AI concept of the '80ies ... why?

[zepath]

Well...

I, for one, do not want to see any AIs more sophisticated than the one that we have in Dom 3. If they get too smart they'll start posing a serious challenge even on lower settings and they inevitably try to take over the world. Furthermore, I don't really want John Conner to end up as the leader of the human race. He was a punk *** kid. So just say, "No!" to better AIs. And keep them the hell away from our thermonuclear devices, please!

[PhilD]

chacal_ said:
Radioactive source seem to be a good source of true random
==> http://www.random.org/

Yeah, and electronic noise should be another good one, potentially with higher rates. If only we could get some electronics into computers...

I did some quick searches on the subject (as a side line to some "randomized algorithms" lectures I give), and I seem to remember reading that CPU makers (Intel et al.) typically have the means of including pretty good, unpredictable, irreproduceable random number generators in their chips, only it doesn't look like the demand is really there (since space on chips has to come at the expense of some other functions, the integrated RNG has to compete with other, chromier stuff that will make them sell a few more units.

[PhilD]

Esben Mose Hansen said:
Personally, I would love a way to create a script-client so we could write our owns AIs. I think I'd take a shot at doing it as a LP or maybe a MIP problem

Yeah, but scriptable in-game is way too dangerous - either the scripting language would be extremely limited, or 99.99% of scripts would just crash the game 99.99% of the time (though, Neverwinter Nights' toolset scripting language seemed to be a pretty decent sublanguage of C, and that didn't seem to cause too many stability problems; but then, the development team of NWN was orders of magnitude larger than that of Dom...)

What could work would be if the turn file format were more open, so that players could have an external program read an AI's turn, and generate orders. There would be some minor cheating issues (need for a way to have AI nations' files either in encrypted format, to prevent cheating, or unencrypted, to allow AI scripting), and some safeguards to prevent buggy programs from crashing the game through buggy orders files (simply parse the file, and if anything goes wrong, ignore it and have the in-game AI take over), but it would make it possible for all those "how hard can it be to write decent AI, this game's AI sucks" sayers to prove how much better they really are...

But then, this was a suggestion we made back in the days of Dom2, and the devs weren't too receptive.

[GwyrgynBlood]

Scripting languages for AI aren't necessarily hard to write... just depends on how the AI was setup. Kohan series has always had scriptable AI, TA Spring also has it.

Most AIs in strategy games have their AI scripted in some way, even if it's internal. For example, in your average RTS game, the AI generally gets a basic list of what buildings they need to build what units, and then a basic understanding of how many buildings of each type they should have, and then an idea of what relative number of units to produce. Also things like 'how many units should I stock up before sending out an attack force'.

Of course, those AIs are generally very dumb unless a LOT of effort is put into them.


Best example of 'good' AI I've seen is Virtual Fighter 4. Very good AI that is modeled after real players.

[HoneyBadger]

I think atleast we ought to be able to have the computer coming up with good Pretender designs. It should be fairly easy to do this without the use of any true AI at all. Just come up with several designs for each and every pretender available per nation. Preferrably, these designs would be influenced by the forum community, because inevitably, it takes a village to come up with truly dangerous strategies. Based on the design the computer randomly chose, the AI could then be influenced to follow one of several basic strategies, such as from building a lot of sacreds to not building any sacreds at all, depending on the bless effect and the specific nation the computer was playing. It would require a significant effort on the part of the programmers, but not much computer time at all, and if done right, should certainly improve the AI. By the way, has anyone noticed whether or not the AI in the game makes better decisions (or seems to) on higher difficulty levels? I'm still learning the finer points of the game, so I mostly stay on Normal setting.

[Recruit]

Endoperez said:
I was surprised, yesterday, to see AI using Terminus the mercenarey assassin to conquer my weakky-defended provinces.

I had that 2A wind mage mercenary conquer 3 of my provinces while i wasn't paying attention. The little bastard took out 10 guys at a time with lightning bolts and air elementals.

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

HoneyBadger, I think I said something similar. Maybe what I wrote was invisible though, as nobody has acknowledged it. I will go back to the AS thread and angrily sulk there.

In any case, Total Annihilations had a very interesting AI MOD model. It was a text file of units and weights, different for each race, and different for different types of maps, and completely changeable by the player. E.g. if we were to have this kind of possibility in Dom III, we could have a text file (or xml) that allowed us to say something like (this is simplified):

race 43 (superbadgers)
pretendertype;SC,Magic,Lucky,Random
turns0--24;StratMagicTurtle (slow expansion)
turns0--24;regunit456;30% (badger militia)
turns0--24;regunit457;70% (h inf badgers)
turns0--24;cmdrunit466;90% (badger mage scholars)
turns0--24;cmdrunit465;10% (reg commander)
turns25--48;StratMagicDragon (rapid expansion)
turns25--48;regunit458;50% (sacred badger unit)
turns25--48;regunit459;50% (badgersamurai)
turns25--48;cmdrunit459;90% (badger battle mage)
turns25--48;cmdrunit460;10% (badger priest of light)
.
.
.
etc.

[HoneyBadger]

I think you did, Uh-Nu-Buh. I acknowledge it. Sorry, I try to read the posts that have been submitted in a thread before I post, myself, but I skim through and I must have missed it.

Ok, Uh-Nu-Buh has a very good idea!
I second it.

There. Squish.

[mivayan]

Uh-Nu-Buh said:
In any case, Total Annihilations had a very interesting AI MOD model. It was a text file of units and weights, different for each race, and different for different types of maps, and completely changeable by the player.

It's a long step from a fully customizable AI, but could still mean great improvements for dominions.

Semi-related: is there a way to set a 'difficult' AI when changing from human to AI, for example to set up a single player challenge? Would be potentially bad for multiplay though.

[Wick]

Once upon a time I was playing Wesnoth as the Undead. My leading troops were ghosts with a chill attack. After driving the Imperials back most of the map I noticed he had started recruiting mermen. I thought that was odd since Mermen aren't that good on land and there wasn't much water then I realized they were strongly resistant to cold damage. The AI was paying attention to what I was doing! I felt so validated as a person! ;-) I also thought he should be recruiting mages that could actually hurt my ghosts instead. :-(