Is it AI challenging for you??

[Doomdark]

No, I have not reload anything or cheated, I don't cheat, its really no fun cheating, and actually, the GC was pretty easy up till around 1650 then it started to get though.

Well then, you must be a very honorable player... I myself am often tempted to reload when an early manufactory burns down, plague hits my core provinces or stability drops to -3, unleashing a civil war. Personally I find the early stages of the game much harder than the later; especially with Sweden, which needs to crush Denmark quickly in order to survive against the Danish-Russian vice, and also needs to manage a prosperous colonial empire to fund her research.

In those cases when I am still playing in the 1700s (for some reason I usually get distracted and start new campaigns instead), I too am usually pretty much dominating the scene, but I dislike completely ahistorical expansion.

/Doomie

 

[unmerged(2487)]

Its nice to read that

thanks Doodmark

 

[Pocus]

Well I find that you can have an hell of a challenge with the following settings:

Hardest difficulty, furious AI, no reload, IGC and real EU unofficial add-on. Play a minor like Prussia. Very good leaders, giving interest in the game, but with the big Poland Lithuania wanting to crush her...

Now you will sweat during the greater part of the GC.

 

[unmerged(2487)]

Pocus... isnt it too much??

A good game with realistic AI should give you realistic results, for example, playing normal/normal with... say Austria, you should finish the game with a few provinces more, or some provinces left in your empire. Of course, without cheatings!

 

[Pocus]

if you finish the game with just say half a dozen more provinces, you will find it quite boring: playing 300 years for this result is quite frustrating IMO. My setting is obviously for grognards, people who plays wargames or strategies games for 10+ years, but it can be toned down. Anywyay the main point is to play in a game where you are never sure that you can win. Prussia is good for that because there is always a greater menace hovering. This is not to say that you don't have fun: always something to do, and doing it the right way is the sole method to survive

 

[unmerged(1633)]

Originally posted by robo
Let me rephrase that then to:

I don't find the Game challenging at all, compared to say CIV or MOO.

I could care less about the AI, as long as the game is fun to play and challenging.

Ahh I remember playing MOO (Masters of Orion) on impossible. And those 100,000 literally little ships the enemy would send all at once and tear you to shreds. Never managed to beat that game on impossible and I still try sometimes these days.

As for the EU AI, it is not bad. Remember that a computer cannot make decisions like you would. Most decisions (as far as I've seen in programming, and I'm new at this) require an if, if-else or switch.

That is:

if this happens
Do this
if that doesn't happen
Do this

Like:
If enemy invades provinces
Send armies to defeat him
else
Move armies into enemy's provinces

Obviously you can't make the AI be totally brilliant in making decisions, its going to follow a coded routine. From what I've seen the only way to make an AI better is to make more variables, which guess what, makes it slower. So its a balance. Once again, I've only been learning programming for two and a half years, so I could be missing something, but basically that's the idea.

 

[Pocus]

You can do fairly complicated AI things if you spend some times programming it. This won't slow the computer down significatively (for non TBS and TBS like games at least), but you have to put quite some time in AI dev to achieve some results.

To be more precise, an AI can only be good if:

you spend a large time developping it (a full time developper is assigned to it in some game companies). (Especially true for strategy games.)
you are yourself able to plan good strategies, and have a clear vision of pitfalls to be avoided. (if you are not good, your are will be poor)

When your AI makes something dumb, like ignoring attrition or sending wave after wave of troops on a max fortified islands, ask yourself if some parameters are not missing in you decision-making tree.

Obviously good olde hierarchical AI, with finite state machines is the way to go if you want something solid. Leave the neuronal networks, genetic algorithms and the likes for others (far too experimental IMO)
If you are interested in the subject, you first stop should be at gameai.com (I'm not affiliated with them in any ways).


I know things are more easily said than done
Pocus.

 

[Sidney]

Originally posted by robo
I don't find the AI challenging at all, compared to say CIV or MOO.

Yeah well when I got my battleship killed by the AI's phalanx in Civ I about lost it. Chariots were also surpirsingly effective against tanks. The Civ AI:

1. Cheated like mad
2. Was totally irrational. Ghandi lived to kill.

The AI did not play to win but played to stop YOU from winning. Also, higher level of difficulty just meant "How much more do you want the AI to cheat".

MOO wasn't much better and the AI operated along about the same lines. Problem was it was obviouslthat the MOO AI cheated. The number of ships it could crank out at higher levels was clearly impossible- you'd see the Darloks pumping out more ships, in fewer star systems than my Meklons.

The EU AI is vastly superior. While it makes some gaffs it feels a lot more real- and since it is several years later it should. It does not have the kind of cheating involved that either of these did.

 

[unmerged(2055)]

Imagine how wonderful EU (or any strategy game, for that matter) could be with a learning AI. It's unrealistic to expect a small development studio to pioneer such a step, but the day is not far off when AIs will react to each player's actions, learn from their mistakes and gradually get better. <i>Black and White</i> strikes me as a showcase for a learning AI, and the old arguments that justified weak AIs -- processor cycles and time spent "thinking" -- don't hold up as gigahertz CPUs gain market share.

Getting back to reality, though, EU's AI is fundamentally solid and will benefit greatly from some fairly minor tweaks.

 

[unmerged(543)]

Well, I must admit that the AI is rather easy to beat.
mostly because it does not concentrate its forces on the weakest points.
but the real problem IMHO is that the game has been changed from the BG in a number of areas, where the BG was a challenge and a source of amusement in itself.
basically it takes about a hundre to 150 yts to gain a strong financial position (I am playing as England). the turns are 5 yrs. and the military rounds in each turn is 2-11 rnds (Random)all the administrative actions are cheaper and harder. the amount of colonisation attempts/turn and max colonies/TP per period.
When I play I usually find the CG very interesting the first 50-100 yrs. after that I tend to get bored, and start annexing the nations that attack me.
No, I don't use realoads at all, no cheats. And still i have conquered all of europe ecept prance (only half) and most of the east before 1700.
so in this game I'll see if i can get total concuest (except for the capitals of major nations of course).
So if I had more to do, I would be challenged by creating a _good_ nation, instead of a large one.

 

[unmerged(1939)]

IMO, to sum up the AI I'd say it's rather robust when it comes to managing it's own domain where it does a decent job. The point where it starts to do less well is warfare and particularly finding and exploiting the weak points of it's enemies (like the sweden example which was mentioned). Of course it could be later day doctrine, but something like strategic deep strikes are a complete unknown to the AI, it virtually never uses, say, it's navy to bypass an enemy's heavily fortified border provinces to wreak havoc behind the enemy lines (then again, behind the lines you get attrition. The other weak point of AI, it has scary fondness for sieging helvetia in the winter with a 100k+ army. The whole thing gets eaten down by attrition pretty quick. Not to mention the usual Russia-by-Winter sightseeing tours in the Napoleonic style, to call the results catastrophic would be an understatement.).

 

[Sidney]

Originally posted by tijlehto
Of course it could be later day doctrine, but something like strategic deep strikes are a complete unknown to the AI, it virtually never uses, say, it's navy to bypass an enemy's heavily fortified border provinces to wreak havoc behind the enemy lines (

The machine is quite good at this vs me...in fact it irritates me. I have, if I'm a large state, enemy armies rampaging free in my rear areas. Never large ones just large enough to burn things down. Never recall guys running scorched earth tactics by brunging their reasr areas in this time. You'd almost like to see a rule that prevtns you from entering a province without a supply line.