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AFAIK, Empire: Total War uses this concept (not just F.E.A.R. :p) to great success (haven't played it, so I wouldn't know how well it works in strategy games,

Sorry, I don't have time to talk about our AI atm, but I was not aware of there being an AI in Empire Total War.

But yeah, we've been using goal-oriented plans driving our ai's since eu1. You can't determine hiw the AI in the older engine works by the cripple-scripts that it has to make the AI just do historical things.
 
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On a sidenote:
Im curious.
I may post in this thread, but in cant post in Johans poll about the next video.
I also can not vote.
Why?

I think the forum is setup that in polls only registered customers can vote.

and I THINK that this forum has copied the settings from eu3 for now.

will be fixed i think.
 
AFAIK, Empire: Total War uses this concept (not just F.E.A.R. :p) to great success (haven't played it, so I wouldn't know how well it works in strategy games, but the AI blows me away in FEAR2, sometimes quite literally).

if I remember correctly from what one of the devs working on FEAR said, one of the reasons the AI turned out so well was due to bugs making the soldiers do irrational things in certain situations making them appear more like human opponents :D

also, it was cheating like hell: http://www.gamespy.com/pc/fear/698080p1.html
although, in clever ways. Their AI makes for lots of fun gameplay.
 
@Johan:

Hi there Johan. This is Kieran from the Creative Assembly, the chaps behind Empire.

Forgive me if I cut to the chase, It's not particularly sporting (Or accurate) to suggest Empire 'has no AI'.

I appreciate I may have misread your remark, but I note several other readers have taken it the same way and in two subsequent posts you havn't bothered to correct them, so I can only assume it was your intention to take a swipe at Empire.

If I'm wrong, please do let me know. Otherwise meet me on Hang Man's Hill at midday, the weapon is swords.

Yours,
Kieran

Sorry.

Just was irritated after paying for the game at releasedate and basically winning every single battle first try.

Then having the AI being unable to build armies that were challenging (even if you had no clue about the gamemechanics, which the manual did not explain.)

Basically I was able to knock out denmark in 1 year as Sweden by just marching the troops i had at start to christiania and kobenhavn.

It felt like "build something random, and move armies randomly at weak positions". The AI in eu1 was a bigger challenge and that one could not handle more than 2 targets per country.

We've been slaughtered for bad ai in games as well, but I'd expect that if you got a budget over 1M USD you'd be able to have at least 1 guy at AI for a year :)
 
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Make it interesting.

Find some freeware/open source/whatever game with a programmable AI (I'm sure there's some version of chess coded in Java or something that could be ripped to pieces for this purpose).

Then it's Johan's best AI coder versus Creative Assembly's best AI coder in a contest to assemble a winning AI in two weeks (by winning I mean winning two matches in a row).

chess isnt a very good test to be honest. its very different from your average computer game in how the AI is handled. "Go" though might be interesting >:) good humans still win that consistently against computers afaik.
 
Although I do apprecaite that everyone has an opinion about ETW (apart from me it seems as I never bought it). I think that perhaps we could move this dicussion back onto HoI3. We've all had our fun but let's play the discuss HoI3 game now, otherwise King we throw a sulk and take the ball home with him
 
3. I though EU:Rome sucked at release. I stopped playing it within 1 month of buying it and have never gone back to it.

give it another go now after patches + expansion :)

EDIT: I swear i didnt see the above post when I posted :p
 
I'm no expert but don't see how a grid system makes things harder for the AI. When considering a move, its destination is a simple coordinate, and it should not be too hard to have it avoid likely threats along the way.

If you think those things are easy and trivial in processing power, and can actually explain why, then you are a few hours from being the richest man on the planet.
 
True, but that's why one cheats and precomputes as much as possible, leaving as little as possible (in an elaborate trade off versus memory usage) to be actually calculated on the spot.

I have no idea how CA implements this, except that it is undoubtedly far beyond my own skills and knowledge, but I'll be damned before I believe they actually run a full search or stepwise optimization on the raw grid data without some form of optimization whenever an action has to be taken. That's what threat maps (created at beginning of each turn, updated locally throughout the turn), regionally preferred routes, and many other tricks are used for. :)

Yeah.. but still a map of just.. 1500 x 800 pixels.. like the lowres map we used in EU3 is still 1,2 million possible locations. Its ALOT of memory after a while for lookup tables, and sorted areas. Just updating and propagating information takes alot of time.

For comparison, Eu3 has about 1/1000th of the amount of possible locations, and thats why we stick with province-based maps.
 
There are two types of AI: one that acts somewhat intelligently to execute plans or solve problems, and one that basically just moves things around to make things in the game seem alive.

The first requires a lot of work and clever design, the second is not that big a deal and can also not really be called an "intelligence".

Paradox works with the first type of AI, while CA has the second type. I agree that by one definition, CA does not actually have an AI. I have personally always wished for them to perfect their games by actually bothering to create a seriously good AI for them and thus making them playable on the same level as the Paradox games.
 
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