XWerewolfX

Join Date 02/2006

+31

I GROW TIRED OF INADEQUATE AI

This game is so good, it just bothers the shit out of me to see the AI still do dumb stuff, like send their sovereigns out without armies, or when the monsters DO NOT ATTACK OTHER AI PLAYERS. Please fix this. Please, I beg of you.

This game is a few AI upgrades from legendary and I want to see it get there. Please, fix this kind of shit.

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XWerewolfX

Join Date 02/2006

+31

I take these pictures as proof that there are still significant AI flaws.

Hire someone else if you have to. I know you've posted recently about how tough the AI is to write, but these kind of problems have been in nearly every build of Elemental. They NEED to be fixed to make this game better.

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but but....they have your money already.

From what I've seen so far, SD puts in a lot of time to patching there previously released titles...and goes well out of there way to gain input from the gaming community around.

I completely understand that some bugs and flaws seem to persist over multiple patches and versions, but if I were running a company like that, I'd presume to have a battleplan...a roadmap laid out in order to help organize different aspects of the game. If SD does have that, the've tackled it in 1.3 and now the window is closed...they may have another shot on their road map for 1.5 or something...

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In all fairness, can you name an AI in a game this complex that does well?

Civ 5, the most recent, has an AI that wrestles as well and I think FE is at least as complex.

Anything they do to improve the AI is, of course, welcome - but I cannot think of one game of equal complexity that FE isn't at least as good as in its own right....

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It's probably not so easy to code AI for a game this complex what with research, techs, units, spells, buildings etc etc etc

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The problem with the AI is that it too often does blatantly stupid stuff.

I think there are two parts to a strategy AI which affect the players opinion of it:

1. Does the AI do stupid things?

2. Does the AI provide a challenge? (without cheating to a ridiculous level, I would add).

Most strategy AI's struggle to really nail #2 because it is very hard to write an AI that can compete with a player in a complex game. LH is probably about on par with similar budget games in this respect. I think the current (not initial release) versions of both Civ 4 and Civ 5 AI's are noticably better than LH but that is a reasonably high standard as Civ is a big budget franchise.

However some strategy AI's full down at step #1 and that is when the player (and reviewers) really pans the AI. I think WoM/FE/LH have had a chronic problem in this area and that has pulled down the player's opinion of the AI below where it would otherwise warrant. LH is much, much better now, but even so the AI still does some of same stupid things it did in WoM/FE.

Based on Brad's comments in the last month or so its even becoming fairly obvious why this happened. Some of the library functions that the AI relies on just didn't work properly. It doesn't matter how well the AI is written, if the data going in is bad then result is going to be bad (or at least bad sometimes). Based on my recent LH play I suspect that some of the library functions are still broken - the AI shows definite signs of intelligence at times but then it will drop a real clanker.

Needless to say it is still my number one priority for LH. I would love the AI to improve further.

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XWerewolfX

Join Date 02/2006

+31

That's my frustration: that some of the STUPID things that have always been there since EWOM are STILL THERE.

Like what I've originally posted about.

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I would like to add an observation that I'm seeing with 1.3 AI. I think Brad heard the complaints about poor city planning by the AI so I'm seeing the AI try to build better cities. Unfortunately, this is coming at the expense of building better and more troops especially during time of war. I'll be at war with the AI and they are researching "growth" when they should be pumping out troops.

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Another complication is difficulty levels. Even if they could program the AI to research, build, organize, recognize the situation, and deploy a reasonable "Pearl Harbor" attack (and /each/ of those steps is fiendishly complex) - you don't want to do it on less than, say, "challenging", or a lot of people will get frustrated. So you need to be able to turn parts of it on and parts of it off.

Not to mention figuring out which opponent to try it on in the first place.

One thing people are good at and the computer isn't is synergy. We do theorycrafting, know what's possible, and target our acquisitions and advances, which the AI can't do as emergent behavior, it has to be scripted (that's how the Civ4 AI developed, from watching good players). We build a whole strategy from min-maxing our sovereign's abilities to modifying our timetable based on expected research and the exact layout of the cities we are presented with. The AI on the other hand has to be a Swiss army knife, since if it did /that/ much scripting, it would be repetitive and we'd all complain about boredom with how mechanical it all was...

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