Proof of stupid AI spellcasting

[johan osterman]

The AI never closes voluntarily for melee unless specifically told so, and I think most players would be very unhappy if this were to change, and expecting the AI to take into account the few times when he is alone in combat and then act differently in this very rare and special situation is to, in my mind, put to unreasonable demands on it.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by mivayan:
[QB] Here is what my star child assassin did during an assassination against an ulm prophet:

scripted actions: cast luck. fire: mindbLast, mindbLast, mindbLast, mindbLast.

cast spells: astral shield, body etheral, astral weapon, resist magic, twist fate, communion master, communion slave, star fires, star fires, star fires, star fires.

Are you sure you didn't leave his orders as cast spells or with no orders instead of telling him to fire closest? If his final order was left blank, then he will default to casting spells as a starchild is a mage.

[Psitticine]

Not to inflame things, but there was a mention awhile back (by Kristoffer) about possibly changing Breath of Winter so it'll only be cast when specifically scripted. That would be sooo nice.

I was just playing R'lyeh and the Traitor King pulled his (now familiar) trick of casting Breath of Winter without being told to and then dancing all about the rear row, doing great harm to my mages, illithids, etc. I wasn't particularly unhappy, even though he is a great water mage, when he finally went down under Abyssian fire magic.

I think spells that can damage friendly troops around the mage should not be auto-cast. Even when I set the water mages apart, they tend to come back towards the main group sooner or later, and they are also Banned from having non-cold resistant bodyguards while apart.

[mivayan]

Are you sure you didn't leave his orders as cast spells or with no orders instead of telling him to fire closest? If his final order was left blank, then he will default to casting spells as a starchild is a mage.

His orders was luck, fire x4, cast spells. I dont mind him casting usefull buffing spells before star fires, but communion master and slave are not exactly usefull during an assassination.

Not to inflame things, but there was a mention awhile back (by Kristoffer) about possibly changing Breath of Winter so it'll only be cast when specifically scripted. That would be sooo nice.

I would like that very much. For communion master and slave too.

[ February 24, 2004, 23:57: Message edited by: mivayan ]

[mivayan]

Here is what my star child assassin did during an assassination against an ulm prophet:

scripted actions: cast luck. fire: mindbLast, mindbLast, mindbLast, mindbLast.

cast spells: astral shield, body etheral, astral weapon, resist magic, twist fate, communion master, communion slave, star fires, star fires, star fires, star fires.

There was a brief message: "the armies of special monsters have been routed". Then he ran away. The ulm commander was still paralyzed(5).

I would prefer that the ai dont cast communion master or slave when alone. In fact, I would prefer if it was never cast at all unless scripted to.

[Pocus]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
Geo:

Your points a,b and c are mistaken. the AI does a calculation based on chance to hit MR, damage, tries to some extent to avoid friendly fire etc etc. Perhaps you do not think it wieghts friendly fire enough but it do these things.

about weights of AI parameters... The best AI so far, in commercial games, are were there weights are externalized in text files, so that the most zealout of the fans can tweak and propose alternative solutions. As IW is a very small company, it would benefits even more from that process.

I remember the example of some Age of Kings (AoE II) or Kohan fans made AI which were able to routinely beat developpers made AI at 1 against 2. Its just because fans can put far more hours in a specific topic than the devs. I know of some fans, for the Hearts of Iron game (Paradox big simulation of WW 2) who spent more than 1000 hours, just on AI. (SuperAi pack 1.3 is far more superior than the Paradox vanilla AI eg).

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Pocus:
Its just because fans can put far more hours in a specific topic than the devs. I know of some fans, for the Hearts of Iron game (Paradox big simulation of WW 2) who spent more than 1000 hours, just on AI. (SuperAi pack 1.3 is far more superior than the Paradox vanilla AI eg).

HoI w/ CORE is by far superior to plain HoI. OTOH, Paradox is infamous for coding AIs that are notorious for doing rather stupid things, so saying that CORE is "much better" really isn't saying that much.

If IW were to expose their AI, then we fans could have a field day tweaking it so that it presents an even greater challenge than it already does. One of the things that's most needed is the ability to enable/disable the AI from being able to cast spells we don't want it to. The spellcasting list could be exposed via a config file that we can just tweak with true/false flags. (Breath of Winter=0) The game would still keep its internal list of what's castable, but it then checks the config file for what's permitted. It's a straightforward fix, that requires no GUI changes, and only adds the burden of an extra file I/O at the start of a gaming session and the overhead of maintaining the config file's contents in memory afterwards.

[Pocus]

add to this the preferences about castles, temples, etc. in AI budget. 2 patches out, and we still have AI building mostly light indeps troops, because there is never new castles build by the AI.

That is to the point that fighting Ulm, Man or Pythium is often the same thing, with a mass of rabble in front of you, with the occasional national unit or mage thrown into the lot.

[CharonJr]

I seem to recall reading that external casting lists/scripting... will not be put in due to wanting the better player to win and not the better script writer.

Personally I would like something like an external list, too even though I am fairly clueless about writing programs or anything like it, but this shoulnd't be too difficult and would actually add even more depth to the game.

CharonJr

[Arryn]

My suggestion for externalizing the spells-permitted list is just that, a list. Only one option per spell: 0 or 1, no-cast/castable. of course, if the devs want, the options per spell could be expanded to allow much more variety, but a simple yes/no is all that's really needed to "fix" the AI spellcasting silliness. Anything more is just icing on the cake.

I do not advocate external script lists, though I do think they'd be pretty cool.