Q&A With Merni - AI

[Aquilegia]

What's your favourite piece of AI (code) in the game?

Will Xenophile AI's actually try to resettle/migrate xenos to their planets to get a mix of species?

 

[Aquilegia]

Not sure that will be great. If a IA can learn to play against a human, this IA will not try to play fun, this IA will try to play with the objectif we give and dont care if an Human think this is a good or a bad game style.

Only if you give it the objective to get as much power as quickly as possible. But if you as a player could give points to how well you like an AI ingame, a 'self-learning' might be able to come up with something interesting?

 

[RoboticManiac]

Yes they will. And if something is interrupting their expansion they will try to deal with it

How viable is it trying to fight an end game disaster by spawning another end game disaster?

 

[Spyhawk]

Only if you give it the objective to get as much power as quickly as possible. But if you as a player could give points to how well you like an AI ingame, a 'self-learning' might be able to come up with something interesting?

A self-learning AI is data driven, while a rating given by the player would be very subjective. No way you'd rate an IA favorably if he crushes you because you don't know how to play good yet.

 

[merni]

I have to say the combat seems confusing (how the target choise happens). Does better admirals (level&perks) can select better targets? Focusing targerts and such... Because you are suffering unnecessary lost even you have supperior army.

It depends on a lot of factors. For example corvettes are very evasive resulting in that they will not be hit as often. There is info for each battle so you can see why you are taking fire.

 

[merni]

Now i'm really lost too. Before i thought that Sectors are basically vassals without army\fleet with most of their income and all research sent to Sector owner. All internal politics, edicts, buildings, moving POPs and doing various stuff with them is managed by Sector Governor, based on given focus. But now we discover that Governors doesn't enslave\free POP. When who do it in Sectors? Who choose that kind of POP work on given tile? What about edicts, purging and such. What about rare resources?

Sectors are more like specialized factories for resources. Rare resources in sectors will be available for the empire.

 

[merni]

Does the AI have long range goals and is it able to derive strategies to obtain them or is it more reactive to current state?

It has ethos that affects its behavior more long term but generally it is reactive to its current state.

 

[merni]

Hi Merni

Are the a.i alliances dynamic like in EUIV where they can be friends and enemies in the course of the same game or is it more static where they will remain allied until the end?


Also in one of the twitch streams, Shen declared war on a empire of equal strength... As he invaded the enemies outer systems there fleet was no where to be seen. After occupying a couple planets he moved his 4k fleet to the enemy home world where they had 6k sitting. The a.i fleet won the battle forcing shen to retreat, but despite the a.i having a larger fleet and having just won a major fight... they agreed to be vaslised as the war score had ticked up so much through occupations while the fleet sat at the capital planet. Is this working as intended or was this a bug from the pre-release version? The vassal who ended up with 13k fleet remained loyal to shen even when his fleet was only half the strength, i was waiting for them to declare an Independence war but they never did.

Not working as intended! And yes, the alliances are dynamic.

 

[merni]

Thanks for the reply. That is to some degree what I expected based on the observed AI behaviors in most strategy games. So would you say then that the objectives of an AI in a GSG (or a strategy game in general) is make rational, but possibly non-optimal, decisions while providing a personality to the game? I.e. so that a player will feel like you are playing against another civilization. That optimization is not the most important factor since such a system will feel robotic if it is to deterministic and ruin the immersion?

Yes, that sums it up pretty well!

 

[merni]

For some reason, the alert system is saying you quoted my earlier post. Is this a glitch I should report to the forum tech people, or did you just edit the post?

I think it was my fault, what was your question?

 

[merni]

Hi merni,

Do the anomalies are drawn from a common pool from which every empire can get anomalies or does every empire has his own.

Practical, can you research a system and find anomalies in it even if it has been surveyed by an ai empire?

Are you able to discover an anomaly on a location that someone else already surveyed? Or are they specific to the one location and always discovered when surveyed?

The anomalies are individual so you can get anomalies on the same locations as other empires.

 

[merni]

Can the AI be modified to work better with any changes made by mods?

No but I like the idea, thanks!

 

[merni]

Do you use some standard mathematical model to get all these different modifiers and values together to meaningful numbers? Or do you mess around with numbers until the result is satisfying?

We play the game and tune it accordingly.

 

[Jorlem]

I think it was my fault, what was your question?

This was my earlier post:

I was watching those vids too, and at the start of episode seven, when he is fighting the mining drones, the drones do a fairly decent job of focus firing on one of his ships at a time, so I wonder if it might be a weapon thing. Arumba's ships had missiles, while the drones had lasers, so perhaps lasers can focus fire, while missiles get to ignore shields?

Thanks.

 

[merni]

How viable is it trying to fight an end game disaster by spawning another end game disaster?

You might just find out?

 

[merni]

This was my earlier post:


Thanks.

Yes, shields, armor and evasiveness will affect the outcome depending on the weapons.

 

[Jorlem]

Also, another question I thought of while reading your responses:

They don't adapt to their enemies right now. Partly as it is costly to update your ship design. May be changed in the future but no plans as of now.

Any chance that in the future, we might be able to get resources by scrapping a ship, or partially scrapping it, by "upgrading" it to a cheaper design?

 

[merni]

Also, another question I thought of while reading your responses:


Any chance that in the future, we might be able to get resources by scrapping a ship, or partially scrapping it, by "upgrading" it to a cheaper design?

I like the idea!

 

[DàbiànLājīdàrén]

Do you focus on making the AI play "human like" or are there other more important goals for designing the AI?

 

[Jorlem]

Yes, shields, armor and evasiveness will affect the outcome depending on the weapons.

I was actually referring to Arumba's complaint in his LP that his ships weren't focus firing on one specific ship, and were instead spreading out their fire to damage all the ships in the enemy fleet roughly equally. However, I also noticed that one of the enemy fleets he was fighting did appear to be focus firing the top ship in his fleet list, before moving on to damage the next when the first was destroyed. That enemy fleet was armed with lasers, while Arumba is using missiles, so I was wondering if being able to focus fire on a single enemy ship with all the ships in your fleet is a specific property of laser type weapons. If true, this could mean that lasers are superior to other weapon types, as they'd be able to destroy enemy ships faster, reducing the opposing fleet's offensive capabilities at a greater rate.

I like the idea!

I believe this is something similar that most 4X games have, where you can get some resources back by disbanding a unit. That you could do this anywhere in your territory never made much sense to me, but if you need to bring it to a shipyard for salvage first, or sent a constructor to salvage the parts...

Hey, what if when your own ships are destroyed, they'd create debris that you could send a constructor to in order to salvage the remains for resourses, and deny the debris to the enemy?