Quote Originally Posted by hotingzilla
...Bascially, I want better AI instead of handicapping the player or boosting the computer AI in terms of morale.
This would be a dream come true indeed. We all know, though, that all the research into AI isn't trickling down to the game market.

Difficulty is most often implemented in a few afternoons of work by game teams, setting things like starting cash, unit stat boosts or degradation, and the like. Anyone who has played any of EA's sports games (like football -- not American, don't know about that) knows that difficulty level increases only result in unfair/unrealistic stat boosts for the other team. BTW, Pro Evolution does a heck of a lot better with realistic diff level.

But anyway, It's the same for strategy games on the whole -- the AI doesn't have different levels of complexity, it remains the same while the environment surrounding it changes.

Black & White, for all its failings, was a brilliant example of what can happen when a quality AI is put into a game. When the computer's behaviour becomes realistic AND unexpected (unexpected even to the programmers who designed it), then you've got a game that can be truly challenging.

Instead of changing the environment around the AI, you change the depth of decision-search, or make the AI an informed/uninformed agent, or add constraints to the decisions it can/will make, etc etc. There are so many things that could go into game AI that aren't being utilised...

Anyway, enough rambling. I do hope that RTW will be better than the MTW engine was, at least on the battlefield level if not the campaign as well.