Your A.I. of choice

[Dooz]

With all these complaints against the RTW A.I. (I'm not saying their unwarranted, because they are) I was just curious as to what game's A.I. any of you have ever truly loved and were happy with for a long time.

I know it kind of sounds like a weird "tone" here, like I'm pissed off or making fun of those who complain about the A.I. but I'm really not. I just can't word it any better

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

Civ III AI was great!

Again and again the computer amazed me with a combined Diplomatic agreements and movements that was brilliant! I still working on beating the AI on highest level. Almost used.. something about 28 tries.

Rome - Total War and Shogun - Total War has a high level AI even know it has some mistakes (Just waiting to be shot by archers etc.).

[Akka]

I concur. Civ3 AI is very good. I'm not a hardcore player, but I'm somehow seasoned, and though I kick the butt of the AI easily on Regent (the "medium" difficulty), it's mainly because I know how to play, and not because the AI is inane. I recognize, though, that part of the good job of the AI comes from a downplaying of the complexity of the game in some aspects, but still the results are quite impressive for me (of course, real veterans are able to win consistently even in totally insane difficulty levels, but it tells more about their abilities than about AI shortcomings).

On a totally different kind of game, the Unreal Tournament AI was excellent. It successed in making a "human-like" AI, with bots that acted in a somehow "natural" way, making human-like mistake and so on.

[Tamur]

Chessmaster 9000. Not joking! If someone --- that someone who gets paid to do such things or has time to do it for free! --- would abstract a wargame's rules to the level of a chess game, and then define constraints with the same detail, that someone could make an AI that is insanely difficult to insanely easy, weak in some areas but tough in others, etc. And yes, I'm dreaming.

[Chelifer]

IMHO, one of the best battle AI was in Homeworld series. It felt good to me.

[Red Harvest]

Battlefield map AI I would go for Sid Meier's Gettysburg & Antietam. Sure it could be beaten, but it could put up a very good fight in the process.

Strategic map AI...hmmm...not sure. Actually, Spaceward Ho! is very entertaining since it uses a mix of AI characters/abilities. Completely different kind of game, but I like its approach to AI. Simple and fun.

Overall campaign atmosphere: Red Baron 3D. It wasn't scripted. It had a dynamic campaign and you could deviate from your mission and explore other areas looking for a fight. Now the AI pilots were fairly easy to beat once you got the feel for it, but the campaign was impressive. I even keep my old 3dfx Banshee card around and put it in at times just to play. I would love to mate that campaign engine to an IL-2 flight sim (fixing the laser cannon AI gunners of course.) I've never seen a campaign engine to match it. Sad, because it was really just a mission generator for a campaign map, but it did missions for an entire front, not just a few squads.

[BobTheTerrible]

The best AI I have seen is in Civ3. Even on the medium difficulty, the game gave a huge challenge. It took enough people banding together over the internet to share their tips and secrets to make it possible to beat the games Hardest AI. I nearly beat it once myself (interestingly enough it was Rome who stopped me dead in my tracks, after annhiliating the chinese, vikings, and english in short order... ahh those were the days) But the AI's once weakness in Civ3 was its military operations. It used artillery and tactics effectively, the only thing it failed to do was to keep its units together in one "stack." If it had done that, the hardest AI would be literally impossible (the AI getting production bonuses and such on that level)

EDIT: Yes, come to think of it, the AI in Gettysburg/anteitam/south mountain was excelent. I never played the game for any extended period of time, but there were certain places I couldn't beat due to the AI being overwhelmingly good. It didn't help that I knew little to nothing of civil war tactics, hehe.

To make a good AI, it takes alot of hard work... There's so much for it to consider, especially in the battle map of RTW.

What I would really like to see, is AI generals having different "strategies" depending on the battle, and by winning the battles developing the strategies more. As it stands now (what I have noticed at least) is that there is 1 battle map AI. It gets slightly modified depending on nation and other conditions, but it is the same AI each time. If you were to do a battle, and make certain moves at certain times, the AI would do the same thing each time provided that the conditions were exactly the same.

Now, that's pure fantasy because although the gaming market would be capable of that, it would be impractical because of the time needed to make the AI.

As a side note, does anyone know how the AI in, say, RTW is created? Is it still the standard long lines of "if, then" code, or does it actually use the so called "fuzzy logic" stuff?

[Dooz]

I loved Civ III too. Favorite game to date. RTW close second... or tie... hmm...

Anyhoo, if there are any other game genres from which you like the A.I. feel free to list those too.