Underestimate the AI: Reap the consequences.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by PrinzMegaherz:
You make it sound as if the AI tried to make you lose by giving your troops bad commands.

It does. Witness "The AI makes your pretender uselessly cast junk spells until it passes out and dies".

That's wrong. The AI is not some kind of entity inside your PC that is out there to beat you.

Yes it is. Otherwise, there wouldn't be much point to playing against it, would you? Who wants to play an opponent that doesn't try to beat you? This is boring.

Your troops will be given those commands that the AI assumes is best suited for your success.

No, the AI gives commands that are best suited for *ITS* success....not yours. If you leave a unit simply on "no orders", the unit will NOT behave like it does when the AI is controlling it.

Originally posted by Stormbinder:
Strategic AI obviosly lack this option, by being, duh, AI.

The strategic AI doesn't NEED this option, because he already has full control of his tactics. The tactical AI *IS* an extension of the strategic AI. It does exactly what he wants it to do. The same cannot be said for you, as the tactical AI never does what you want it to do beyond the level you can force it to do so.

Originally posted by Boron:
don't want to quote again stormbinder this would because i think that would be fair if the ai has a slightly better battlefield ai then the player battlefield ai so that there are 2 slightly different battlefield ais .

so i thought perhaps norfleet has discovered this . in the starting of the post too the guess was made the computer ai may perhaps still use dominion 1 battle orders .

The AI definitely does different things that you cannot possibly do, as evidence from the original poster shows, and is far more reactive. This is because the AI is able to "script orders", as it were, on the fly, right before the battle starts, rather than having to guess. Notice how you will never, ever, catch the AI having been scripted to fight someone else, and his mages never charge you with a spoon for no comprehensible reason. Note also how, if left up to the AI, your pretender will be allowed to cast spells until it faints from exhaustion....but the AI's pretender won't do this: You can easily witness the AI's pretender casting its spells, and then ATTACKING YOU.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Alexi:
it wouldn't make sense to program two seperate combat algorythms for the human players and the AI controlled players. Dominions is all about role playing accuracy. And as far as I can see, there's no sense in one army behaving differently then another simply because it's controlled by the computer.

Actually, this is untrue. It makes perfect sense: The AI's combat algorithms are often more sophisticated specifically because it has to oppose you, whereas the "friendly force" algorithms are simplistic and designed to, at best, make a feeble attempt to prod the player, who's supposed to be playing the game, in the right direction. If the AI did everything for you, you wouldn't need to play the game. In Soviet Russia, the game plays you!

[ August 03, 2004, 00:46: Message edited by: Norfleet ]

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Cainehill:
A human-played army would have to first go through its pre-scripted spells, regardless of the fact that many of them would be near-useless (certainly by comparison with Banishment), before finally settling down to kick some undead butt.

You could achieve exactly the same thing by placing all your commanders on "stay behind troops" or "cast spells".

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
[QB]Note also how, if left up to the AI, your pretender will be allowed to cast spells until it faints from exhaustion....but the AI's pretender won't do this: You can easily witness the AI's pretender casting its spells, and then ATTACKING YOU.

I assume that you can actually provide an example of this, since anybody who isn't trying to mislead new players won't have seen this behaviour.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
I assume that you can actually provide an example of this, since anybody who isn't trying to mislead new players won't have seen this behaviour.

You mean other than the fact that I've seen it happen before? I don't exactly play a lot of SP anymore, you know, but you can definitely see it happen, which clearly indicates the AI isn't just set on default orders, and *IS* actually making decisions. What exactly do you want as an example? A screenshot? Because I can hardly go around posting my MP turns anywhere, since they'd be passworded and unreadable.

[ August 03, 2004, 01:42: Message edited by: Norfleet ]

[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Alexi:
it wouldn't make sense to program two seperate combat algorythms for the human players and the AI controlled players. Dominions is all about role playing accuracy. And as far as I can see, there's no sense in one army behaving differently then another simply because it's controlled by the computer.

Yeap, that is absolutely correct. The only possible very rare exception is the topic of this very thread, as I said myself earlier. And that had nothing to do with choosing of which spells to cast. Accursing developers of malicious intend to secretly screw the player by forcing him to use "bad" spell-selecting algoritm, while strategic AI got to use the differnt "uber" spell selecting algoritm is very... errr... strange.

[archaeolept]

i've never seen an AI pretender cast more than 5 spells and then go on to attack. If the unit were berserk, of course that could happen, but otherwise no.