Just why is the AI so bad!!??

**noodle** · 10-14-2004, 16:55

HicRic - To be fair, I have had a challenge playing MTW, but frustratingly it never seems to last.

I see your point about it being a fine line although I reckon you could code in simple rules which would give each faction some individulaity and make it look like they were not robots making perfect decisions whilst still improving things...eg have the AI make perfect economic decisions but impose penalties on the income it has to work with to simulate wastage, bad management etc.

Building up better enemies via the -ian cheat or pre modding them via the data files doesn't really seem to help either.

I guess I could get 10 mates or so to come round, and using the -ian cheat have them control the economies of all enemy factions, while I keep my eyes closed.

**English assassin** · 10-14-2004, 17:23

There is one very simple change they could make to the AI that might make things better. I saw it as an option in computer Risk (must have been years ago), and it was simply that if you took a territory off an AI player it remembered that was "its" land and basically threw the kitchen sink at getting it back. (And for MTW also code it so that there is none of this "The XXXX decide they cannot win the battle" nonsense.)

It doesn't sound like much but believe me you could beat the AI with your eyes shut with that option turned off, but with it turned on it was almost impossible to win.

I think its right that the AI's economy is half the problem, to be honest although its a total cheat I wouldn't mind a crude system that just gives the AI the average of what a human player would get from a given province in a given year regardless of what it does with its trade ships or whatever. Also a complete ban on the AI building peasants would be no bad thing.

**VikingHorde** · 10-14-2004, 19:29

Some of the AI problems can be solved, also the trade "cheat" that the player can use by building a huge trade empire. In my XL mod, I reduced the trade value of goods, increased farm income by 30%, changed AI building setup, increased unit morale and most of all removed peasants. The AI now builds a lot more HQ units (large stacks!), battles are harder and the player dosn't have the trade advantage. My mod also adds more units and factions to the game. Try it out.

**Procrustes** · 10-14-2004, 21:17

The problem w/ an AI - and I don't think there will be a way around this until HAL comes along - is that it can't learn, it will only ever know what was tediously programmed into it. I mean, I made a lot of the same dumb mistakes that the AI makes during my first campaign. I thought about it, read the manuals and checked the boards, and made a lot few mistakes the second time. The AI however didn't learn a damn thing and never will.

My imperfect solution has been careful use of the -ian switch to give the AI a hand here and there, and to use a few self-imposed rules to keep me from mauling the AI too badly and ruining all the fun.

**HicRic** · 10-14-2004, 23:41

Originally Posted by Procrustes

The problem w/ an AI - and I don't think there will be a way around this until HAL comes along - is that it can't learn, it will only ever know what was tediously programmed into it. I mean, I made a lot of the same dumb mistakes that the AI makes during my first campaign. I thought about it, read the manuals and checked the boards, and made a lot few mistakes the second time. The AI however didn't learn a damn thing and never will.

My imperfect solution has been careful use of the -ian switch to give the AI a hand here and there, and to use a few self-imposed rules to keep me from mauling the AI too badly and ruining all the fun.

The day someone makes a complex AI that can learn and improve in complex areas such as a Total War game will be a fine day indeed-it will provide and endless challenge as we constantly must find new ways to defeat an opponent who learns and counters our tactics.

Until then-wait for an MP campaign in a Total War game. Human players on all factions would make things difficult-and I doubt an AI will come along any time soon that would be better than playing real, skilled people.

(Of course, there are difficulties in making such a thing, like the time it would take to play through and so on.)

**EatYerGreens** · 10-15-2004, 02:46

Originally Posted by Procrustes

The problem w/ an AI - and I don't think there will be a way around this until HAL comes along - is that it can't learn, it will only ever know what was tediously programmed into it.

I can't begin to imagine how it's possible to boil down something as complex as strategy into a series of binary yes/no decisions, so I don't envy the task of the AI programmers one bit. (oops, unintentional pun there)

However, there's plenty of room on most people's HDDs in which to create additional data files so I don't see any major obstacle to a system whereby the AI can 'learn', after a fashion. For each AI faction, it records the strategic decisions they made in a campaign and the ultimate consequence of what it did in each province it owned, economic improvements added, buildings constructed, the troops it built, the moves it made with them and so on.

If it never lost a particular province throughout a campaign, it knows it can follow that same event path for that province in a subsequent campaign, 'expecting' some degree of success. Where a province ended up being lost, or the faction got totally wiped out the sequence of decisions leading to that are on record and next time, this can serve to inhibit it from going too far down that same path a second time.

Better still, a record of what the player did at any given time - especially useful where the player ultimately won - since this behaviour can be copied when you play as a different faction next time. Ultimately, you'll end up playing against 'yourself', in a way...

On the other hand, the AI resolves all its battles (with other AI) by autocalc, where numbers seem to count for more than quality of troops and skill in their use. No doubt the fate of the AI trying to exactly copy what you did (including attacking large forces with small ones) will rapidly diverge from your previous success and the rest of the event tree becomes inapplicable, leaving it on its own, perhaps carving out an alternate route to ultimate failure...

With or without the ability to learn, one thing which pure applied logic can't do, which people can, is those 'what the heck' decisions about things to build or whether or not to launch an attack, say. They may have more to do with emotion (revenge for example) than reason but sometimes can still pay off. No AI would be able to anticipate such actions, nor emulate them.