AI concept of the '80ies ... why?

[GwyrgynBlood]

You seem to be of the impression that throwing more time at a problem gets it solved, which it doesn't. Your right that the game could spend free CPU cycles working on the AI, but that's sort of a 'cherry on top' to the main problem, which is actually MAKING the AI.

Making AI is hard to begin with. Making a smart AI for a game that is complicated like this would be even harder. Being able to analyze the map to decide which provinces are good to attack, which are important to defend, where build buildings, where/when to research, what to research, how to budget their money.

Having a dynamic and 'smart' AI would be pretty much impossible with so many variables. The easiest method would be a scripted AI (what most RTS/TBS games use), with which you give it a template to follow and it does so to the best of its abilities. Such a template could contain things like what order to research magic schools in, what percent to budget to defense/buildings/troops, whether to be risky or not, all of those things. The problem with templated AI is that it either ends up being predictable (you KNOW it is going to follow a pattern so you just plan around it), totally unpredictable (meaning it's completely random and therefore, very unhumanlike), or incredibly boring (it always plays the 'best' strategy and always wins. This doesn't really apply to any good strategy game because there shouldn't be any 1 plan that always wins).

Throwing time at a scripted AI is pointless. It makes decisions pretty fast and doesn't need more time. It doesn't think ahead, it just looks at its script and makes the best choices given it.

That's very much different from a 'look ahead' AI (which is what chess AIs use), which basically look at ideal moves, and see what resulting games could happen based off of that move (a branching tree of moves). The idea is to pick a move that has a high degree of success. You can't really do that with Dominions because there are far, far too many variables involved in a turn. Chess is a game with a few pieces with a few limited options. It's easy to look ahead in a game like that. You can't do that in Dominions because there are literally thousands of different potential 'moves' you could make. How do you decide what strategy to test, and then how do you decide what the possible outcome of that was so that you could test the next turn's move? You can't, not only because there are tons of unknown factors involved (such as the outcome of battles) and a ton of decisions to be made, but there are lot of random numbers involved as well. How would a dynamic AI determine what is a good magic school to research? How would it determine how many units to put on Research? How would it decide that it needs more mages to research as opposed to more priests or commanders or elephants?

Assuming you could even answer those questions with a formula, then you have to worry about other players. The AI has to look ahead turns to see what other players are doing. Each player has 1000s of possible turn choices they could make. There can be 16+ players, each who could make any number of choices. There's no way the AI could look at a game with that many possible choices and make a decision as to what to do.

In short, the general problem with dynamic look-ahead AI is that there are too many options for each player to make, and too many different outcomes.

The best possible choice would probably be to run the AI mostly on scripts to give it a general idea how to play its turn. The only dynamic-ness to it would be to have a very abstract view of troop/province power, so it could determine what would be an idea province to defend/attack. Breaking down enemy armies into 'offensive rating', provinces into 'valuable-ness', that kind of thing. Basically, just taking the game and stripping it down to a much, much simpler level so the AI can make some form of plan based on it.


Every aspect of the AI is complicated and a huge headache to program and develop well. The real reason why Dominion's AI is not very good, however, is because it's made by 2 people who are not really conserned with it so much as they are concerned with making a FUN game. Besides that, human players are the real point of a strategy game in the first place. There's not that much reason to focus on something that is largely secondary to the point of the game.