🚀 go-pugleaf

Ooh a sequel. I played the first one, and right now I am tediously
slogging through Arcanum so I can uninstall it and start playing Gal Civ
1 + the expansion.

"Brad Wardell" <bwardell@stardock.com> wrote:
>Back a couple of years ago there was a great deal of discussion on Usenet 
>with regards to the GalCiv I AI.  Most people thought it was pretty good but 
>others felt the military tactics were bad.  That while the AI provided a 
>challenge, it mostly was able to do so because it was more effective at 
>managing its economy/industry than the typical human and thus could 
>essentially "win" through brute force.
>
>In general, my view was that the AI worked pretty well but militarily was 
>disappointed. The main issue was its lack of coordination in projecting 
>military power into a given quadrant.  The result was hat looked like the 
>age-old "Death train" (That's where units uselessly throw themselves at a 
>wall dying with no purpose). There simply wasn't enough analysis on putting 
>units together and using them effectivley.
>
>A lot of this came down to being restricted to CPU light algorithms.  GalCiv 
>I was a sprite-based game -- no hardware acceleration.  So the graphics were 
>CPU bound.  Even though the AI is, and continues to be, multithreaded, there 
>are still very real limits on how much time can be spent generating 
>multi-turn strategies.  GalCiv II, however, is 3D-accelerated which has 
>freed up the CPU a great deal.  This has allowed for greatly expanded 
>algorithms during military endeavors without raising the hardware 
>requirements (in fact, on the typical PC, GalCiv II will run better than 
>GalCiv I did ironically despite immense graphics improvements and 3D 
>engine).
>
>A lot -- A LOT -- of work has been going into the AI of Galactic 
>Civilizations II in order to not just make it "challenging" but to make it 
>play intelligently.  There were significant chunks of the GalCiv I AI that 
>were scripted.  That is, the AI is programmed to do certain things due to 
>play-testing over and over.  This time around, we're trying our best to make 
>the AI build strategies based on analysis and not rely on scripts.
>
>The improvements in the AI have led to a lot of changes, probably the 
>biggest one being the elimination of the infamous "The AI knows where the 
>good planets are" issue that GalCiv from the OS/2 days on up to the 2003 
>release of GalCiv.  GalCiv II's AI has to build scouts and look for good 
>planets just like everyone else.
>
>To get an idea of what is involved in debugging such an AI, I chronicled one 
>such game.  Mind you, we're now doing several of these types of games each 
>day to tune the AI, to find flaws, etc.  The idea being that when the game's 
>released, the difficulty levels will determine how smartly the AI plays 
>rather than age old "Here's some money (or less of)" way that strategy games 
>have used as a crutch.
>
>Anyway, here's the URL to the AI debugging session entitled "Human/Drengin 
>wars".  I through in flavor text as well to make it more interesting to 
>read. ;)
>
>http://www.galciv2.com/Journals.aspx?AID=98513
>
>Brad