2 AI Questions

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

And I wouldnt say that the AI efforts have been ignored.

Neither would I, that's why I didn't. I called you out for saying we have been given all the tools we want to mod the AI, which isn't even close to the truth. It's pretty generous to consider it sugar coating and not straight up misinformation.

And player-done items are available. Large maps get downloaded fairly often.

Neither of which has anything to do with efforts to improve the AI. Are you just stating facts at random or what?

[Makinus]

Do SemiRand works with CBM 1.6?

[Sombre]

Yeah, should work fine with it. CBM doesn't really move IDs around or anything, just tweaks stuff.

[Arralen]

Yeah, I've asked for AI improvements for quite some time, and offered some hints, tests and further help, but I gave up on that some time ago, when I realised 2 things:

The AI is broken by (its) design.
Though there have been some minor improvements, in general it still does not really have "a plan", but mills around randomly from turn to turn (that's why you see those suicide attacks). This is because it grew from being a very simple ruleset for moving pieces of a very simple game: The first "Dominions" iteration had only a handful of nations, and no "specials", so it was basically grunts only. From PPP to Dom2 to Dom3 literally thousands of "specials" have been added to the game, but the scope of additional "if-then" clauses you could cramp into the AI turn generation is limited - and while it was sufficient to look at the available armies each turn and roll a dice to see into which of the neighbouring provinces they'll go, very obviously this cannot really work with move-3 units, flyers, stealth, teleport etc etc any more. Basically, the "understanding" the AI has of the game came to a standstill somewhen "around" DomPPP, while tons of features got added along the way.

There's no way any kind of "external" AI (help) can be implemented
.. simply because turn files/generation is closely interwoven with the copy protection scheme and cheat protection. It is simply not possible to read & write turn files with an external application (otherwise one could write an "automated player" which would appear to the server as a regular human player). Likewise, in-memory manipulation of the server, to alter the between-turn AI routines, wouldn't work either.
Best bet would be some kind of "API" that lets your dom3.exe itself dump the info, and read a turn script to make a turn file from it. But that would be a major code addition, and therefore will never happen - even small GUI changes won't be made, and that project would be several magnitudes bigger ...

So, to me the whole subject "Dominions 2.5" is pretty much over for quite some time now, because SP plain sucks, and I don't always have 8 friends around to play with, and I don't like either playing with 2 players + AI (or head-to-head), nor the fast paced blitz games which focus more on squeezing everything out of an unbalanced game and its poor engine, then strategic decisions.

Oh, before you ask (me) ... ask google for "Fall from Heaven 2".

cu there

[Sombre]

Why not just play (non fast paced) forum games? Those are the majority of games available after all.

[Arralen]

Because if I have 1 hour, or 5, and want to play a game, I want to play it. Not do a turn, wait a day. And, o.c., simply save & continue another day if time runs out. That's what SP normally is for, and maybe computer games in general, at least for me, and that doesn't really work out with Dominions.

Back to the "AI" topic - have a little bit to add which I forgot:

Another hint that the AI design is stuck maybe even before DomPPP,
is that in the beginning, when it is forced to build up its first army to break out of its home province, and it has one clear target (the home province of a neighbouring player, which it can see because it always knows all province ownerships) - then it can head straight for that target until it runs out of units in that army.
So as long as it has 1 army, and 1 target, everything is fine. No idea about reinforcements, though, and multiple armies and targets seem to confuse the algorithm completely ...

[Sombre]

You could arrange to play a weekend game with some people. Every weekend play for 5 hours straight at a given time, then save the game to continue next weekend.

That doesn't seem any less feasible than coordinating with 4-8 friends to do something.

It sounds like dom3 isn't the right game for you though, for sure, due to the SP being rubbish.

[Gandalf Parker]

There are also people who will always search for a better AI just to avoid trash talk. Even light-hearted trash talk. Im just not a confrontational or competitive person. Not in games, sports, hobbies, not in conversation, etc. The AI might suck but I still find the games more enjoyable. Unless of course the MP has some RPG variation in its setup.

[Sombre]

Non reciprocal trash talk is very uncommon in dom3 forum games and easily avoided (just don't post in the thread). I've never heard of people trash talking via the ingame messaging system.

If you are always searching for better AI I'm amazed you play dom3 at all.

[Gandalf Parker]

What would you recommend instead? VGA Planets? C-Robots? GalCiv?
Better AI doesnt necessarily provide the variety and replay that Dom3 does even with its "crappy" AI.