Wanted: Cheating AI - Page 3

benp · #21 December 22nd, 2000, 09:04 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Courageous:

I personally believe you have chosen the best two ways for an AI to "cheat". In the game Imperialism II, I believe that they make use of both of these strategies and disguise them quite well. It's worthy of note that Imperialism II has to be one of the most difficult strategy games of all time. That game will bust your ***.

Personally I don't find AI's which cheat over information to be offensive at all. That's just my opinion, though.

Different people have different opinions about this, ranging from "the AI should not cheat at all", through, "it can cheat if you can't tell", to "do whatever you have to to give a challenge".

When we did the AI for Imperialism II we took roughly the middle choice above. It wasn't because we were lazy, it was because we didn't want to make a game that was easy for an experienced strategy game player to beat after a couple of tries. (Although I'm afraid we went a bit overboard on the difficulty.)

Our determination of what was an acceptable "cheat" was based on our belief that it was important that it feel like the AI is playing the same game as the human. We ended up with few information related cheats, but not global knowledge about what the human is doing. For example, the AI knows what units the human has in each place, but does not know what moves the human has entered for those units for the following turn.

I prefer this kind of limited cheating because I've never seen a game without it that can give me much of a challenge, but many others disagree with me.

Ben Polk

Courageous · #22 December 22nd, 2000, 09:41 PM

"Checkers, IIRC, a comparably simple game (at most... 24 pieces IIRC, on 32 squares with fairly limited branching factor) has actually been solved, 'tho."
----
Right. It's worthy of note to observe that even if we could represent a game like SEIV correctly using classical search (given the complexities and configurational flexibility, this is in doubt), it would actually be IMPOSSIBLE with today's hardware to solve the SEIV AI (or similar) problem using the same kinds of techniques which are used for Chess, Go, and Checkers. The combinatorial expansion is simply enormous.

As for Ben and Imp II, congratulations. I believe you pulled off an outstanding solution to computer "AI," and while I often had to play that game on easy, that's the way it should be.

Oh, BTW: CHEATER!!!

C//

Courageous · #23 December 22nd, 2000, 09:52 PM

Oh, by the way, my only real complaint regarding Imperialism II was not the AI, but the way that it became nearly impossible to bust cities in the late game. That was frustrating; you should have had a siege model or something.

C//

Talenn · #24 December 22nd, 2000, 10:22 PM

Ben Polk:

Imperialism II has to be one of my favorite games of all times simply BECAUSE the AI was so challenging!

I LOVED the way it did the 'dog pile on the rabbit' if you were the weakest. And the best part is that it seemed to jump on the weakest regardless if it was a Human or AI controled nation...as it should be. Boy did it ever suck to be even perceived as having the weakest military... All the nation of Europe were like a pack of wild dogs smelling fresh meat!

I tend to agree with Courageous on the late game though. It did become a bit tedious reducing forts but overall its still one of the best games every published IMO. I've often cited I2's AI as the best AI in a PC game specifically because it DID appear to be playing by the same rules a human player (with a few exceptions).

Now if only you guys had allowed for tactical combat in multiplayer games....

Talenn

Courageous · #25 December 23rd, 2000, 01:35 AM

Yeah "dogpile on the weakest" was one of my favorite IMP II features. I discovered this the hard way in one of my earliest games, where I attempted to emphasize infrastructure over military. Didn't work out!

C//

benp · #26 December 23rd, 2000, 08:27 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Courageous:
Oh, by the way, my only real complaint regarding Imperialism II was not the AI, but the way that it became nearly impossible to bust cities in the late game. That was frustrating; you should have had a siege model or something.

C//

Yeah, that was bad.

I2 also didn't carry the atmosphere of the times through the game as well as it should have.

It's hard to make a good game. Aaron and the MM crew have done a great job. I'm just waiting for the AI code and data file patches to be a little cleaner before diving in again. You can imagine how doing that kind of feels like work now.