[Arralen]

Recruit said:

I think you don't have an impression of how much is involved in writing a successful AI.

I think I have.
You know, I have minor degree in programming. Ok, its only "for engineering purposes" .. but maybe they should let the engineers work on AI development, not the computer scientist, maybe we would have gotten somewhere by now
Anyhow, while its been quite some time since, and I'm only fiddling around with some script language for small tools now and then, I think I have a pretty solid grasp on how hard it is to do AI programming. Not on it itself, mind, but about the complexity involved.

Read the wikipedia article on Deep Blue and see how much was involved in writing an AI that could play Chess well. (although this is a bit of an extreme example) And chess only has 32 pieces on a relatively tiny grid.

A Deep Blue - like AI wouldn't work for dominions IMHO, and -surprisingly- a game like Dominions might be easier to do AI-wise than chess!
Why? Because of the random element, and the high complexety!
Chess is over-analyzed and at the same time highly deterministic. If you want to do a good AI, you must factor everything in exactly, up to the quite complex moves and tactics the human mind can conceive - at least those which are commonly known, and those are quite a few with chess.

Dominions, on the other hand, is ever-changing and, to a degree, random. Arbitraty solutions will work ok, and might be the only one which make sense.
E.g.:
If Dom would be deterministic like chess, you could pre-calulate how many HI you would need to run down and slaughter a given bunch of shortbow archers on the battlefield. Every possible option and event would be known beforehand - but in Dom, you don't know how many arrows will really hit, if some adverse weather would give added encumbrance or restrict archery, or even where the pieces will be placed on the battlefield.
Like in chess, an AI would have to pre-calculate every possible move several turns into the future, weighthing the possibilities for each "branch". That's not only eating up computer ressources like crazy, it's also very prone to error if some detail is missing in formulas describing your "AI model" of the game. (e.g.: computer generated weather forecasts...)
A human player would draw from experience, and (as commonly in chess) known 'optimized' solutions he learned by heart.
They're doing the 2nd with Deep Blue (vast libraries), and don't have a clue how to do the 1st ...
That's what Deep Blue is: a programm the calculates every possible move serveral turns into the future and compares the result to some pre-made libraries which contain lots of possible positions and human-made estimates about their "worth". I wouldn't call that an AI, as it depends on human assessments on every move it makes.

But dominions doesn't work that way: a player would make a guess (from experience), and bring some more just to be sure. And he might end up wrong because of something that he didn't figure in or didn't know beforehand.
The AI could do very much the same: Do a quick guess (easy calc), bring some more, hope for the best - and it would behave pretty much human-like and play equally strong.

Endoperez said:
Arralen didn't mean that kind of AI. He basically suggested giving AI more time to think.

Actually, I meant something more like an AI then a turn-precalculator ;-)
But you're right about the 'thinking time'. With moving the AI turn processing from between-the-turns to during-the-turn, the standard Dom AI wouldn't benefit, unless the devs add some more sophisticated routines. But the player wouldn't have to wait that long for the turn to finish.
And there would be the option to add some more advanced AI which would result in prohibitive turn calculation time with the current setup .. .