Targeting efficiency

[Potatoman]

For the T ignorant among you:
Mr. T vs Everything

Enough of this Jibba Jabba! All you forum foo's are crazier than Murdoch!

[LordArioch]

Wow...a thread with programming humor from saber cherry and a mister T reference!

Honestly I think the Dominions 1 AI was pretty good and difficult for anyone who wasn't a master player. The main things I noticed human players have over it are advantages due to things dominions 2 is fixing...namely elemental abuse and patrolling.

Tatical AI was good too...it's just everyone notices it's failings because it's controlling their units as well as the enemies. Although an improvement in not shooting the one militia in the middle of your army would be nice...but it sounds like that's been worked on.

[Taqwus]

*shrug*

And as for pre-game scripting, that mostly works when the situation tends to be fairly predictable.

For instance, RTSes generally have far more limited possibilities. "Tech trees" or their equivalents tend to be small, unit choices can be constrained by lack of resources or even artificial limits (e.g. "you're not allowed to build that building this level"), and so forth. In addition, many of the popular ones such as the *craft series start the player with a very, very small force and the AI with a significant base already built up -- and having a pre-built base limits what the AI needs to consider. Then, it may have scenario-specific instructions, e.g. in a "survive for XX minutes" scenario the AI may be told to attack in waves of certain sizes or at a given time.

Taken to the extreme, a strategy game gets turned into a puzzle game; the AI isn't so much factor as the decisions that the level designer made before the game was ever started.

Dominions is far, far more varied. The number of units is huge; combinations of units can get pretty strange courtesy of the independents and the charming/enslaving spells; and the magical spells and items can significantly alter things. Even if one had decent strategic scripts written beforehand, tactics and events may quickly render them meaningless... because you can't prepare optimally for everything. One might face an early war with cheap units; one might have to deal with hordes of mindless undead; one might face assassination, or magical assaults, or disease warfare. Perhaps an enemy has a heavily-decked out combat leader; perhaps he has a rainbow mage. Maybe he's going for weak hordes, maybe stronger elite units. Perhaps he's bringing bows, or perhaps he's invoking storms again to limit bows. Maybe an army's planning to siege you out; maybe that castle the AI wants to siege has vast numbers of ghouls in it so sieging isn't too practical. A human player brings out the Ark and blinds half your army; how does that change things? Or he's got an immortal commander casting Summon Lammashastas, or summoning other nasties and then magically leaving the battle?

Is it the mage that's the threat, or would it be easier to take out the communicants? Or is one of the mage's constructs or some tough combatant a bigger threat? Send units to fight the toughie with the damage shield and wraith sword, or merely try to hold him off and send the bulk against the rest of the enemy? Heck, even deciding whether to burn gems can be tricky, when you're attacking an enemy province without a lab so you might be caught short in a counterattack.

You've got fliers, and the enemy has a strong flier. Try to ground everyone? How to decide? Ditto for bowmen, et al. Super combatant versus super? Are those militia advancing numerous enough to merit attention, or no? The enemy's using mindless units; fight them, or find a way to kill the leaders?

It's an enormously complicated game, and it doesn't have the advantage of drastically constraining the problem space. In addition, hand-eye coordination doesn't matter, so the game can't rely on old stand-byes like insanely good speed-of-light reflexes ala AI Paladins in WC2 healing each other constantly during battle. And learning approaches will be hard, too; even saying something like "learn from what just happened" is difficult, because it needs to grok "why". And that why may be pretty subtle, or go back a considerable number of turns, or involve a diverse set of factors ranging from research to greater gem supply to even dumb luck -- e.g. getting lucky and killing an enemy supercombatant when it botches its MR check, or simply getting outlandish results from open-ended dice. Factor in hidden information and the large number of players involved, and it's a bit surprising that it can do much at all. There's so much stuff that can happen that planning can't be easy, nor would learning.

[DominionsFan]

Taqwus, why the heck are you writing stories? LOL.

Can't you complain in 1 sentence?!
So in your opinion the Dominions I. AI was good enough?
Please reply with a yes/no.

[ October 15, 2003, 08:40: Message edited by: DominionsFAN ]

[Wendigo]

Originally posted by HJ:
I said "as far as the AIs go", not when compared to Napoleon or Alexander the Great. Very few games have anything comparable to TW AI. The AI is exploitable, for sure, but it can perform really well. If you see another game with the AI that can perform flanking and combined arms attacks, let me know.

This is strange, it sounds as if we were talking of different games. I have never seen the TW AI perform a flanking maneuver (although it indeed answers your own flanking atempts by rearanging its army formation). In my experience (in the highest lv in STW, and one of the higher if not the highest in MTW) the AI will just charge forward its melee units to engage the nearest enemy unit & fire with skirmish or hold orders with its missile units. That can hardly be considered 'combined arms attacks', when it basically ignores its own rock-scissor-paper rules in its offensive.

Frankly, it's anything but bright. If it tried to at least engage your cavalry with its spears, maneuver for a flank charge, try to gain the higher ground...but it doesn't do anything like this. Its only notable doings are the skirmish script for missile units and the army formations that at least keep some order before they break & the mounted troops rush forward leaving the infantry behind.

And all the calculations are done in real time. (I'm not a RTS fan, I'm just saying why it isn't comparable). And what other variables might those be, btw? I mean, since there is no terrain, no formations, no charge bonuses, no accurate targeting?.

Some other poster expanded on this, but basically in my little knowledge of AI scripting I find it easier to write some glorified IF-THEN conditionals to account for:
a couple dozen units x 3 different facings x 3 or so different terrains x higher/lower ground x a handful of different formations in order to decide whether to charge, fall back or maneuver for a better postion. Maybe add a couple more conditionals for morale & experience.

In Dominions however said conditionals would have to acount for _many hundred units_ ^ modified by many hundred spells (note that multiple spells can affect the same unit, thus we have an exponitial increase in posibilities here)^ magic items x morale, experience, afflictions, HoF bonuses, dominion bonuses, starvation.... see the difference?

Even with TW being RT handling a few thousand triggers (or maybe only a few hundred, as units can be grouped into similar types that would act the same 90% of the time) should be doable for any modern computer.

They are not supposed to be simultaneous, and they are not. You take this into acount when making moves that it's IGO-UGO (sort of), and not simultaneous.

Just curious, is this a guess or a deduction you made from MP experience? And what game does it refers to? I ask so because this issue raised many complaints with STW, but I do not recall the same feeling from MTW, so I have to wonder if it was changed.

I also liked them because of all those things, but I also find them to put up a decent challenge. More so than vast majority of other games. Since you're talking about Shogun, may I suggest trying out MTW if you can find it on sale

Thks for the sugestion, already got it. While I enjoyed both installments I guess I must differ regarding the challenge, for the reasons stated above.

[ October 15, 2003, 11:39: Message edited by: Wendigo ]

[Richard]

Originally posted by Maelstorm:
Reading Johan Osterman's reply.....I had a feeling that the Dominions 2. AI will suck balls once again.

On the old shrapnel's Dom 2. site there was a sentence that Doms 2. will have a very good AI.
On the new site this info cannot be found.

I think that Shrapnel realized that the AI will suck, so they removed that sentence, because lying is not wise for a publisher.

I tell you, that one of the most imprtant thing is the AI in a strategy game, if the game is not a MMORPG. You should think about this.

This is ridiculous. When we moved sites all of the product page write-ups were re-written by a new employee. It is entirely possible he missed the AI line. It has nothing to do with the quality of the AI in the game.

[DominionsFan]

Well, I think it is pointless to post about the AI right now, let us wait for the demo first.
We can complain than, if we want.