Dominions 2. AI. Suggestions, that how to fix it.

licker · #1 October 30th, 2003, 05:37 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by ywl:
A scripting language which can handle the game situation is nice on paper. But it's a tremendous task - that's why I put a on my comment. So, unless the developers say that they're willing to work on it, or somebody could send them a language spec and preferrable a compiler, it'll be more or less remain just an idea.

It might be fun and easy enough to give the AI different preference to exploration, conquering, etc. But that will only change the weakpoint AI in strategy to something else . It wouldn't really solve the major issue here.

Overall, I don't think it's even realistic to expect an AI can play such a complicated game well. But some simple fixes should be able to make the AI more challenging - and we have proposed some.

It would change the AI weakpoint to what exactly? Certainly if you think the AI is weak in many areas, improving some of them is worthwhile, it doesn't make the unimproved areas any weaker, other than on a reletive scale.

The easist thing to fix in the strategic AI is probably the unit balance within a nation. I would guess that if that were fixed (or made moddible to let the modders play around with it) other defiencies would be less obvious since the main hanicap of not fielding competative armies would be gone.

I'm sure it's a deeper issue than we touch on though, only the Devs can tell us what is realistically possible. We are just presenting different ways to look at the problem. (I hope

)

Mortifer · #2 October 30th, 2003, 07:13 PM

Well if you ask me, separating various AI scripts sounds very good, however it would work? I have no idea, I am not an AI scripter.
The devs will know that this is a good idea or not.

Once again, the first and biggest problems are that the AI tends to use weak or mediocre units, also bigger AI armies are very rare. (in the demo)

I have a question: the AI is casting rituals in a proper way? IE. Is it summoning creatures and enlist them in his armies? Perhaps Beta testers could answer this?
(I barely saw summoned creatures in the AI armies in the demo)

-Storm- · #3 October 30th, 2003, 09:55 PM

Hey, maybe JK should comment these AI suggestions. He coded the AI...

licker · #4 October 30th, 2003, 10:21 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by -Storm-:
Hey, maybe JK should comment these AI suggestions. He coded the AI...

Yep it would be nice for a Dev to step into this thread and give some reaction. Though depending on how much of the AI is hardcoded it may be difficult to really effect the types of changes suggested here...

MythicalMino · #5 October 30th, 2003, 11:07 PM

ok, here is a report on my current game...

Playing the Aran map, Indeps set to 4 strength. 5 other AI's, 3 Easy, 2 Normal...I am playing as C'tis (Miasma theme)

Caelum just attacked me with about 30 troops...the make up of the troops:

Wingless (had several of these)
Blizzard Warriors (Several of these)
Spine Horn Warriors (had several of these also)
1 Wyvern
Seraphine
Caelian Infantry
1 Temple Guard
also, they were attacking with their Prophet

In another border province, they have about 20 troops, mostly made up of Spire Warriors, and they have a Wyvern there also.

On my other border, Michtlan is making their move i think, against me:

110 Troop army:

made up of Warriors, Slaves, Sun Warriors and several Fiends of Darkness

They are placed as 4th place in Army Size. 3 other AI are ahead of them. Michtlin is a Normal AI, Caelum is easy AI.

Anyways, there is my report for this game....what i have seen so far....I have come across several times 20+ armies on my borders, but they pull their troops elsewhere...possibly to fight on another border with another nation? IT would seem....cause the AI's are losing/gaining provinces quite a bit...

Gandalf Parker · #6 October 30th, 2003, 11:17 PM

Quote:

originally posted by licker
I don't see why this wouldn't work for Dom as well. You'd have a list of commander types (maybe also broken down into magic types for different mages) and a list of unit types (classes rather than specific units so indies fit in). Then a weight is assigned to each type, a crude example for just infantry could be:
LI: 25%
MI: 50%
HI: 25%
So the AI would look at its current army and see that it had only 10% LI, then it would build more LI to get the ratios set. Something like that should be made external so that modders can tweek away to their hearts content. In fact you can use lists like that to control many aspects of AI choices, you can do it for magic, artificing, recruiting, summoning, ... and have master matricies to control the embedded ones...

Seems simple and workable. On the other hand, lets pick one race and try to write it all out. Ulm should be simplest. It has a cheap and expensive Version of each of its units which is nice. But I suspect that anything we come up with to "fix" this will amount to fixing it for the indep 2 games people are playing (fast player conflict) and will need fixing again for 4, 6, 8. Then for levels of magic research, and levels of resources, etc. Im thinking that this level of "thinking" might end up being equal in size to the game now (Ive run into this problem before).

Gandalf Parker · #7 October 30th, 2003, 11:23 PM

originally posted by cbeller

Quote:

Anyways, there is my report for this game....what i have seen so far....I have come across several times 20+ armies on my borders, but they pull their troops elsewhere...possibly to fight on another border with another nation? IT would seem....cause the AI's are losing/gaining provinces quite a bit...

Ive seen that. Im just guessing but it might be a simple way of providing some "smarts" to the AI. He moves the big army around inside his borders. If he kept it still Id be able to plan better. And many times Ive moved on a province of his that I thought was clear only to meet his big army head on.

It would probably work better if he had more armies, a variety. Maybe kept up with the number of provinces he had such as armies=provinces/5