Playing Challenging Games Against the AI

[mlepinski]

Recently, there's been a lot of complaining on the Boards about the shortcoming of the AI. Some people have gone so far as to claim that single player was "unplayable" due to AI limitations.

I think a far more constructive use of time is not to complain about the AI, but to figure out given the AI's limitations how we can get the most enjoyment out of single player games.

My personal viewpoint is that I like challenging Single Player games. I don't mind if the AI starts out in an advantageous position as long as once the game starts it doesn't cheat. My limited experience has been that the best way to make a single player game of Dominions more challenging is to give the AI access to additional forts (so that it is able to recruit more national troops) either by starting with multiple forts or by putting random forts on the map for the AI to conquer.

Therefore, I put together a Perl script for generating random scenerios that:
1) Allows you to set the number of provinces the AI starts with
2) Allows you to set play against teams of allied AI players
3) Puts random forts on the map for the AI to conquer.

Version 0.1 of the script is available at:
http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~lepinski/dom2/

Additionally, at the same website, I have an example scenario for the Inland map which I made using the Random Scenario script.

The script syntax is:
perl RandScenario.perl foo.map TEAMS SIZE PROV PLAYER

Where foo.map is the map file on which to base the scenario, TEAMS is the number of AI teams, SIZE is the number of AI players on each team, PROV is the number of provinces the AI starts with, and (optionally) PLAYER is an empire which is off limits to the AI (reserved for the human player).

Currently, I have the script set the magic site frequency to 40% and the Independent strength to 6. I don't have a good sense of whether the AI is helped or hindered by high (or low) site frequency or independent strength. Please let me know if you have any insight about what settings make for the most challenging single player games.

The most significant limitation of the current Version of the script is that it doesn't do a good job of spreading the AI players out on the map. I intend to fix this in the future but today I didn't feel like coding up an all-pairs shortest path algorithm.

In any case, if you like single player, but you've never tried playing against the AI with extra forts, you should really try out the inland scenario I have on the above website. It features 3 teams of 3 AI players each starting with 2 initial forts and 18 extra forts randomly spread throughout the map. In my opinion, this scenario leads to a much more challenging (and enjoyable) single player experience than a "standard" game against the AI.

- Matt Lepinski :->

[Kuroth1]

Cool... I just got a book on Perl... Might need to use it at work....

Thanks!

[Gandalf Parker]

You might turn up the resources and turn down the independent strength. Both of those boost the AI.

Also random forts tend to help the players more than the AI. Since indepts with castles dont patrol or defence, a player can take a castle with a scout. Its a big game advantage (which I have abused often)


You might consider adding::

Assign an extra province or two to each AI but be sure to clear ir or give it troops since it has to fight for it in the first round

extra forts given to the AI (mark the extras as #nostart to avoid some nasty surprises)

toss extra magic sites at the provinces the AI starts with. If you dont clear the province first then the additional sites will only appear if there are spaces for them.

Boosted population, and some already granted defence points,

extra commanders with good equipment already assigned to them. maybe even heros

pre-researched spells for the AI

If someone really wants to help it kickk tail Id like to see someones random-opponents program (yours, leifs, mine) include a player-created pretender library to assign the AIs although we would probably need to wait for the "cheat switch" to turn off properly to be able to give it gods as good as it can make for itself

[ May 10, 2004, 02:01: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]