What is really new?

NTJedi · #1 September 18th, 2006, 08:27 PM

Quote:

DominionsFan said:
I don't think that there is a way to prevent human players to exploit a diplo AI.
The human player can always send gold/resources or whatever to the AI player to raise the relations with him. This is what happening in all games. Game developers cannot exclude this mechanism. If there wouldn't be something like "sending gifts" the whole diplomacy system would be pointless, hence you couldn't improve the relations with the AI. Well maybe in some special way, like offering some of your troops to a specific AI player when it is at war with an other AI or something like that.

Well actually the developers only need to include a formula which evaluates the total value of the gift in comparison to the AI opponents total power/value/attitude. If the gift does not add a worthy percentage increase to the AIs kingdoms power/resources/value then the gift has no value or even possibly viewed as an insult for being so small. The higher the game difficulty the higher the percentage. For example if a small country consisting of 3 islands sent an ambassador to the Mexico and offered a basket of fruit as a gift... the ambassador probably wouldn't even make it past the government guards.

Sindai · #2 September 18th, 2006, 08:41 PM

I'm 100% sure several games already do that. GalCiv certainly does. Developers aren't stupid. If you can come up with a solution in the time it takes to write a forum post you can be sure they thought of it ages ago.

The real problem with diplomatic AI is that it is usually incapable of betrayal. If it is then you have the nontrivial task of making it smart enough to betray the player only when it's logical. If it's not done cleverly and communicated to the user it will only cause players to complain about the AI being "random" and "attacking for no reason."

I think Dominions does fine as a pure wargame. It's not impossible to rationalize diplomatic AI if you change the story just a bit, though. Instead of a single supreme throne the pretenders could just be agreeing to ascend as a pantheon.