AI nation skills

thejeff · #1 October 25th, 2007, 02:01 PM

Granted, that adds more complexity to optimizing pretender design, but there is still merit in ruling out particularly bad choices.
(Some of which is already done, right? I don't see cold 3 Abyssia very often. A race's temperature preference is taken into account. Why not preferences for other scales?)

Or are you saying there's less complexity? One set of scales that is optimal for all nations in a large enough game? Even if that were true, (which it is not, there being some obvious exceptions) it wouldn't hold in smaller games.

Zeldor · #2 October 25th, 2007, 03:49 PM

thejeff:

I am just saying that choosing bad scales for a smaller map has a smaller influence than taking them on huge map. You can survive 1:1 game with Death 3 if you use it for example to have super awake pretender or nice bless. But try using it on 500 province map against 20 opponents. And AI should take it into consideration.

thejeff · #3 October 25th, 2007, 03:55 PM

Or since it can't handle the SC pretender or a bless strategy it should avoid taking the bad scales even on small maps...

HoneyBadger · #4 October 25th, 2007, 07:37 PM

In addition to the NI maps, someone ought to create mods for the various nations that eliminate units the AI shouldn't be creating, within it's own nation.

Sombre · #5 October 25th, 2007, 08:24 PM

Not a lot gets done waiting for this 'someone' person to do stuff.

HoneyBadger · #6 October 25th, 2007, 09:36 PM

Well, I'd elect myself, but I've got no working computer to use. Won't have, for a year plus. That and I'm not a very good player anyway, so the AI doesn't need that much help squashing me.

Wikd Thots · #7 October 26th, 2007, 12:01 PM

Quote:

HoneyBadger said:
Well, I'd elect myself, but I've got no working computer to use. Won't have, for a year plus. That and I'm not a very good player anyway, so the AI doesn't need that much help squashing me.

Don't bother. Somber has gotten that argument many times.
A better AI mod needs to be written by one of these people who feels that the AI sucks and they know exactly what it should do to play better. Various threads have tried to pull out the suggestions. I think there was one for a better Mictlan AI that Somber and someone else did finally make mods from.

ALSO there is the SemiRandom project. It lets us all design gods, scales, equipment choices for the AI to start with. And it will randomly pick from those files when it starts a game. If more people did AI design files for it then it would have a bigger pool to choose from but still all be sensible choices. That is probably easier to go with than trying to get the game code rewritten

Edi · #8 October 26th, 2007, 12:19 PM

Quote:

HoneyBadger said:
In addition to the NI maps, someone ought to create mods for the various nations that eliminate units the AI shouldn't be creating, within it's own nation.

*points at sig*

Though I need to update that mod to the one I'm using right now. The currently public one is screwed up. I also need to rename it to "Better Independents"

thejeff · #9 October 26th, 2007, 12:53 PM

The "if the code is well-designed" part was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. As I said, code is rarely well-designed if designed at all and I knew enough of Dominions history wo assume it wasn't. Had forgotten the Atari beginnings, though.

Still, I suspect that kind of logic wouldn't increase thinking time significantly if implemented well. Especially since that's already a tiny part of the lag between turns. Impossible to know without looking into the code, though.

I'm not sure what you mean by "write it all out." It's not going to be implemented, not is it moddable, so I'm not sure what the point is in coming up with a complete detailed list. Nor am I qualified. I haven't even played most nations.

All I was saying, is that a few common sense rules could prevent the AI from making broken pretender design choices. Some of which, on further reflection, it probably already does. I think the races are biased towards their preferred temperatures, at the very least.

The rules need not be complete to be useful. Rules that prevented a particular bad design would still be an improvement, even if other problems were still possible.

I am curious what problems you have with my examples? I was going for obvious and non-controversial.

Hmmm. catgod reads pretender files, right? Does that mean we know enough to write them? That would let us play with tweaking random pretender design. Couldn't get the AI bonuses though.