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[NTJedi]

Twan said:
Hum as AI diplomacy has always been exploitable in any game having diplomacy IMHO it's useless to waste the time of someone "to prevent players finding exploits with the AI diplomacy".

The reason exploits can be found is because the AI is not able to learn from its mistakes the same as a human opponent. Unfortunately this type of AI computer opponent won't be created within our lifetime.
At least if one developer is focused on creating diplomacy he can limit the exploits and improve the diplomacy with patches. My suggestion at least prevents the usual exploit of sending small gifts to keep the AI opponents happy.

Twan said:
Now if AIs still works like St Patrik said ("AI only become aggressive when they notice that you are weak, or when you attack them", a good resume of dom2 AI) I think there is a flaw in the "diplomatic part of the strategic AI" that may be easy to correct with good effects on the SP game : make AIs attack not only a weaker player but the strongest one. I think it's very simple to implement : if a pretender is by large first in charts all neighbours should attack him instead of staying passive waiting for their turn. No need to make an alliance system for that, just make all the AIs aggressive against the potential winner once a critical power level is reached (usually by the player).

I've covered all this in another topic... perhaps we'll see the improvement within a patch or within Dominions_4.

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...b=5&o=&fpart=1

Sindai said:
I'm 100% sure several games already do that. GalCiv certainly does. Developers aren't stupid. If you can come up with a solution in the time it takes to write a forum post you can be sure they thought of it ages ago.

Developers are definitely not stupid... which is why we have poor AI opponents in our games. There's a few exceptions and these games are only average at best. Developers are thinking of their future careers and thus focus much of their time on graphics because it's easier to promote your career by illustrating what you can create with pretty graphics compared to some extensive AI formula. Firaxis has actually taken a good step forward in hiring someone who purely focuses on the artificial intelligence... so hopefully we'll see some better AI opponents in whatever next game is being developed.

Sindai said:
The real problem with diplomatic AI is that it is usually incapable of betrayal. If it is then you have the nontrivial task of making it smart enough to betray the player only when it's logical. If it's not done cleverly and communicated to the user it will only cause players to complain about the AI being "random" and "attacking for no reason."

Yes betrayal would have to be worked into the personality formula of an AI opponent and most games don't even have AI personalities much less a betrayal factor. The betrayal factor is much more complex... from what I've heard and seen CIV_4 and GalCiv_2 do some betrayal.