Single Player Rant

[Arralen]

PvK said:
* Ok, so you've figured out some things the AI does or doesn't do that you can exploit to defeat it. Congratulations on your cleverness. Now, can you be clever enough to realize that if you enjoyed that challenge, you could have another challenge by choosing to not exploit that technique? After all, once you learn that the AI can't do something, using that trick against the AI isn't exactly playing fair, is it?

To me, that's the difference between between "beating the game" and "beating the in-game opponents".

If you play to "beat the game", you're mostly looking for cheesy tactics and strategies which the AI cannot cope with - actually, you're not playing the game against an adversary, but against the game designers: "I'll be able to break you game, because I know now (with some little help from hundreds others players, maybe) more about the game than You during the concept and development stage."

Great. How anyone can expect to have fun with the game after he succeeded doing this once is beyond me ...

And saying the AI is "dumb" is ... dumb.
And not so nice to the developers - if you play "to beat the game", this statement might as well mean "the developers are dumb":
No-ever is able to programm a real AI atm. Not on Suns Computing Grid, not on single S-Cs, surely not on a typical Windoze desktop PC. So what do you expect? Obviously, even the limited scope of the "Dominions World" is too complex for an "AI" to grasp (at least within the constraints what 1 programmer could do in reasonable time) - there must be "holes" in it's understanding of what's going on, therefore ways to exploits and resulting "dumb behaviour".

And I wonder if anyone ever thought about the possiblity that apparently (I mean, really evidently) stupid behaviour of the AI could simply be the result of a bug? But AI bugs resulting in unexpected and/or undesirable behaviour are harder to spot in-game and even harder to track down and correct than bugs which are easily "accessible" from the "player side".

Ok. Here's the (maybe) most prominent example:
"The AI is so **** dumb, it's throwing it's troops piecemeal against my PD again and again".
Means: The devs where so dumb to program that the AI should do that.
Reality is:
- In Dominions (and any other game I know of) there is not real Artifical INTELLIGENCE .. the computer cannot learn. If something goes wrong, he's doomed to try it again and again .. no matter if his enemy thwarted his plans or if things simply didn't work out because of a bug.
- There are bugs with movement in Dom3. Still. Obvisouly, not easy to track down and fix, or Johan would have done that long ago. Why shouldn't the AI be subject to them, and maybe a whole bunch of them which only apply to the AI?
- At times (more often than not), the AI seems to ignore the defenders strength. Thats not only true with PD, but with regular troops as well. Might be a design error, maybe simply a bug. How can you claim to be able to tell?

[Sombre]

I would be interested in this argument were it not so clear from the couple of posts that have already been made that huge assumptions will continue to be made about people who dare criticise any one part of dom3 and hope for improvement.

So I'm staying out of this one.

I guess I'll go back to slandering the devs, or min/max powergaming, or trading the AI thousands of bane venom charms, or building exploitative cookie cutter SCs, or playing 1 turn every 5 minutes 20 province blitz maps, or whatever the hell it is people like me are supposed to do. Heh.

[Gandalf Parker]

Im all for a smarter AI since I play mostly solo.
But I think that many people tend to complain too early. They post about easy AI but apparently have not beaten the AI. Instead they read the posts about how to beat the AI. And many of them havent bothered to try the various means of making the AI harder or at least forcing it to play differently.

Also there is always the final stage. I have laid out various methods for these AI experts to help the devs make the AI better but I havent seen much done along those lines.

I am almost completely a solo player and have played many games. I think that the Dom AI is one of the best AIs I have come across in a game that was not designed for solo play. Its well beyond just a tutorial level. Johan has put quite abit into a side-feature.

But like I said, I wouldnt mind it being better.

[Aleph]

And I can still be regularly beaten by the AI on wrap around maps on the hardest difficulty, so luckily I'm bad enough that I can enjoy the game.

Edit - I like Fate's parallel game comment. I strongly believe that the nations of Dominions aren't balanced with each other... and I'm not sure they're even meant to be or should be. I appreciate the option to pick diversity of game experience over strict balancing, which is an option I enjoy by virtue of selecting SP. Or, I suppose, also an option I would enjoy by virtue of willingness to be obliterated in MP, but I find that less rewarding.

Edit II - I have noticed a trend on this forum (similar to the red sox/yankees competition) between SP/MP players. SP players seen to feel they have to prove their own enjoyment of the game as equally valid with the MP players, while MP players often don't care at all about the SP experience. If you're enjoying what you're doing with the game, good on you.

