2 AI Questions

[Sombre]

Yeah, should work fine with it. CBM doesn't really move IDs around or anything, just tweaks stuff.

[Arralen]

Yeah, I've asked for AI improvements for quite some time, and offered some hints, tests and further help, but I gave up on that some time ago, when I realised 2 things:

The AI is broken by (its) design.
Though there have been some minor improvements, in general it still does not really have "a plan", but mills around randomly from turn to turn (that's why you see those suicide attacks). This is because it grew from being a very simple ruleset for moving pieces of a very simple game: The first "Dominions" iteration had only a handful of nations, and no "specials", so it was basically grunts only. From PPP to Dom2 to Dom3 literally thousands of "specials" have been added to the game, but the scope of additional "if-then" clauses you could cramp into the AI turn generation is limited - and while it was sufficient to look at the available armies each turn and roll a dice to see into which of the neighbouring provinces they'll go, very obviously this cannot really work with move-3 units, flyers, stealth, teleport etc etc any more. Basically, the "understanding" the AI has of the game came to a standstill somewhen "around" DomPPP, while tons of features got added along the way.

There's no way any kind of "external" AI (help) can be implemented
.. simply because turn files/generation is closely interwoven with the copy protection scheme and cheat protection. It is simply not possible to read & write turn files with an external application (otherwise one could write an "automated player" which would appear to the server as a regular human player). Likewise, in-memory manipulation of the server, to alter the between-turn AI routines, wouldn't work either.
Best bet would be some kind of "API" that lets your dom3.exe itself dump the info, and read a turn script to make a turn file from it. But that would be a major code addition, and therefore will never happen - even small GUI changes won't be made, and that project would be several magnitudes bigger ...

So, to me the whole subject "Dominions 2.5" is pretty much over for quite some time now, because SP plain sucks, and I don't always have 8 friends around to play with, and I don't like either playing with 2 players + AI (or head-to-head), nor the fast paced blitz games which focus more on squeezing everything out of an unbalanced game and its poor engine, then strategic decisions.

Oh, before you ask (me) ... ask google for "Fall from Heaven 2".

cu there

[Loren]

Originally Posted by Arralen

There's no way any kind of "external" AI (help) can be implemented
.. simply because turn files/generation is closely interwoven with the copy protection scheme and cheat protection. It is simply not possible to read & write turn files with an external application (otherwise one could write an "automated player" which would appear to the server as a regular human player).

And this would be so bad how?? It's not like it's a game where the AI can outperform a human!

Likewise, in-memory manipulation of the server, to alter the between-turn AI routines, wouldn't work either.
Best bet would be some kind of "API" that lets your dom3.exe itself dump the info, and read a turn script to make a turn file from it. But that would be a major code addition, and therefore will never happen - even small GUI changes won't be made, and that project would be several magnitudes bigger ...

While it's not trivial it would not need to be at all hard to implement. All that needs to be added is the name of the file to be called to process the turn--a separate setting for each race so you can have multiple AIs in the game.

We already have virtually everything we need to do this--the needed files are already being exported and it can already read an import file with the orders in it.

I would *NOT* expect them to write an AI for it.

The only issue I see is how to do this without leaving a hole in the copy protection.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Loren

And this would be so bad how?? It's not like it's a game where the AI can outperform a human!

He wasn't saying it was bad, he was saying Y isn't possible because of X, otherwise Y would be possible.

NOT:

Y isn't possible because of X, which is a measure put in place to stop Z from happening (oh noes! Z!!!)