AI difficulty levels

[deccan]

Just some ideas here, so please don't be offended.

I think that Dom 2 could do worse than pick up the example of what Aaron Hall did with SEIV. In SEIV, higher difficulty levels determine which of the AI's "ministers" are turned on, meaning I suppose which sub-components of the AI responsible for handling a specific thing. At the same time, the player can explicitly choose how much of a production bonus to give to the AI. This handily solves the common problem of players complaining that the AI cheats.

As for making AI opponents smarter, granted that given technological constraints, it would be impossible at the present time to make a truly intelligent AI, but that doesn't mean that it is impossible to make game-playing AIs that "seem" reasonably sneaky and most importantly, "fun" to play against. Making the AI do things semi-randomly seems like a poor way of doing that.

One way to make this work for Dom 2 would be to make the AIs moddable. So a modder might create, say, an nation-specific AI that tries to rush to a particular spell or unit, or builds masses of a certain type of unit at a certain point in the game, in order to achieve a fairly consistent strategy. Of course, once you play against that AI a few times, you're wise to it and can do things that specifically counter it, but the point is to have a lot of different AIs and so increase replayability for SP.

Would take a lot of work though, so maybe for Dom 3.

[Gandalf Parker]

Up to a point that can be done. You can affect the units an AI builds. You can also provide it with specific god, castles, scales, equipment, allies to start with. Specify spells it already knows. Give it a few special starting provinces. Give those provinces specific magic sites already found.

[Arralen]

question on a related topic:
If I turn over a player nation to AI control, which difficulty setting does the AI use? Obviously, it cannot change the pretender or the scales (can it?), but does it get the production bonus from the difficulty level I set on the game startup screen?

Does the AI hamper itself by pretender and scale choice too often?
I experimented with severaly nation design I turned over to AI control after 1..3 turns, and I seems to me that a pre-build nation works much better and more consistently for the AI than most nations it comes up with.

It is especially prone to kill C'tis, Vanheim and Joutmheim off by itself using heavy death scales .. I mean, how far do Niefel Giants Last with death-2, especially as on most maps procinves and therefore supply values are rather small in everage?

[Gandalf Parker]

Standard AI programming: what you cant make smart, make random. If you start out trying to make the AI smart, you make the AI too predictable to be a challenge. If you start out random and work your way backward to smart (by adding code to knock out the worst choices) then its a smoother road.

But yes, there is definetly an advantage to using a .map file or a .dm file to create a computer opponent of some worth. I wish the people who have strong ideas about how the AI should play would do some more of those.

One of the extensions of my "random opponents" project was to collect lots of good castle/pretender/scales/magic settings for Ermor and have it randomly added to the daily generated .map file. And of course working from there to do the same for every other nation. I never got to it but if someone wants to tackle the project (collecting setup files) I will take it to completion and host it in their name

[Arralen]

question on a related topic:
If I turn over a player nation to AI control, which difficulty setting does the AI use? Obviously, it cannot change the pretender or the scales (can it?), but does it get the production bonus from the difficulty level I set on the game startup screen?

Wasn't all that, err, clear here .. at best.
(Better have to turn on preview to re-read what I post)

What I meant was:

If I switch over a player nation to AI, can I control the difficulty level the AI runs at via command line parameters for AI settings?