The more members both sides can be civil and make room for the other on the forum (and I'm not pointing any fingers, at either side), that will also render the discussion about the game enjoyable - and at least for me, forum discussion is an important aspect of enjoying a game, since very few in my immediate social circle like the kind of games I do.

[Evil Dave]

Like a few other people, I still find the hardest AI opponents challenging. I don't have the time to learn to beat it.

But I look at the AI from a different angle: I've written AI. Yup, actual pieces of software to play games (no, none you've heard of). It's not an easy problem, especially as the complexity of the game grows. Dom3's AI doesn't do so badly, actually. While the tactical AI needs spell blacklists (or at least player-selectable hint lists), it's generally pretty clever. The pretender-building code could be improved, tho.

But anybody can eventually beat game "AI" given enough time. Game designers are limited by two things: the processing power of home computers and the lack of machine learning. Your computer has one, maybe up to four, processors in it. Deep Blue, the big chess engine that beat Kasparov, had 32 and 256 special-purpose chess-playing chips.

Good machine learning systems are a pain to write. They also run very slowly. I've seen them run for hours on 16-processor machines while learning how to run factories. While it would be cool if Dom3 could learn to beat humans, I don't think that's gonna happen any time soon.

[Gandalf Parker]

Evil Dave said:
But I look at the AI from a different angle: I've written AI. Yup, actual pieces of software to play games (no, none you've heard of). It's not an easy problem, especially as the complexity of the game grows. Dom3's AI doesn't do so badly, actually. While the tactical AI needs spell blacklists (or at least player-selectable hint lists), it's generally pretty clever. The pretender-building code could be improved, tho.

In the AI forums its often joked about the difference between AI and AH. Doing AI (Artificial Intelligence) is actually fairly easy and common. Writing artificial intelligence is to get it to go from point A to point B by a straight line. Of course for games that would be too predictable and exploitable. AH (Artificially Human) is much harder. The usual AI line of programming would be to start with absolutes and then gradually add randoms. The usual AH line for game opponents is to start with total randoms and then gradually add intelligent absolutes. (its an interesting comment on humanity that you are closer to playing a human if the AI is random instead of smart)

The game actually does have spell blacklists, and weighted choice lists for spells, and a set sequence that it considers them in. If you want to watch the game "think" you can turn on the debug to various levels using a command line switch and direct the output to a file. If one of the expert players wanted to point out a specific change in the weights or sequence then I am sure it would be considered.

The pretender-building code is a problem. Not too bad considering that it was tacked onto the game, and its linear. It does try to make some smart choices buts a single routine for all nations as far as I know. If you dont allow for the possibility of some harmful choices then certain nations will never be able to win. But the player-done SemiRandom project is helping that. If more people will turn in their smarter pretender/scale designs for specific nations then we can get some games available to us that let the AI play much better.

[Evil Dave]

Gandalf,

What I meant was player-controlled blacklists/hint lists. I've watched Dom3 think; that's one reason I think it's a good job. The problem, of course, is that the AI doesn't know what the player is trying to do. It's trying to optimize a situation it doesn't really understand, so it gets it wrong sometimes (like the recent thread on it making archers and mages berserk).

I'd really like a GUI/configuration file to be able to say, "No, please don't cast this spell in this battle." or "Yes, you may use a pearl to cast Power of the Spheres even against weak opponents, but don't use pearls for anything else.". Really, I want that. Double pretty-please with the devs' favorite sweets on top.

[Fate]

I am a player who still loses to hard (not impossible, just hard) AI after a good number of games.

I have to say that I have seen many forums where gamers say that the AI is just too easy, and have almost never been able to consistently beat the AI myself.

I would like to say that I take NO offense when others can beat the AI easily. It is inevitable, especially on the forums, where most of the more advanced and dedicated players go, that this issue will appear. I even appreciate the fact the these players find ways to retain the enjoyment of SP (by giving the AI advantages).

I see it as no slander against the developers that the AI is beatable. In large games which sell millions of copies and have teams of 30+ the AI is still, consistently, easier than advanced MP.

The flip-side is that I think everyone should be treated equally (including the opinions of SP players, who should NOT -!NOT!- "shut up").

In Rise of Nations, one side (Russia) was very unbalanced for advanced players, but it was one of the strongest nations among new players. The developers chose to leave the nation unbalanced for advanced players because any more bonuses would make it too powerful for the new players.


In conclusion, I am OK with advanced player discussing the AI problems they have had, and how to "improve" the AI. I also will admit that many other people know the game better than me. What I do NOT appreciate is being told that ANYONE'S opinion is invalid.