Battle AI Dev Diary

[Tamur]

Well...

Let's put it this way: writing a battle AI for chess is very simple in comparison to TW, because:

• Chess has a flat rectangular board with 64 square tiles. TW "boards" are thousands of times larger, are made up of no tiles, and contain terrain, elevation, and weather information.
• Chess units are individual pieces. TW units are made up of multiple individuals.
• Chess units kill instantly with any valid attack move. TW units can be counter-attacked.
• Chess takes no account of factors that TW does, such as morale, fatigue, etc.
• The moves available to a chess unit are very limited in scope, and executed instantly. The moves available to TW units are hugely more varied and executed over real-time.
• A Chess AI can use its turn to formulate a strategy. In TW there are no turns, so strategy must be created on the fly.

I'm sure there are other factors, but these are a few of the basics.

I'm entirely open to the possibility that a TW battle AI could be written which outperforms CA's. After TosaInu's posts earlier this week I dug around and found the start of my coding project, and am trying it myself using a stripped-down knowledge-base approach.

However, in my experience, it's a very, very difficult proposition. Chess is so nicely packaged for computation in comparison.