AI for Mages Using Gems

[fantasma]

I think the unpredictable and sometimes stupid mage is perfectly normal.

Imagine yourself in a situation where the sky is torn apart, the earth shivers, lightnings flash, etc, etc, a few hundred/thousand monsters are crying and milling about and slaughtering each other and you in the middle of this have exactly the fraction of a second to ponder all the implications of possibly several hundred options.

Sure, you make the right decision 10% of the time, if you are lucky!

Of course it's annoying when you watch the replay with a cold beer in your hand and scratch your head and think oh my god!

My mages cast mass protection always against Abysia! And Aby had more pyromages on the field than troops...

[capnq]

sansanjuan said:I was wondering what % of a turn's cycles are spent on animation creation. If that was surpressed...

Animations are only relevant for watching the replay; there's no reason to calculate the visuals while the battle is being resolved.

[Tuidjy]

While the animations take a great deal of processing power, and skipping them will
reduce the run time considerably, the move selection still takes quite a bit of
time. Not convinced? Replay a major battle, and hit 'n' a few times. This will
skip the animation, and just do the number crunching. It still takes a few
seconds. With hundreds of choices per mage, ten mages on each side, and 50 rounds,
the total number of possible battles dwarfs the number of atoms in the universe.

Yes, some branches may get curtailed, some spells may be ignored as obviously bad,
etc... But it is still a matter of writing better AI, not running exhaustive searches.

[sansanjuan]

capnq said:

Animations are only relevant for watching the replay; there's no reason to calculate the visuals while the battle is being resolved.

ok. I'm a bit intrigued...

So when the .trn file is being generated with the battle sequences, every unit ends up with a "this is what unit-x did this turn", etc. etc.? As the battle engine cycles through commanders and units each unit reacts to every appropriate unit on the battle field for both friends and foes (morale check, can't move there, can swing at bog beast, etc.)? The computational heavy lifting results from all these (each unit's) array checks. If so I can see why it's a bugger to finesse the AI into "deep and clever" code. Thematically I do agree that some mages would nuke their own friends due to panic. I also still am convinced a single attribute (IQ) that would leverage a single with/without magic iteration might be doable. I may be full of hooey... wouldn't be the first time.

-SSJ

Edit: We'd call it the "mage watches battle in lawnchair" iteration. Perhaps only useful if they are the only mage in play for that battle.

[Darkstone]

Like others have hinted before, I think a big part of this is perspective.

We have a bird's eye view of the situation. Mages are in the battle itself. It's hard to see the enemy. Perhaps they're stacked a dozen deep, or they're beyond a group of your own troops. Frankly, considering the situation, the mages do a hell of a good job.

[sansanjuan]

Darkstone said:
Like others have hinted before, I think a big part of this is perspective.

We have a bird's eye view of the situation. Mages are in the battle itself. It's hard to see the enemy. Perhaps they're stacked a dozen deep, or they're beyond a group of your own troops. Frankly, considering the situation, the mages do a hell of a good job.

Upon reflection... you are probably correct. Likely on average the mages chose significantly wiser spells than I would have scripted.
-SSJ