Single Player Rant

[Saxon]

<Rant warning>

Yes, it is commonly understood that many people find single player too easy. In this, Dominions is like pretty much every other strategy game out there. Once you play for a while, learn the basics and some advanced information, you will win most of the time, unless you give the AI large advantages. Once you reach this stage, you either quit the game or take the next step, which is playing other humans. The main variation between games is how much time learning you have to put in before you can beat the AI and how long you, as an individual, are willing to accept the diminished challenge.

Dominions is very deep and one of the best parts about it is that there is so much to learn. This has the advantage of making the learning curve longer and making the game more robust for the AI. If they humans take a longer to learn the game, the AI looks better for longer. However, once the human gets the deep knowledge mastered, the AI looks pretty stupid.

Now, why am I going on about this, which is nothing new to strategy gamers? It is simple, I have a pet peeve. I am tired of hearing people state something like “I beat the AI like a drum unless I really handicap myself. Single player is pointless, the game is only about multiplayer.”

What I hear the person saying is something a bit different. “I have tons of free time and have mastered the basic and advanced stages of this complex game. I must have had fun if I played that much, so it is a pretty good game. I am a competitive personality and want more challenge. However, I don’t recognize my first three statements are true, so let me tell everyone who has not invested that much time that they are bad players and the fun they are having in SP is akin to masturbation.”

Yes, I am jealous folks like this have so much free time to play Dominions! I wish my job gave me more time off and sometimes I wish my wife and daughter would understand that playing with the computer is more fun than playing with the dogs. Yes, I wish I had the time to master this game and compete with the ‘big boys.” Maybe I would never win at that level, I am not particularly gifted, but in over 20 years of playing strategy games, I have yet to meet a game I can not beat the AI in. Given some time, I would make that level and so would 95% of players. (For the other 5%, I suggest The Sims)

What I am asking is if we can leave off the repeated announcements of how useless the AI is and the implication that people who are playing SP are not much good. I propose to you that it does not make the boards a welcoming place for newbie’s (the future of the MP community) nor does make the poster look good. It just shows the posters have a lot of free time!

Dominions is a game of two halves, as they say in English football, and both are important. SP is the recruiting and training ground for MP, a place where a lot of us have a lot of fun and a good source of income for the developers. MP is the place where the limits are stretched, the best strategies are created and the hard core, long term players keep the soul of the game alive. Both are needed and both deserve respect.

So, thanks for listening to my rant and I hope it makes you think about your opinions on SP. Even if it didn’t, have a good weekend. I hope to get two hours of Dominions played this weekend, but it depends how long we have to wait at my daughter’s doctor. She is fine, thanks for asking, it is just a regular check up. Yes, you are right, I will try to get her playing strategy games, but she is only 1.5 years old, so it will probably be Dominions 7. And yes, she will start with single player!

[Sombre]

I'm someone who will often say "I have to handicap myself to get a challenge from the AI". It's true. The first game of dom3 I played (I never played Dom2) I set the AI to normal and stomped it pretty easily, while messing about learning the game. The second game I played I set it to impossible and,.. stomped it easily. The problem isn't that the AI isn't that challenging - on impossible it cheats enough that it can give you a challenge if you let it and if you set up the scales, pretender etc for it then turn it AI it fares ok without all the cheating.

The problem is really that the AI isn't that much fun to play against once you realise how stupid it is. Once you get tired of it throwing its armies piecemeal into your strong PD for no reason. At this point, you have to handicap yourself, let it have a head start, don't use PD etc, otherwise there's no sense of pressure and, to me anyway, it becomes more like a chore slowly stomping the AI down.

As for SP as it relates to MP - because of the AIs very random and often nonsensical behaviour, SP doesn't prepare you for MP strat at all. It might teach you how to play the game, but beyond that it's just too different. So you can't really blame experienced MP folk for discounting the opinions that SP people have on MP gameplay issues, such as the balancing of the Vans. If they don't play MP they should just shut up instead of insisting they know something about it because they beat the AI like a red-haired stepchild.

[Saxon]

True, SP does not prepare you for the intense competition of MP, but nor does Little League prepare you for the Major League. However, they both teach you how to play the game and serve as a recruiting ground for new players. Take it away and the MP/Big League suffer. Also, many more people have fun playing in the small leagues than in the Big League. It would be interesting to set up a poll and see if the sports analogy is true with Dom. Let me see what I can do.

I also agree that SP people should be very careful about talking about balance. In the Van thread, you will note that my comments specifically state they are regarding SP and that my observations are based on how the nations relate to each other, in SP. My concerns are specifically about how it effects the SP game and my perception that it was harmful to the SP game. In addition, it is worth noting that I backed down when presented with a large sample of SP data. Just as SP data is not much use in talking about MP, MP data is not much use in talking about SP.

SP and MP are very different, but they are linked. Issues of balance arise in both types of games and, as long as the writer is clear about what they are discussing, both types of players can and should post. I don’t mind an experienced MP player discounting a SP person talking about MP, but I do have a problem with a MP player discounting a SP person talking about SP and claiming that the SP world is not important. The two are linked, just like the two communities are linked.

