Dominions III Artificial Intelligence

[Unknown_Enemy]

Johan K said:
Hi Cherry!

At the risk of being unpopular, there won't being any support for programming your own AI in Dominions III. It would be much work to do and believe almost no one would take advantage of that possibility anyway. If there will be a way to influence the AI it will be mod settings that are easy to fiddle around with.

A hasty jugement.
Look at space empire 4 ! Score of players fiddled with AI, improving score of them to the point where none of the ingame AI could handle the heat from the customs one.

There has even been AI contests where all customs AI battled each others just to decide who's the best.

Too bad we'll can't have that on Dom3.

[Valandil]

Interestingly, the P=NP? problem will likely never be solved. The basic stucture of it is such that any proof will probably be unconstructive, i.e, it either is untrue, or it is impossible to proove whether it is right or not. The main problem in understanding this is that NP is NOT the same as non-P. a problem is NP if you can determine whether a proposed solution IS a solution in polynomial time. If someone could find an NP complete problem (that is one that if solved in polynomial time demonstrates that all NP can be)and solve it. the trouble is, if we find just 1 NP complete that is P, we have proved it, but no number of NP that do not =P will disprove it. The SAT gate of boolean computation is a very simple NP complete problem. If Illwinter can solve this, I, on behalf of all mathematicians from Euclid to the present, thank them.

But it won't happen. A minesweeper SAT gate would require all the computing power illwinter has at its disposal. Dominions3 would be impossible.

An'ya i Suotho,
Valandil

[Ironhawk]

Flashbacks of my CS training...

Why are you doing this to me!!!

[Evil Dave]

Saber Cherry said:

The Johans and Ostermans of the world are already doing their part in improving Dominions’ graphics, interface, balance, variety, mechanics, and who knows what else. However, they are primarily a 3-ish person, part-time team – trying to make the best strategy game ever. A lot of the coding problems are (probably) NP-hard, like ideal unit-mix recruitment, battle spell selection and order, site-searching order, and battle target-selection.

I think it's worse than NP-hard. It's either AI-hard (you can't program it because you can't specify the problem well enough, a common problem in Artificial Intelligence) or "NI-hard" -- you can't program it because even natural intelligences (people) can't think of algorithms to solve it. NI-hard problems make for good games, for some reason.

I agree, tho, that heuristics, approximations, and pre-computed answers (look-up tables) will help a lot. They're used heavily in industry, and they solve a lot of practical problems that are formally NP-hard. I work on stuff like that.

In my opinion: many of the issues with exploits, balance, and micromanagement are really symptoms of AI and related algorithms, and will not improve significantly with any amount of effort into UI design, data balancing, or even game-mechanic changes.

I think this is another case where I think it's worse than you think. I think there's a mismatch between the options the player wants for tactical combat and the tools the game provides for them.

There was a game called Deadlock that did much better. The details aren't that important, 'cept that that it was a strategy game where the tactical combat took place on the "province" maps, so in addition to attacking enemy units, troops could attack province buildings directly. Units were ordered around by simple pop-up menus, with choices like "(Attack|Protect) (Kind of unit|kind of building) until unit casualies = X%." That worked really well, because players really wanted to attack or defend buildings, but enemy units got in the way.

In Dom2, tho, what we really want to is give orders like "skirmishers harass enemy national heavy troops until lightly damaged, and then break off" or "high-path mages cast big buffs on friendly SCs, then blast enemy SCs until killed", but neither the UI nor the AI is geared toward this.

As such – and bearing in mind that I do not speak for Illwinter, or with any authority, for that matter – would anyone in the forums be willing and able to engage in code-modding, if Illwinter was so benevolent as to make it a possibility?

Ooo! Me! Me!me!me! I can't talk much about my paying work, but you can get an idea what I do and enjoy by looking up early MechMania contests (programming game AIs over a long weekend). You'll note that the first few contests were dominated by a small number of teams from the same schools. I was on one of them. We stopped dominating only 'cause the organizers politely asked us to stay away.

Would anyone else utilize deep code-modding capabilities if they were available? Bear in mind that answering “Yes” when you mean “Maybe” or "Yes I want other people to do this, but I won't" might possibly divert Illwinter’s attention away from more important matters.

Oh, yeah! If nothing else, it would make it much easier to test strategy and tatics w/o having to hack the save files to get the "right" scenario set up.

[Gandalf Parker]

In DomII there was no support for AI programming but I was still able to setup alot of variations and scenarios. Boosted starts for AIs, extra castles, alliances, hatreds, boosted gods, no gods, extra aggressive, less aggressive capable, extra equipment, and on and on and on. And then of course, randomized variants of all of it.

So even if AI programming isnt specifically supported, you can expect more capabilities along those lines. And you can expect me to jump right into it.

But just for the record I also vote that I would like for the game to have scripting hooks put in for 3rd party bot writing. And I also agree that Space Empires 3 (which I consider to be one of the very few peers to Dominions 2) is a great example of what benefits can happen by allowing player improvements in things like AI.

Gandalf Parker

[Arralen]

Some remarks:

- Cherry first idea was about writing an external or scripting the internal Battle AI, to fix lots of its current shortcomings over a long time of evolvement. Sadly, this will never happen, because the DOM engine does not support that at all, and illwinter is not going to re-code everything from scratch.

- In SE4 (not 3, Gandalf!), there's no way to write own AI code or script "new" behaviour. There are lots of parameters one can set in a mod, though, to drastically alter the weighting in its decision making process.

- If I understand Johan correctly, this is the best we can hope for with DOM3 as well.

[curtadams]

For turn-level AI, the only thing the Dom3 team need do is publish the client file descriptions. That is very little work. We can do the rest.

Security requires that the only thing coming from the clients back to the servers is orders and that the only thing coming from the servers to the clients is nation-specific info. This has to be done even if the client flie descriptions aren't published. Obfuscated files or not, Norfleet just demonstrates what every security professional will say, which is that concealment doesn't give usable security. Once that's done, you can't hack Dom3 from the client files, period.

Making the server recognize only orders from the client is trivial if it's not already done that way. You can sync order creation and check by having both run off a "doableBy(Commander commander)" method in the Order interface/abstract class. Item transfers and the gem/money spinners would need to be implemented as orders rather than as operations on the world model but that's easy if not already done.

Having the client (player's) view of the world operate from a representation of their knowledge of the world rather than the actual world model is not trivial but worth the effort even if not already done. Actually, even thinking about doing it the other way makes my head hurt - that would be WAY harder.

[Arralen]

@curt : As I said above ...

@Johan K. : What do you think about releasing info 'bout the file formats to the public ?
And what about releasing the info to trustworthy members of the community only, who are willing to sign a NDA ?

[Ballbarian]

At the risk of being unpopular, there won't being any support for programming your own AI in Dominions III. It would be much work to do and believe almost no one would take advantage of that possibility anyway.

I just wanted to point out that entire communities have evolved around games with AI scripting. I am a member of one such community:
http://aiscripters.com/

Please don't take this as meaning that I don't appreciate dominions in it's current state, I just look at AI scripting/modification being included as an opportunity to erase every other game from my hard drive. I think there are plenty of people who would take advantage of this feature if it were available.

[Gandalf Parker]

Interesting. I joined a number of map-making communities back when I was working on turning the Dom2 maps into semi-AI variations. None of them proved helpful.

Lets hope that the Dom3 AI has some improvements.