How will the AI cope with player magic?

from Elemental Forums

Hi

My question stems from experience with Heroes of Might and Magic 3. On the highest difficulty level the AI players got immense bonuses and some scenarios were nearly impossible to defeat because of their resource advantage. However, once the player got access to certain spells, the game became a cakewalk. The AI clearly didn't take them into account.

One such spell was dimension door. With it, the player could teleport an army a short distance. One near impossible scenario had a city that had to be conquered. The city was occupied by a huge army. I positioned my own small forces behind a mountain. The AI calculated that there was no way I could reach the city in a single turn and moved it's army out. Next turn a cast Dimension door to teleport my army next to the city and conquered it.

In a screenshot, I've seen a "Teleport into friendly territory" spell and in another thread Frogboy mentioned an AI function "How many armies threaten this area" or something like that. It was like a flashback to a time of total AI failure.

That is why I ask, how will the AI cope with player magic? Will it even try to guess the extent of player's spell effects? Will it "remember" which spells a player has cast and therefore has access to? Will it just have automatic knowledge of all the spells a player can cast? Or ultimately, will it be as ignorant as the HoMM AI?

elemental
9,507 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Frogboy has stated multiple times how he will not include capabilities that the AI cannot effectively use.  Given how the focus is single player, and the deserved reputation that stardock has for capable AI, I am not too concerned about this.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

agreed with above post i am not worried at all.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

ha ha i am not worried either.  i remember being surprised when in galciv 2 i tried the old build up a huge force outside an enemies gate, then declare war and attack them unawares.

well needless to say they saw what i was doing called me on it, then went to war with me before i had the chance to complete my strategy.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I sincerely hope you're all correct in your confidence. Galciv 2 definitely has an AI that is capable of putting up a fight, even if it wasn't perfect in some areas, like planetary development.

Since there's no actual answer to my questions, I'm still a bit worried. The thing is, it's easy for a computer to calculate stuff such as moving distances for armies with movement points, but the rules change when powerful magic comes into play. Let's take a situation from a simple game as an example: a game of tic-tac-toe. Nine squares to be filled with Xs and Os. At a point when both players have filled three squares, there are three remaining. The active player has 3 possibilities for a move. If he can teleport a previous piece instead, we get a total of 12 possible moves. Four times the calculation in such a simple situation with just a single spell.

In a world such as the one in Elemental, the situations are far more complex and magic doesn't increase the complexity on a linear scale. It does so exponentially. With many game breaking spells. There was nothing like that in Galciv and no existing games handle this very well.

I do hope Elemental manages.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Well... One of my strategies against human players will be to ahve most of my forces hidden at X and then teleport them with a magic user to defend any allied territory. It takes little mana and you can still move after the teleport. Negates the need for roads and for defending every town at once.

I wouldn't consider this an exploit of the game, but a valid magical strategy.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Well said, seanw3. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic due to my bad experience. If there's a spell that guarantees 100% victory over the AI, the constant improvement of Elemental will see either the spell altered or the AI enhanced.

I definitely consider your strategy to be valid and not an exploit. As such, I hope to see an AI that can cope with it some way. In my HoMM 3 example, the most sensible way for the AI to play would have been to never leave the city. Calculating distances of the various teleport spells would not have been most important: leaving the only victory objective undefended was the major mistake!

In other words, I guess the AI can never calculate through all the enemy spell combinations in a given situation, a human player won't do that either. But it should be expecting the unexpected  ;)

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

In a screenshot, I've seen a "Teleport into friendly territory" spell and in another thread Frogboy mentioned an AI function "How many armies threaten this area" or something like that. It was like a flashback to a time of total AI failure.

It isn't the same to be able to teleport in your territory (defensive move) vs teleport into ennemy territory (like you did in HOMM3)

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Peace, reply 7

It isn't the same to be able to teleport in your territory (defensive move) vs teleport into ennemy territory (like you did in HOMM3)

It's not quite as powerful, but it can still be used offensively. You can teleport your army to a border hex and attack anything near the border. At least in Civ, you could take over cities this way.

And besides, the true fear here is whether there will be a full teleport spell in the game...

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Vallu751, reply 8

Quoting Peace Phoenix, reply 7
It isn't the same to be able to teleport in your territory (defensive move) vs teleport into ennemy territory (like you did in HOMM3)
It's not quite as powerful, but it can still be used offensively. You can teleport your army to a border hex and attack anything near the border. At least in Civ, you could take over cities this way.

And besides, the true fear here is whether there will be a full teleport spell in the game...

It's not just teleporting - many spells will allow an army to get where you didn't expect it to be, if used creatively. Lowering a mountain or raising land out of water, for example, can eliminate natural barriers and allow an army to unexpectedly bypass defenders stationed at a choke point. Not to mention spells that can change the odds of a battle, letting a weaker attacker unexpectedly win against a defending force that should've been sufficient (almost every spell falls into this category; summons, direct damage, etc).

In other words, nearly any spell can throw what you expect to happen out the window, by allowing attackers to beat superior defenders, or bypass them completely. So players and AIs essentially need to predict what spells the enemy can cast and account for them - you may not know if your enemy has lower mountain, so you'd better count on him having it and expect armies to bypass mountains. While you're at it assume he can teleport, rain ice on you, and bolster his numbers at the last moment with a summon or three, and act accordingly. "Expect the unexpected" indeed.

It almost makes you wish there was a way to determine what spells an enemy knows, or at least what spell books and/or shards he has access to. Perhaps with a spell..