[PvK]

I quite agree, but would add some other thoughts which might help some people get more fun out this and other games.

* It's also possible to learn ways to enjoy games that you "can beat" (like playing against an AI which you know ways to beat) by willingly limiting what you do, not just as a handicap, but in imaginative and fun ways. For example, try roleplaying Ulm, and trying to make mostly-national human armies with forged items the core of your force. That's still one of my favorite ways to play (and I'm talking about since getting hooked on the first game in the series: Dominions: Priests, Prophets and Pretenders). Or, think of other thematic ways to play the other nations.

* 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?

* Even if you think you only enjoy mental challenges without handicaps, try this idea for a minute: Try to find interesting ways to make the game challenging for you by thematic (or arbitrary, or balancing) limits such as I mentioned.

* Consider that you get something pretty cool when you succeed: a game that doesn't stop being fun, satisfying, interesting, and challenging. Not all games are fertile enough to allow that, and very, very few are as full of possibilities as Dominions . . . unless you let your own close-mindedness blind you to their potential.

Just an invitation that might help some people have more fun. Meanwhile, I'll be continuing having a blast as MA Ulm against the AI...

PvK

[Beorne]

I usually preface all my posts with "I play only in mp". I have the luck to have a group of players and mp is so much fun. I don't have much free time (sometimes I can't do a turn a day) and I prefer investing it in mp. I find sp boring, and I haven't said I win easily with the ai, simply playing sp bores me soon. It's notorious peoples are more fun than computers.
Regarding ai improvements to create better sp experiences, it is very, very, very hard to build good ai in a so complex system. Correcting the balance for mp (and sp as side effect) is much easier.

[Arralen]

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?

[Sombre]

I would be interested in this argument were it not so clear from the couple of posts that have already been made that huge assumptions will continue to be made about people who dare criticise any one part of dom3 and hope for improvement.

So I'm staying out of this one.

I guess I'll go back to slandering the devs, or min/max powergaming, or trading the AI thousands of bane venom charms, or building exploitative cookie cutter SCs, or playing 1 turn every 5 minutes 20 province blitz maps, or whatever the hell it is people like me are supposed to do. Heh.

[Gandalf Parker]

Im all for a smarter AI since I play mostly solo.
But I think that many people tend to complain too early. They post about easy AI but apparently have not beaten the AI. Instead they read the posts about how to beat the AI. And many of them havent bothered to try the various means of making the AI harder or at least forcing it to play differently.

Also there is always the final stage. I have laid out various methods for these AI experts to help the devs make the AI better but I havent seen much done along those lines.

I am almost completely a solo player and have played many games. I think that the Dom AI is one of the best AIs I have come across in a game that was not designed for solo play. Its well beyond just a tutorial level. Johan has put quite abit into a side-feature.

But like I said, I wouldnt mind it being better.

[Fate]

I am a player who still loses to hard (not impossible, just hard) AI after a good number of games.

I have to say that I have seen many forums where gamers say that the AI is just too easy, and have almost never been able to consistently beat the AI myself.

I would like to say that I take NO offense when others can beat the AI easily. It is inevitable, especially on the forums, where most of the more advanced and dedicated players go, that this issue will appear. I even appreciate the fact the these players find ways to retain the enjoyment of SP (by giving the AI advantages).

I see it as no slander against the developers that the AI is beatable. In large games which sell millions of copies and have teams of 30+ the AI is still, consistently, easier than advanced MP.

The flip-side is that I think everyone should be treated equally (including the opinions of SP players, who should NOT -!NOT!- "shut up").

In Rise of Nations, one side (Russia) was very unbalanced for advanced players, but it was one of the strongest nations among new players. The developers chose to leave the nation unbalanced for advanced players because any more bonuses would make it too powerful for the new players.


In conclusion, I am OK with advanced player discussing the AI problems they have had, and how to "improve" the AI. I also will admit that many other people know the game better than me. What I do NOT appreciate is being told that ANYONE'S opinion is invalid.

[Aleph]

And I can still be regularly beaten by the AI on wrap around maps on the hardest difficulty, so luckily I'm bad enough that I can enjoy the game.

Edit - I like Fate's parallel game comment. I strongly believe that the nations of Dominions aren't balanced with each other... and I'm not sure they're even meant to be or should be. I appreciate the option to pick diversity of game experience over strict balancing, which is an option I enjoy by virtue of selecting SP. Or, I suppose, also an option I would enjoy by virtue of willingness to be obliterated in MP, but I find that less rewarding.

Edit II - I have noticed a trend on this forum (similar to the red sox/yankees competition) between SP/MP players. SP players seen to feel they have to prove their own enjoyment of the game as equally valid with the MP players, while MP players often don't care at all about the SP experience. If you're enjoying what you're doing with the game, good on you.

The more members both sides can be civil and make room for the other on the forum (and I'm not pointing any fingers, at either side), that will also render the discussion about the game enjoyable - and at least for me, forum discussion is an important aspect of enjoying a game, since very few in my immediate social circle like the kind of games I do.