligent absolutes. (its an interesting comment on humanity that you are closer to playing a human if the AI is random instead of smart)
The game actually does have spell blacklists, and weighted choice lists for spells, and a set sequence that it considers them in. If you want to watch the game "think" you can turn on the debug to various levels using a command line switch and direct the output to a file. If one of the expert players wanted to point out a specific change in the weights or sequence then I am sure it would be considered.
The pretender-building code is a problem. Not too bad considering that it was tacked onto the game, and its linear. It does try to make some smart choices buts a single routine for all nations as far as I know. If you dont allow for the possibility of some harmful choices then certain nations will never be able to win. But the player-done SemiRandom project is helping that. If more people will turn in their smarter pretender/scale designs for specific nations then we can get some games available to us that let the AI play much better.