2 AI Questions

[Belac]

1: How does the AI design its pretenders? That is, what factors does it value how? Having seen a variety of AI pretenders in SP (including one fantastically-amusing Great Enchantress on MA C'tis who died repeatedly from Miasma over the course of an epic war), I am quite curious.

2: What nations does the AI manage best and worst? From my anecdotal SP experience, it is very good at Vanheim/Midgard, pretty good at MA/LA Ermor, and supremely crappy at Pangaea. Is there some kind of pattern, some type of units/strategies it is better at?

[Sombre]

1: Essentially it's random. Whether or not the processes behind it are random, the end result certainly doesn't resemble a design of any kind. At anything higher than normal difficulty they get so many free design points that they're bound to have lots of magic on anything they pick though.

2: It kinda depends if you mean with CBM on or not, NI or BI on also. It's pretty terrible with all of them regardless, however. It's especially bad with ma and la mictlan, capable of dying after a few turns and with caelum, since it has no idea how to use flying troops. I think it's best with Jotunheim and the roman nations, personally.

Basically the only AI 'strat' is to build as many troops as possible and throw them at you. So anything that has good basic troops and good pd is what it's best with. Magic, thugs etc mean pretty much nothing to the AI.

[Gandalf Parker]

1) The AI represents ultimate variation. Any kind of "good choice" would be quickly learned, documented, and step-by-step instructions how to beat it would be posted. Not much replay there. Unfortunately, it also means that the AI often selects gods and scales that are bad for it.

HOWEVER it is possible to design good gods and scales for each nation and use those. But then you know whats happening.

If you want the best in-between take a look at the SemiRandom program. It uses pre-created surprises in both AI pretenders and designed provinces but scatters them in so you dont get to know them too well.

2) The AI instructions are linear. In other words its one AI for all nations with very few "IF Nation =" in it. So the more specialized a nation is, the worse the AI plays it.

There are ways to improve that. There are mods, and maps, and again the SemiRandom program all meant to improve the AI. The devs might not have done as much there as we would have liked but at least they granted us the tools to do what we wanted.

[Sombre]

No they didn't. They haven't granted anything people actually want for AI improvements. There are also relatively few mods or maps dedicated to improving the AI. Those that have been made have been largely ignored. Stop sugar coating everything.

I'm sure someone is going to try and take me to task over who 'people' are. I would classify them as those who actually had an interest in improving the AI and were willing to make mods/improvements. The ability to change the weighting of the AI, its scripting, decision making etc has always been a wishlist item and something many people have asked about.

Edit: This is no criticism of the devs. AI tools are obviously not a priority, which is cool. They'd probably be a total pain to implement.

[thejeff]

The AI isn't actually bad at using straight-forward battle mages. Some buffs, artillery, that kind of thing. It's not good at summoning, forging & equipping, communions, anything that requires planning or adapting to circumstance.

[Sombre]

Oh the battle AI is pretty good, considering, yeah. It uses evocations etc in a sensible manner.

But the AI doesn't deploy battlemages strategically or anything, it just chucks a few mages along with every stack of guys. Or sometimes just randomly chucks the mages at you without the army.

And does the AI actually script mages? I don't think it does. Other than hold and cast spell, hold and cast spell, attack for those it has deemed to be thugs. If you never script any of your guys you'll find they act exactly the same way as the AI mage support.

[thejeff]

I've never been quite sure whether it doesn't script them, or whether the algorithm for scripting is just close enough to the battle AI that it's hard to tell the difference.
I suppose a debug log would tell you. Just look for favspell.

[Gandalf Parker]

You can always turn on the comptrn switch and look at the AIs turn files. It doesnt script specific spells but then that would be a duplication anyway since the spell choices are written into the code and used to overwrite scripts. Be dumb for the code to argue with itself that way. But it does script. Im not sure how it decides but some units it prefers "stay behind troops" for major mages which makes sense since it allows the other code to just do spell selection. Then another mage is cast, cast, attack which made sense since it was an SC. And yes another would be just cast once then attack which made sense since it was a clerical giant.

It is fun to see the things that the AI can do that we cant. Ive seen scripted instructions such as cast, cast, fly attk rear.

And I wouldnt say that the AI efforts have been ignored. The devs have a number of AI items on the progress page including one we have yet to receive. And player-done items are available. NI maps are well known and seem to get a fair amount of use. Large maps get downloaded fairly often. And there is always SemiRand.

Besides, dont knock me for upholding the title beneath my name just as I wouldnt knock you for always upholding yours.

[Tollund]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

It is fun to see the things that the AI can do that we cant. Ive seen scripted instructions such as cast, cast, fly attk rear.

I use that one quite often, since it's one of the standard scripting actions available to all commanders.

[Gandalf Parker]

Oh. guess Im really rusty on my flight commanders. Should play Caelum more often.