🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <yZudnZa7eZR...@comcast.com>, bwar...@stardock.com 
says...
> 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.

An invariable problem, I suspect.  You need strongish AI to strike a 
balance between opportunistic raiding/exploration/dispersed defence and 
attacks in force.

Part of the solution is often to change the rules.  Civ4 did away with 
separate attack and defence parameters, and instantly the cost to the 
AI of ill-judged cavalry raids was reduced, though not eliminated.
 
> 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.

That was more of an issue because some people were claiming that the AI 
played by exactly the same rules, I suspect ;-)

Of course, some people just don't understand the difficulty of writing 
an AI and will always complain when sleight of hand is used to create 
an effective computer opponent.

> 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

Looks interesting.  I still suspect that computers will not play 
strategy games at strong human level until they develop near human 
level intelligence.  Cheats or handicapping of some kind will always be 
needed.

PS

- Gerry Quinn