Dominions 2. AI. Suggestions, that how to fix it.

Mortifer · #1 November 5th, 2003, 07:41 PM

Humzzz I like the idea as well, the question is: this can be added to Doms II.? The AI will be really better or just more diverse?
IMHO the key is, that the AI must be lot more effective. It will be more effective this way?
Frankly I have no idea.

Gandalf Parker · #2 November 5th, 2003, 10:07 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Mortifer:
Humzzz I like the idea as well, the question is: this can be added to Doms II.? The AI will be really better or just more diverse?
IMHO the key is, that the AI must be lot more effective. It will be more effective this way?
Frankly I have no idea.

I think it would definetly be more effective. Many of the things on the list of AI suggestions seem to be that the AI does too much or not enough of something. With a system like this it can be gauranteed to change that. Maybe not to the perfect level but at least not completely not happening. With so many different races and different game paramters Im not sure it would ever be possible to achieve a smart AI.

Rule #1 of AI programming. If you cant beat them, cheat.

Rule #2 of AI programming. If you cant be smart, be random.

Rule #3 of AI programming. If you cant please the Users with #1 and #2 then declare the AI to be for tutorial purposes only toward the MP part of the game, and give up.

(HEY! calm down. Im only half serious)

[ November 05, 2003, 20:08: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Aristoteles · #3 November 5th, 2003, 10:20 PM

I still say that tweaking the main AI would be the best, but I am not sure..I mean these AI personalities sounds good and all, but I think this won't be added. Well not now..maybe not at all. I guess that would take countless time to script, and the success is not sure.
However...if that would boost the brain of the AI..

[ November 05, 2003, 20:21: Message edited by: Aristoteles ]

licker · #4 November 5th, 2003, 10:43 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Aristoteles:
I still say that tweaking the main AI would be the best, but I am not sure..I mean these AI personalities sounds good and all, but I think this won't be added. Well not now..maybe not at all. I guess that would take countless time to script, and the success is not sure.
However...if that would boost the brain of the AI..

Well the personalities may not make it becasue its too hard to redo the code to fit them, but if certain things can be easilly tweeked by the devs, or externalized then it would be a fairly simple process I think. I'm not sure you'd want to call the personalities scripts either, that doesn't seem the most accurate way to look at them. Though you could do it that way, just that I don't think it would be very elegant.

Anyway, when you say tweeking the main AI what do you mean exactly? and how would you do it? I think that the personalities or externalized paramaters are tweeks to the main AI. Though I also feel that each nation (and even each theme for a nation) should have it's own AI. Of course if you do this via a series of matricies its not that hard, though it is potentially alot of matricies...

Gandalf Parker · #5 November 5th, 2003, 11:36 PM

Quote:

Anyway, when you say tweeking the main AI what do you mean exactly? and how would you do it? I think that the personalities or externalized paramaters are tweeks to the main AI. Though I also feel that each nation (and even each theme for a nation) should have it's own AI. Of course if you do this via a series of matricies its not that hard, though it is potentially alot of matricies...

Thats part of the problem I see. Just for troops it would be a huge matrix. For each race there are different units, plus all the independents, plus different situations such as small game, large game, low resource, high magic, independent strength, which opponent.

Ive helped program an AI for a MUD. Using a programmable client to create a player on the MUD we programmed it into what people thought was a pretty amazing robot "player". The bot program was as large and used as much CPU as the MUD program itself. Luckily by running from a completely different computer as a player that wasnt a problem. Im afraid that trying to create so many different smart AIs (I mean the improve AI code, not the personalities project) would make the game 20 times bigger.

licker · #6 November 5th, 2003, 11:50 PM

It is alot of matricies theoretically. Someone smarter than I am can probably figure out a way to crunch them down. But they are just text files, not that big. For any given game, only a few are needed anyway, unless you are playing with all 17 nations, but even then only 16 are needed.

Sure you need to have made the others, but as far as which are used during a given game, its not that many.

Anyway, it is probably possible to make only a few matricies for army composition, or magic research... and then have a few operators for different nations, or different personalities that modify them. Once the game has started the modified (temporary) matrix is the only one used anyway. The .mob file from MoO3 was pretty big if I remember correctly (the file that stored all the matricies), but once you 'extracted' it you had a series of text files in a series of folders that you could easily open and edit in excel or even word pad. I mean it adds more size to the game, but I don't think it requires more processing power. And I don't think it would add more than 20MB in a worst case anyway.

I guess I don't quite see how this is comparable to a bot.

licker · #7 November 6th, 2003, 12:01 AM

Bah, I didn't want to do this but I'll try...

Do you remember linear algebra?

(I do and wish I didn't but that's beside the point)

So you have a matrix of units with weights and it looks like this:

Unit Weight
Militia 10%
LI 10%
MI 40%
HI 25%
X-bow 15%

Then you chose a rapid expander type personality and the matrix gets multiplied by:

(.5
1.5
2
0
1)
And then it gets normalized to 100%...

You further have a SC pretender so that multiplies the matrix by:
(.5
.5
3
1
1)
And it gets normalized again...

Anyway, you have a large matrix for unit type, then you have these operators (if that's the right term) for different conditions, like personality, like theme, like nation that multiply the values in the big matrix.

Actually if you did it this way you could have one huge list of all units, multiplied by national operators (to zero out the unallowed units), multiplied by theme and personality operators, multiplied by exisiting indie units (to put back in desired indie units when you get them), multiplied by...

Do you see it now? Its not that difficult to set up, it is difficult to balance

The size of these files is tiny, though there may be 100 of them. The tricky part then comes in how you set up your algorythem for which operators are applied to your specified matricies. But again, that's not difficult to concieve how you set up those algorythems, its just difficult to balance... that's where the want to externalize all this comes from, let the players who want to fiddle fiddle, eventually people will arrive at settings that work 'best' and the devs can chose to use them for the vanilla game or not.