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

DominionsFan · #1 October 31st, 2003, 04:47 PM

Yeap. It seems, that the Dominions 2 AI love to use these worthless units.

Ok they are not worthless, but without good units and monsters, those armies are very very very weak, compared to the elite human armies.

licker · #2 October 31st, 2003, 05:03 PM

I think its hard to tell from the demo how effective the AI is with units. The game settings do make alot of difference. I still think the discussion and suggestions in this thread are valuable, and I wish a dev would deign to let us know how things are currently set up.

I had some time to fool around Last night and I was playing with Indies at 6 or 7 (can't remeber exactly) with all nations on normal or difficult on the bigger map. Anyway, by turn 10 I had expanded or scouted to other nations borders (not surprising as the map was crowded), by turn 15 I had 4 nations declare war on me, though only one was actually adjacent to me. I routinely saw armies of 100+ units moving around though, and I managed to catch Marginon's big force with mine (playing Pythem) I slaughtered them, mostly because I had sent in an assassin who picked off a couple of mages (well inquisitors... you know...) and my Arch Therug with 3 slaves doled out some nastyness...

Anyway, a few turns later I regrouped and reenforced and set seige to their capital. The next turn I had to repell a relief army with 8 summer lions and assorted pikeneers and x-bows. I beat them back, but it wasn't clean... So the AI does seem capeable of using summons, and it will make bigger armies.

Part of the problem some of you are encountering is probably due to not having enough opponents on a too big map. With a cramped map the AI is forced to consolodate more (though it could still probably use some tweeks to the units it recruits). In the next 20 turns of this game it will be interesting to see what the other nations who declared war on me do, 2 more of them now have provinces boarding mine, and if I can't finish of Marg quickly I may have to recall that beseiging army to deal with other threats. All in all this game has been entertaining, at least for the short duration it's Lasted.

Again though, there is alway room for improvement of the AI, I hope that the discussion in this thread is not being ignored

-Storm- · #3 October 31st, 2003, 05:22 PM

I am sure that we are NOT ignored, but IW tends to don't reply usually.

It is all cool, it is good enough, if they are READING our suggestions at least.

I have a very good idea. Well hopefully it is a very good idea.

So we all know about the debug mode, and that we can pass the control to the AI.
What about adding a special debug mode.

Special debug mode:
((
1. make a god
2. set up a game
3. let the AI control our nation
))

-->>
We will be able to see the actions of the AI. That would be awesome. Than, it would be lot easier to post suggestions about the AI. {{Now, after you've gave the control to the AI, the game will quit.}}

What do you think? [I hope that this is possible.]

[ October 31, 2003, 15:26: Message edited by: -Storm- ]

Mortifer · #4 October 31st, 2003, 05:43 PM

Man, that is an excellent idea! If we could see the "moves" made by the AI, after each and every turn....that would help hella lot!
Seriously I love this idea.

licker · #5 October 31st, 2003, 05:50 PM

It is a good suggestion, as would be some form of autoplay, where the Comp would run for a set number of turns and then allow the user to view the contents of every province.

That way you could set different nations to different levels and get a better feel for how well each nation is tuned rather than just watching one nation at a time.

MStavros · #6 October 31st, 2003, 06:30 PM

Indeed. Good suggestion.

HJ · #7 October 31st, 2003, 07:31 PM

And the suggestion about special debug mode is also very useful for trying out/balancing mods.

In any case, yesterday I was playing iron faith Ulm with 5 normal AI opponents, indies on 5, and I've encountered several big armies. On turn 39 Mictlan showed up on my border with an army of 280 men. I know they are not of the highest quality, but still, it's decent size force. Btw, I'm not suggesting that the strategical AI need not be improved (the AI can never be improved enough).

What I found, and I don't know whether other people have noticed as well, is that the AI is constantly moving its armies back and forth in the border provinces. So, if you want to take the province, order an attack when there is an army present - it will leave, and you'll take the province undefended. If you want to wipe out the army instead, attack when the province is empty. And this is almost exclusively the case as far as I was able to see - armies never stay in place on borders to defend them or move unpredictably, they keep on pacing and exploiting is easy because of this. I don't know what's the reason for this behaviour(maybe they are running out of supplies in the border province or something), but it's very predictable, and a possible target for improvement.