Artificial stupidity

Folket · #1 August 5th, 2006, 10:06 AM

He means that the mages will be able to cast mind burn when the enemy is runing away becuase of the range, so your mages will not default to stay behind troops as they do when they can't cast any useful spell.

Arralen · #2 August 5th, 2006, 04:49 PM

.. make that "can't cast any spell". They will cast even the most unuseful spell before they start moving.

Btw. - to correct this whole issue is obviously not trivial, or the devs would have done that long before.

There's no 'do nothing order' - even commanders set to "stay behind troops" wiggle about a bit each turn. So a mage who cannot cast any spell (no matter who silly it may be) can't simply stand still for one turn - he has to move and defaults to "stay behind rearmost" because of this.

Folket · #3 August 6th, 2006, 08:51 AM

Are you sure a fire mage being out of range will cast fireflies after the opponent?

Arralen · #4 August 6th, 2006, 09:38 AM

Nope. He can't cast any spell, because he has no target in range to cast fireflies at. Dunno where I should have said otherwise.

He will cast at a single inf unit at max range despite the to-hit chance must be around 0.1%, though.

Likewise, he'll cast any other spell that has a target that is in range - preferably buffs spells, because those have range "self" or "1".

Only if he runs totally out of castable spells he'll start to move.

Agrajag · #5 August 6th, 2006, 04:27 PM

Here's what I want to know, how come everytime someone remarks that an AI is stupid he says Artificial Stupidity in mock of Artificial Intelligence. Why not Genuine Stupidity which is a much more fitting title. (IE the AI is genuinely stupid)

Wick · #6 August 6th, 2006, 07:09 PM

Because computers are stupid but for idiocy on a grand scale you need a human. ;-)

Gandalf Parker · #7 August 7th, 2006, 10:30 AM

Actually neither term should be used. Artificial Intelligence isnt all that hard and has been done often. Its a common topic in the AI work groups. In those groups they joke about AI always meaning almost implemented because anytime an AI project is completed it stops being referred to as AI. Like diagnosis software, or autopilot, or streetlight management. All were AI projects until they were done.

What the players want is artificially human. As just one example... artificial intelligence would use a straight line. It takes a artificially human would sneak around behind or do a flanking attack. Or better yet to randomly select between them, sometimes when its even a bad idea but might be a surprise.

What programmers, especially game programmers have learned is that the closer you get to AH the more random gets worked in. So its often a shorter project that instead of starting with intelligent then gradually add more randoms, AH is often best achieved by starting with it being random then making it gradually more intelligent.
Just FYI trivia