Targeting efficiency

[Mortifer]

Originally posted by Pocus:

quote:

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Originally posted by Mortifer:
snip : now that the problems are identified, its simple to fix them.

You are a bit too affirmative, in my humble opinion. I think you should try yourself to make a sizable software before saying that anything related to coding is simple.

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Aye, I know that it is not easy, but all of those parts can be upgraded with coding. In fact they should be. Well first lets wait for the game, and we can list that what should be upgraded in the AI mechanism.

[Pocus]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
It is a little more complicated than that, for example making the strategic AI counter a player devised combo or supercombatant strategy is almost impossible since there are so many potentionally devastating combos and spells etc that are very powerful in special circumstances. Making an AI that adapts its strategy the way a human does in a game as complex as this is all but undoable, not only would the AI have to 'understand' the implications of the way spells items units interact but also 'understand' when a particular combo or spell etc was likely to appear etc, there is just to many factors to take into account. So making more than incremental improvements in the AIs ability to counter spell combos and supercombatants is very difficult.

true, but you should aim for proven recipes. Some games adapt their forces to the threat, but they generally does this after the threat appears, and not preemptively. For example, it is surely awfully complex to determine in advance if a player is heading toward having foul vapor / poison ward combos, or if he has the potential to field trampling gifted gargoyles with charcoal shields.

But a thing which is very doable is to tag each loss of the AI units with the origin of the loss. That is, the AI should store that it has losts so far 852 units to poison*, and 145 to trampling damages. These numbers can then be tweaked with a 'time distance', that is if the AI loose some 20 turns ago 150 units to poison, it should be less important than loosing these units just the Last turn. Having done that, you can sort the biggest threat, and have the AI focus on alleviating the problem. Solutions to poison can be to give a high priority to druid recruitments, a big incentive to search poison ward, a higher probability of having nature gems on nature mages, etc.
There is not that much differing sources of damages, perhaps 20 maximum. The biggest work is to have the AI tweak his priorities according to the threat represented by these 20 sources.

* : you can have a kill coming for several sources by the way, the system ought to be refined.

Thats just a remark on top of my head, but if you want to engage into serious ai programming, sites like gameai.com or ai-depot.com are must read. You would invest 50 hours of reading in doing so, but it is well worth the effort.

We all have the tendency to reinvent the wheel...

[Wendigo]

Hopefully I didn't sound too negative. I consider the AI correct for what is to be expected from this kind of game, it has far too many variables to acount for & they interact in far too many different ways.

This is why the claims from the betatesters about a killer AI in Dom II came as a bit of a surprise, but hey, I am glad to hear that it has been tinkered with to appeal to the SP crowd: we can never have too many players & sooner or later those solo players will consider making the jump into MP for the enjoyment of us all.

And I should have included bloodhunts in the strategic section & not the tactical of course.

[ October 14, 2003, 13:34: Message edited by: Wendigo ]

[Taqwus]

Mortifer --

It's not just coding that's hard. In fact, coding may be the easy part... It's the design of the algorithm, including formal description of the problem and how you decide what features et al need to be considered let alone what you do with them. If you can't identify what inputs need to be factored in, you can't even begin to code.

[Nerfix]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
Mortifer --

It's not just coding that's hard. In fact, coding may be the easy part... It's the design of the algorithm, including formal description of the problem and how you decide what features et al need to be considered let alone what you do with them. If you can't identify what inputs need to be factored in, you can't even begin to code.

You have personal experience about that?
You sound like you would have...

[Pocus]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
Mortifer --

It's not just coding that's hard. In fact, coding may be the easy part... It's the design of the algorithm, including formal description of the problem and how you decide what features et al need to be considered let alone what you do with them. If you can't identify what inputs need to be factored in, you can't even begin to code.

UML courses Taqwus?

[Wendigo]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
[QB]The strategic AI can handle more situations in dom 2 than in dom 1, it is slightly better but it isnt Deep Blue. I hardly ever play single player TBS games so I do not know how it holds up against the AI's of other games.
QB]

Well, we certainly do have a crowd of tbs game players that can offer opinions on this.

I do not play as many games as I used to in the past (in part due to RL being more demanding, and in part due to your game stubornly staying in my drive), but I can talk about the AI of a few classics.

MoM: Mom AI was very simple, and depended on bonuses mainly to stand vs the player. The tactical AI made a priority to target heroes, mages & missile units, but apart from that it was realtively simple to beat with inferior/specialized troops. The strategic AI just hyperexpanded relaying on its bonuses.

Kohan: Pausable RTS, so it basically plays as TBS.
The tactical AI retreats its units to heal them when badly damaged, but that's about it. When the AI wants a city it just sends anything it has vs it. AI Units are not tailor-designed to the opponent even on the highest lv as far as I can see, despite the design being far far simpler than Dominions. The strategic AI is correct.

Total War: A very annoying bonus of Shogun:TW was that the AI could 'see' your strategic move, and act upon its knowledge...this was extremely fustrating, you could have 2 defended provinces, empty one moving the army elsewhere & the AI would walk a few peasants from a nearby province & conquer it.
The tactical AI is extremely simple: just rush forward in offence (even walking into a killfield of arquebuses) without flanking maneuvers. In defense it sometimes stays put until targetted.
It's worth noting that missile light cavalry really performs as such in this game, with skirmish orders & keeping distance from the opponent.

All the above were notable games, yet none of them had a particularly challenging AI.

I wont comment on crap like Legion, Lords of Magic or similar, suffice to say that those barely survived a week in my HD.