Was going to buy the game and then!

[NTJedi]

Finding a game with good or great AI is extremely rare because it's 1000_times easier to show your next employer how good your 3D graphics can be compared to how clever your AI game code is.

THUS... we see so so so many games which have state of the art graphics with prehistoric AI. It's like finding a great looking car with a rusted 30 year_old engine.
Personally I would love to see the computer AI improved to the point where multiplayer games would consider including them more often.

[Ballbarian]

I agree, but I think that is why we need to NOT fall into the mentality of "computers will never be able to play good without cheating" or "computers will never be able to play at a human level". There are already plenty of examples I could give that prove that with devotion of time and resources, artificial intelligence of very high quality is quite possible.

Please don't think that I am dogging Dominions on this. I am really impressed with the algorithms that the ai uses and believe it is a very solid opponent even at the non-cheating difficulty levels, until the human player learns the game and improves his tactics over time. However, as many people have noted, there is certainly room for improvement, and if pointing out those weaknesses and possible solutions or improvements in any way gets developers and publishers of this or any other game to give the ai more attention, then I'm all for it.

While I am at it, here are some links for those interested in learning more about artificial intelligence and how far it has come (and has yet to go):

http://www.gameai.com/
One to check out closely at this site is "Cloak, Dagger, and DNA". It is a Risk like game that uses genetic algorithms. It can be downloaded from that page as well. Very cool.

http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html
ELIZA--A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine

http://satirist.org/learn-game/
Machine Learning in Games

http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
Home Page of The Loebner Prize--"The First Turing Test"

http://www.freewebs.com/ballbariansw/links.htm
This is a link to my own links page with links to the above and other ai and alife sites that I found interesting.

[Cainehill]

Of course the AI doesn't need to cheat. Well before the start of the 1900s computers (well, robots) were already winning chess games against strong human players.

Of course, each "computer" / "Robot" had a dwarf inside it controlling the pieces, but in this day and age there's no reason we don't have the online equivalent. Each Dominions 3 game should have a Chinese person playing each AI nation.

After all - farming for hours and hours in online games works for them, we shouldn't need to pay more than 10 cents per turn and they'd be happily on the road to "rich" by Chinese standards.

[magnate]

Give it ten years and it will be the Chinese paying the yanks 10c a turn to play the AI nations in Dom6 ...

[Chazar]

Diplomacy is overrated - lets go to war!

I do not understand why "time" is preventing people from playing MP games? Sure, an MP game takes much longer to complete that any single player game, but I think it is kind of healthy to have the MP-brake preventing the just-one-more-turn disease. Its a PBEM-only game for me. This was what I was searching for and why I found my way to Dom2.

[Endoperez]

Ballbarian said:
While I am at it, here are some links for those interested in learning more about artificial intelligence and how far it has come (and has yet to go):
http://www.gameai.com/
One to check out closely at this site is "Cloak, Dagger, and DNA". It is a Risk like game that uses genetic algorithms. It can be downloaded from that page as well. Very cool.

Indeed. I didn't follow the Cloak, Dagger and DNA path, but found my way to virtual evolution. Program that works as an ecosystem, where raw numbers are processed by program-entities that reproduce affected by mutations. I didn't delve too far into it, but foud a mention that when some developer (or someone using the program in his research) tried destroying all new creatures with positive mutations, they started "playing dead" and still managed to start reproducing faster. Also, while in low- or high-resource environments only one "species" prevails, in certain conditions multiple "species" specialize to use different resources.

Very cool.

[PrinzMegaherz]

Evolution?
What is that?

We are not being thaught something like that at school

[Zooko]

Perhaps instead of working on AI, Illwinter could simply publish and document the format for .2h and .trn files. In fact, it would also help to render them into a more human-readable format instead of binary. Then people could write their own AIs and we could swap them the way we do mods.

Don't tell me that this would enable cheating. Cheating is already enabled, and the only way to disable is to do all consistency checks on the server. This would help the devs disable cheating by making it obvious to everyone how cheating can be done. :-)

[Oversway]

You don't need .2h files to write an AI. The game could provide an api for you to write to.

[Zooko]

It seemed to me that the easiest way for the time-pressed Illwinter devs to make the game "AI-moddable" would be to publish the specification of the .2h file. The alternative of writing an API for the AI-mods to invoke is probably much more time-consuming.

Also, as a potential AI-modder myself I would probably prefer the open .2h files over the API.

Note that this is only for strategic AI mods. For tactical AI mods so that you can configure mages to stop casting Breath of Winter and killing all of their friends, or to cast Aim on the units that actually have ranged weapons instead of on the melee units, or to cast Flying on units that DO NOT ALREADY HAVE FLYING, and so forth, then you would require a different interface.