OT - Strategy games with GOOD AI

[SlipperyJim]

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

Strange. With aggressive ai on, which should always be the case, the ai is somewhat aggressive. Not as much as a human, but it will strike early if it feels its neighbour is weak, akthough it depends a lot on the personality (Gandhi will hardly ever attack for instance).

Agreed. Here's a checklist for good AI in Civ4:

1. Are you playing Beyond the Sword?
2. Have you installed the 3.19 patch, which includes some AI improvements?
3. Have you enabled Aggressive AI?

Please note that Aggressive AI is sort of a double-edged sword. It encourages the AIs to build more troops, which definitely gives them a better chance against bloodthirsty humans. On the other hand, all of those troops can cause the AIs to fall behind in other areas, especially tech. A dedicated science fiend could have an advantage over Aggressive AI by simply out-teching the AI until he can send Riflemen against Longbowmen.

Off-topic a bit, but if you enjoy Civ4:BtS, then you should definitely try the BUG or BAT mods:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=268

BUG stands for "Beyond the Sword Unaltered Gameplay". It doesn't add new nations, units, techs, or other content. Instead, BUG improves the user interface. It includes a lot of great alerts to minimize the micromanagement. BUG also serves up a lot of information to the player. Civ4 will show you all of this information by default, but you usually have to go clicking through half-a-dozen screens every turn in order to find it. BUG saves you the work.

BAT is simply BUG with a number of graphical enhancements. It makes a pretty game look even prettier.

[Arralen]

@vfb
Scripted, timed scenarios are never a measurement for AI, but only for the players' ability to fight against the running clock

@sevenwarlocks
"AI's that react on a turn by turn basis will never be effective." - that's exactly what the Dominions AI (mostly) does .. go figure.

@DakaSha
I don't know which "modded" Civ4 AI you have played, but I'm pretty sure the "Better AI" mod in it's later versions gives a pretty good AI - and the cheating does not come from the AI routines, but from the difficulty settings, which basically do not do anything else than giving the AI lots of adavantages, but not making it smarter. I always feel that the highest difficulties do not make for harder game, but a worse one, because the whole thing becomes seriously unbalanced, and I have the slight suspicion that they're even detrimental to the AI because of the missing balance.
Pretty nice AI I also found in the TAM and Rhye's mod, and in AoDII for Colonization.


Actually, Civ4 is the game I play the most at the moment, not because I like it that much - I actually, I rather hate the 3D crap - but because it's the one with the most stable network code and the best AI mods, and it Alt-TABs very fine on my machine...

I own GalCiv2, too, and IMHO the AI is greatly overhyped - and it's a rather simple game, compared to SE4/5, Civ4, Dom3 or others ...


Finally, on the question for a strategy game with a really good AI:

There ain't !!



edit: PS - I should do Kwok some justice. He's doing fine work with this Balance Mod for SE5, and the AI really has become much better. Sadly, with all that additional AI scripting (partly to get around design errors in the hardcoded part of the game) turn generation times skyrockets ... I'm running 15min- end turns calculations now, and I'm barely midgame

[Illuminated One]

Originally Posted by sevenwarlocks

I say this because to have an effective plan, an AI need not be perfect, or even extremely complicated. The most important thing is that the AI have some plan. By which, I mean, a long-range plan that it will stick to - at least for a time. AI's that react on a turn by turn basis will never be effective. As a chess-master once said - it is better to have a bad plan than no plan at all.

Well, I guess all AIs have some sort of plan hardcoded into them.
However an AI that just gets some goals and formulates the plan themselves reacting to the situation is a whole different matter and far from easy imo.
It might be not even possible, take game theory, most of the algorithms designed to lead to the perfect strategical behaviour fail miserably when put against normal human behaviour. It's not even that humans play better, but they don't necesseraly take the determinable "best" step invalidating the underlying algorithm.