AI nation skills

Zeldor · #1 October 23rd, 2007, 07:49 AM

I am sure there are simple solutions to improve AI skill and it wouldn't be so much work to do, for example:

- make AI choose scales and pretenders somewhat wisely
- make AI recognize geographically strategic provinces
- stop AI from using extremely stupid ideas like hordes of indies with C'tis miasma

Wikd Thots · #2 October 23rd, 2007, 10:54 AM

Quote:

Zeldor said:
I am sure there are simple solutions to improve AI skill and it wouldn't be so much work to do, for example:

- make AI choose scales and pretenders somewhat wisely
- make AI recognize geographically strategic provinces
- stop AI from using extremely stupid ideas like hordes of indies with C'tis miasma

the first item we can already do ourselves with maps and mods

the second thing needs more defining. Some people would say "build a castle in a choke point then dont take the neighboring provinces" but others would say "stupid AI built a castle on a chokepoint that only had 3 neighbors"

last item is out completely. There is only one AI and it builds its armies the same for all nations. The thinking must be something like "build x infantry, build x archers, build x mounted, build 1 commander or mage". And now you want "unless you are ctis with miasma then build". But then we end up with lots of "unless you are" all through the code. That would be a lot of work. And it would really slow the game down for solo playing

Zeldor · #3 October 23rd, 2007, 12:44 PM

Wikd Thots:

Point 1 would be really easy to implement. At least scales.

Pint 3 is indeed very complicated, but it should be like that

Human plays every nation in different way and so should AI. I should have gone to cognitive science so I could help with that...

Folket · #4 October 23rd, 2007, 09:02 PM

Zeldor, since you have an intimite understanding of how strong the different nations are when played by the AI why not just adjust difficult for the nations accordingly. Perhaps increase difficulty for Bandar Log and Caelum. Or decrease difficulty for Ermor and Pangaea.

If you want different nations to get strong in each game without before hand knowledge you may put three AIs to higher difficult and all with random nations.

Zeldor · #5 October 23rd, 2007, 10:09 PM

Folket:

That's what I plan to do next time, but I would prefer not to use tricks like that. And choosing higher difficulty does not make AI make wiser choices with scales and so on.

Sombre · #6 October 23rd, 2007, 10:53 PM

Well you can start them as a human player, choose appropriate scales and then turn them over to AI. But I'm pretty sure the impossible AI is always stronger, because it gets a huge bonus to pretty much everything.

NTJedi · #7 October 23rd, 2007, 11:36 PM

Quote:

Zeldor said:
Folket:

That's what I plan to do next time, but I would prefer not to use tricks like that. And choosing higher difficulty does not make AI make wiser choices with scales and so on.

That's why I use map edit commands to provide the AI with strong scales, strong blessings, Mighty/Impossible difficutly setting and pretenders it won't blindly send into the death match arena.
Much more powerful results than starting a nation as human then switching to AI.

Folket · #8 October 25th, 2007, 06:07 AM

Well, I find that it is not as fun when you know what you are up against.

Wikd Thots · #9 October 25th, 2007, 12:50 PM

Quote:

Zeldor said:
Wikd Thots:

Point 1 would be really easy to implement. At least scales.

Pint 3 is indeed very complicated, but it should be like that

Human plays every nation in different way and so should AI. I should have gone to cognitive science so I could help with that...

That's true of point one also. It would still end up having to be a list of every nation and the scales it would take. Plus I can come up with 2 or 3 standard scales for every nation depending on how its played. If you think that there is a set of scales that will work without doing an "IF" for each nation then let us know what is it.

But if they did do an if for each nation then it wouldn't matter much since the lag of thinking would only be at the creation of the game. Not as bad as trying to do it for in-game thinking like buying reasonable troops.

thejeff · #10 October 25th, 2007, 01:18 PM

Not necessarily a list of scales for every nation. I want the randomness in there. I don't want the same pretender design every time, nor a list of 2-3 choices for each nation.

But a couple of things ruled in/out would help a lot.
Some general rules like:
Don't take 3 misforture and 3 turmoil.
and some specific ones:
Neifelhiem: take cold 2 or 3
EA/LA Mictlan: high dominion and/or awake pretender
High production with MA Ulm

Don't think of it as optimizing the AI's design, but avoiding stupid mistakes.

On another note:
If the code is well-designed, there should be little to no lag even for in-game nation specific thinking. You don't have a series of checks at every decision point, you have separate, preferably inherited, functions for races that want special handling.
(Of course, it's probably not well-designed. Most code, including mine, isn't. That's not a criticism, just an observation. Large codebases tend to grow haphazardly and need to be rethought from the ground up, but there is rarely time or interest.)