Dominions II is fun, diverse, interesting, and complex. Dominions III will be bigger and better. What more could a person possibly want in a strategy game, other than scantily-clad blood slaves of all races and genders? In my opinion... Artificial Intelligence, Balance, and Ease of Use.
The Johans and Ostermans of the world are already doing their part in improving Dominions’ graphics, interface, balance, variety, mechanics, and who knows what else. However, they are primarily a 3-ish person, part-time team – trying to make the best strategy game ever. A lot of the coding problems are (probably) NP-hard, like ideal unit-mix recruitment, battle spell selection and order, site-searching order, and battle target-selection. This means that no amount of effort (barring a monumental mathematical breakthrough) will produce a perfect algorithm, but that the algorithms can be improved indefinitely; and when choosing between addressing a problem that can be solved in a week versus toying with a provably unsolvable NP-hard problem, any programmer who wants to finish a project will choose the solvable one. So without disrespect to JO, almost no single aspect of the Dominions III AI could be perfected even if he had a team of 100 Turings and Babbages working under him for a decade. However, they
would continually improve, and the extra labor would free up time for Johan to work on whatever he finds most interesting.
In my opinion: many of the issues with exploits, balance, and micromanagement are really symptoms of AI and related algorithms, and will not improve significantly with any amount of effort into UI design, data balancing, or even game-mechanic changes.
There is a hard limit to the change one can affect through the current and expected data modding capabilities, and it is insufficient to compensate for (e.g.) the ineffective tactics of skirmish troops. As such – and bearing in mind that I do not speak for Illwinter, or with any authority, for that matter – would anyone in the forums be
willing and able to engage in code-modding, if Illwinter was so benevolent as to make it a possibility? I’m thinking of algorithmic things, ranging from the function “int whatProvinceShouldISiteSearchNext(SiteGraph explored, Unit bobTheMage)” to a complete tactical combat AI.
I would love to work on the tactical AI, because it is vital in single and multiplayer games, because it can be so frustrating, because a huge amount of micromanagement (scripting, etc) is dedicated to compensating for the tactical AI’s nuances, and because a better tactical AI would negate lot of the balancing issues I was unable to address via data modding. If I wrote a tactical AI, it would be extremely slow (slower than you would want in a commercial game, but fine for 1-turn-per-day PBEM games) but thorough, because I don’t care if Dominions III takes 5 seconds or 5 minutes to process turns (as long as there was some user-configurable, finite limit); though it
would be nice to be able to examine my empire in the meantime. This does not mean I can write something better than the current tactical AI, but it would certainly be slower
Would anyone else utilize deep code-modding capabilities if they were available? Bear in mind that answering “Yes” when you mean “Maybe” or "Yes I want other people to do this, but I won't" might possibly divert Illwinter’s attention away from more important matters.
Illwinter - if you have any comments about code-modding, changes in AI since Dominions II, proving P==NP, or the weather up there in the North Pole, I'm sure we'd all be glad to hear them
Dominions III Artificial Intelligence
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