Proof of stupid AI spellcasting

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Pocus:
Its just because fans can put far more hours in a specific topic than the devs. I know of some fans, for the Hearts of Iron game (Paradox big simulation of WW 2) who spent more than 1000 hours, just on AI. (SuperAi pack 1.3 is far more superior than the Paradox vanilla AI eg).

HoI w/ CORE is by far superior to plain HoI. OTOH, Paradox is infamous for coding AIs that are notorious for doing rather stupid things, so saying that CORE is "much better" really isn't saying that much.

If IW were to expose their AI, then we fans could have a field day tweaking it so that it presents an even greater challenge than it already does. One of the things that's most needed is the ability to enable/disable the AI from being able to cast spells we don't want it to. The spellcasting list could be exposed via a config file that we can just tweak with true/false flags. (Breath of Winter=0) The game would still keep its internal list of what's castable, but it then checks the config file for what's permitted. It's a straightforward fix, that requires no GUI changes, and only adds the burden of an extra file I/O at the start of a gaming session and the overhead of maintaining the config file's contents in memory afterwards.

[Pocus]

add to this the preferences about castles, temples, etc. in AI budget. 2 patches out, and we still have AI building mostly light indeps troops, because there is never new castles build by the AI.

That is to the point that fighting Ulm, Man or Pythium is often the same thing, with a mass of rabble in front of you, with the occasional national unit or mage thrown into the lot.

[CharonJr]

I seem to recall reading that external casting lists/scripting... will not be put in due to wanting the better player to win and not the better script writer.

Personally I would like something like an external list, too even though I am fairly clueless about writing programs or anything like it, but this shoulnd't be too difficult and would actually add even more depth to the game.

CharonJr

[Arryn]

My suggestion for externalizing the spells-permitted list is just that, a list. Only one option per spell: 0 or 1, no-cast/castable. of course, if the devs want, the options per spell could be expanded to allow much more variety, but a simple yes/no is all that's really needed to "fix" the AI spellcasting silliness. Anything more is just icing on the cake.

I do not advocate external script lists, though I do think they'd be pretty cool.