Was going to buy the game and then!

[Gargoyle]

There is no purpose to worrying about Declarations of War! Who cares. The objective is to eliminate ALL other pretenders anyway. You are effectively at war with all of them on turn one. Do you declare war on them? No. You just go about taking there land!

As for artillery spells, do you know for sure the AI isn't sending hiding units out to your domain to fire them? And if it can be explained in this manor it could be looked at a an exceptable AI cheat.

[Saarud]

Don't trash SP completely. I know that most active people on this board prolly play more MP than SP. But I bet the majority of those buying the game probably play more SP than MP. I am one of those. Even if you would be able to be in 3 stances with other nation (Allied, Neutral or War) I think that would be a major addition.

[Gargoyle]

In responce to the initial subject- "Was going to buy the game and then!"

Every game I buy has major AI problems. Hearts of Iron 2, Rome: Total War, World at War, Battles in Normandy, etc.

I would say the Dominions 2 probably has the most competitive and realistic AI of any game I've played. Is it perfect, no, but neihter are humans.

[Nerfix]

I think that the lack of diplomacy will scare a lot of players away but such features are propably tertiary concerns to the devs. Such a small team propably has to set some strick paths when adding new features...

I think the AI is a bit lacking - programming it to use the same exploits/"exploits" as humans use would make it a lot better.

[Gargoyle]

Nerfix said:

I think the AI is a bit lacking - programming it to use the same exploits/"exploits" as humans use would make it a lot better.

Well in SP I don't use exploits. I just follow sound strategy. But sound strategy may be what the AI will never be able to do.

[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 ...

[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.