Improvements for AI Opponents

[Gandalf Parker]

HoneyBadger said:
Illwinter doesn't even need to improve the AI themselves, we just need the tools to program it. I'm completely confident that there are people in the forum who will positively salivate over the idea of improving the AI.

We would like to think so but many offers have been made for AI improvement projects by "the AI sucks" experts. Few have ever bothered. They mostly just want Johan to fix it.

On lists of AI fixes about half tend to be "we can do that now", then theres a bunch of "can you lay that out more exactly and maybe Johan can look at it", some that are IMHO not even good things to put into the game, and then a few possibly workable good ideas.

Maybe the problem is that Im not sure what list such things should go on to get Johans attention. Maybe the AI needs its on wishing shortlist.

[MaxWilson]

Gandalf Parker said:
We would like to think so but many offers have been made for AI improvement projects by "the AI sucks" experts. Few have ever bothered. They mostly just want Johan to fix it.

Gandalf,

What does this mean? I've never seen Illwinter offer to let anybody else touch the AI. Are you talking about the map-editing projects like SemiRandom, for giving AI pretenders better scales?

-Max

[Gandalf Parker]

Well that would be one.

Also calls to lay out specific AI instructions the way its in the game. We gave info on looking at the debug code, then giving specific suggestions. The AI is linear and general so most peoples suggestions tended to be too specific. Altho I do remember one that gave very specific suggestions for better castle building which seems to have been put in. Also some suggested changes to spell sequence, and unit building.

[MaxWilson]

Hmmm. Did these discussions take place on the mod forum or here in the main forum? If the mod forum I must have missed them.

I've been thinking lately that the AI seems to be better than it used to be, and I wonder if this is why.

-Max

[Loren]

*PART* of #3 could be implemented easily:

Check to see if the commander will benefit from the item. When I take an air-breathing item off an air-breathing commander, something's wrong.

I would also divide all commanders into caster or non-caster. Items would be flagged as to whether they are for casters/non-casters or both.

[JimMorrison]

Loren said:
*PART* of #3 could be implemented easily:

Check to see if the commander will benefit from the item. When I take an air-breathing item off an air-breathing commander, something's wrong.

I would also divide all commanders into caster or non-caster. Items would be flagged as to whether they are for casters/non-casters or both.

Well that's a fine idea, but how do you define casters? I mean, giving a staff and a robe to a Dai-Oni would just be a terrible SNAFU. In fact many of the best SCs have magical ability, and some of them have much better magical ability than the "mages of the line" that one might recruit in large numbers to spam buffs and minor evocations. It could prove very tiresome to try to work out rules to define what type of commander one is, on the fly. I think a better bet would be to have a flag that can be set to caster-only, combat-only, or left unflagged for those units who are thuggable, but also are perfectly worth having just casting.

And then it comes partly down to research as well..... Most thuggable casters are only viable if they have very specific buffs researched. If they don't, then they would be better used standing back casting whatever else they have access to in a support role.

Such is the conundrum of AI programming - there are so many potential variables, that you get worse results the more specific your rules are. Of course, one could argue it's hard to get much worse than a Fish Pendant on a human commander, but maybe he only had it because he picked it up, the AI never removes magic items AFAIK.

[thejeff]

You define casters as people who have magic paths. More importantly you define non-casters as those without magic paths. You don't give the non-casters path booster items (with exceptions for those have other boosts) or penetration items etc.

This is a much more basic fix suggestion than trying to build SCs or thugs. Just don't give commanders items that are useless to them or actively crippling.

[Gandalf Parker]

Any AI suggestion which gets into too many IF's is out of the category of easy, and is unlikely to get done. The AI now is rather linear and general. In other words it does have an instruction on whether to build infantry ahead of cavalry or mages ahead of priests. But not IF Ermor and IF less than turn 10 and IF you already have the local provinces captured etc etc. It also has a list of spells to cast and a rating system to decide them but not alot of IF Ctis and IF your army is poison resistant and IF etc etc.

Hosting would get 5 times as long if all of the nations had a bunch of IF checks. The code-base is just not structured for doing such checks in a database manner. The only IFs that might get inserted are the real game-killers. The latest I would like to see put in is to keep Mictlan from killing itself out of the game in the first few turns by not choosing a scale and dominion setting that it needs to get started.

On the other hand, many of the IF this and IF that changes that people want directed toward a specific nation can be done by mod or map commands so we can "fix" individual nations the way we want in most cases.