Mighty Ai

Ygorl · #1 March 14th, 2007, 03:11 AM

I believe that levels higher than Normal simply get more design points at the beginning of the game - no improvement to AI (and I don't think they get bonuses to gold or gems or resources in-game, except from the good scales that they can afford and sometimes happen to take). So creating a nation and then setting it to AI control would be essentially fighting Normal opponents who have the advantage of non-random pretender design. Of course there are plenty of other ways to handicap yourself, some mentioned here already.
Xietor, the developers do read these forums, though not as much as some other people. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for official features that could be implemented as mods; improved AI is always appreciated, of course, and may or may not happen, but most of the suggestions here you can do yourself with little effort.

It *would* be interesting to be able to mod the design points that different difficulty levels give you... Even a half-blind lobotomized AI could probably do pretty well with perfect scales and a quadruple bless... Yeowch, that's scary just to think of!

Sombre · #2 March 14th, 2007, 03:17 AM

They do get bonuses beyond pretender points - it was covered in another thread on the AI (there have been several). The benefit of a non-random pretender design is of little use compared to the bonuses they get at Impossible. The AI will still research at random, use troops at random, never follow a coherent bless strategy etc. So giving them your idea of a good pretender setup is less likely to increase their difficulty than just throwing bonuses at them.

People ask for a lot of features that can be contained within mods or even already are - just look at some of the nation requests. Improved core AI is not something that can be modded. Giving 'cheating' bonuses to the AI is entirely possible to mod, as has been discussed in the mod forum.

Xietor · #3 March 14th, 2007, 11:04 AM

Modding is good, but the "official" game should not rely on the players to improve their base product. If simple steps can be taken to improve the AI, it should come as a patch, not as a mod by a player that 1 percent of the player base will download and use.

Nick_K · #4 March 14th, 2007, 01:00 PM

I believe you can setup pretenders in map files, although I've never tried anything like it. Presumably high-difficulty AIs with custom pretencders could be created that way. I still think that giving the human a bad setup might be easier though.

Improvements to the AI would be quite nice. Second to UI improvements IMO, but still quite important. We did see a big jump from doms2 to doms3. The AI is far more effective now.
AI coding is notoriously difficult for complex games and there are generally complaints about AIs for most strategy games. Things that seem obvious to a human can be very difficult to implement without adding new weaknesses for the computer player. There are very few games indeed which actually improve the AI at higher difficulty levels - unless the AI has been deliberately handicapped at lower ones (for instance, in HOMM4 the easy AI cannot use the 'wait' command in battles). Giving them bonuses and occasionally tweaks to aggression seem to be the way things are usually done. I wouldn't complain about the AI 'cheating'... anyway, it's hardly cheating if the human player has specifically requested a harder opponent.

I'd quite like to see some scenario-type map files that can challenge a human player... but most map files are quite large and I dislike playing anything much over 100 provinces so they probably wouldn't be for me.

Graeme Dice · #5 March 14th, 2007, 07:09 PM

Quote:

Ygorl said:
I believe that levels higher than Normal simply get more design points at the beginning of the game - no improvement to AI (and I don't think they get bonuses to gold or gems or resources in-game, except from the good scales that they can afford and sometimes happen to take).

The impossible AI has double the resources and gold of the normal AI (or a human).

Ygorl · #6 March 15th, 2007, 03:34 AM

I've got so much still to learn... Thanks for educating me. With such resources, and however many design points you get on Impossible, you could be truly brutal. Makes me even more eager to be able to see the .trn and .2h formats, so as to experiment with new AIs...

wailoktam · #7 March 17th, 2007, 10:16 PM

I have played quite a lot of impoosible AI games. It is challenging in the beginning with all those resources. It is still challenging when the top AI has an army doubles your size. My expensive SCs can get killed by armies of a few hundred units with fire arrows or some mages using special spells. It may be a matter of chance though. The challenge quickly disappears after you catch up with the army size. The AI can no longer mass archers and mix high level mages with hundreds of units. Getting the AI to fight SC more efficiently in the mid game seems to be the key to make it a bigger challenge.

Xietor · #8 March 17th, 2007, 11:57 PM

I am playing a game on difficult, 275 provinces all the races, with my MA Pangaea/gorgon, against an experienced friend playing pythium. I smell some wrath of god coming soon, and i have no way to dispel it.

I had micitans main castle on about turn 12. It seems like the turns are taking 4-5 minutes to process(: Ulm put up more of a fight, but they are not long for the game. My friend, though, according to the score graph, is having his share of troubles with vanaheim. heh.