[Suggestion] AI fight

from Elemental Forums

One of the things that is missing in most of the strategy games and missing in ALL RTS  TBS games that I am aware off is the ability to set up matches of AI vs. AI. For whatever reason I enjoy doing it. Moreover I hope that we will be able to produce custom AI and include into game. We can even have a competition who writes the best AI. Something like that was done in Kohan (RTS). I still remember those superiour AIs wrote by community that made game so enjoyable in skirmishes and simply watching AI fights.

So, my wish list would be

1) Make AI easily modifiable (produce documentation may be)

2) Make possible to chose particular AI for particular side (AI may be side specific, but there could be a choice of different AIs for the same side)

3) Make possible to setup AI only match, where you remove FOW for the user to observe the fight on the whole map.

3.a) Would be nice if one could check FOW for particular AI player, to see what things it have seen and explored.

4) Make it possible to continue run turns without pressing turn button in AI fights, make it possible to pause and inspect everything for any of the sides, make possible to go step by step (turn by turn) as well.

5) Would be really cool, if at any moment of AI fight you could take control over kingdom and continue game as in single player.

6) Complimentary to above, in any single player game, one could relinquish control to AI and continue the game as AI fight. Then at any moment chose to stop AI fight and chose any side and continue game as that side.

7) To avoid temptation of cheating, one should be able to disable those items for particular game when you start it. Say a check box "locked game - no AI fights, no side switching" somewhere, and if you start game as "locked" then you would not be able to switch to AI fights or to other side. And only such locked games would be scored properly.

8) Ability to upload AI through the game interface (same as with maps)

The above suggestions would greatly simplify development of AIs and also give me personally (and possibly other players) lots of enjoyment.

elemental
3,666 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Spartan by Slitherine allowed for ai script writing also. I remember a ravinhood101 ai from Kohan II that was awesome to play against. One of the best written ai's in the game. If it found you early you were dead usually. It came at you in hordes.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

One of the things that is missing in most of the strategy games and missing in ALL RTS games that I am aware off is the ability to set up matches of AI vs. AI.

Age of Empires 2, IMHO one of the greatest RTS games ever, had exactly such a feature!

In its heyday there were lots of AI tournaments, many of them organised by fan sites like the HeavenGames forums. The games were usually recorded with AoE2's in-game recording mechanism, and distributed through the sites so fans could download them and replay them in their own copy of the game.

There's still a small AoE2 AI scripter community active today. You can find them at http://forums.aiscripters.com/

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Tonto_Stormboy, reply 2

One of the things that is missing in most of the strategy games and missing in ALL RTS games that I am aware off is the ability to set up matches of AI vs. AI.
Age of Empires 2, IMHO one of the greatest RTS games ever, had exactly such a feature!

In its heyday there were lots of AI tournaments, many of them organised by fan sites like the HeavenGames forums. The games were usually recorded with AoE2's in-game recording mechanism, and distributed through the sites so fans could download them and replay them in their own copy of the game.

There's still a small AoE2 AI scripter community active today. You can find them at http://forums.aiscripters.com/

Sorry, I meant that there is no TBS that has this feature. I have corrected the original post.

Some RTSs allow you to watch AI fight (including Starcraft II, by the way), but only some of those permit AI editing. Kohan in my experience, was the best one (Kohan II as well), but you are right, AoE had this capability as well. Please note that all the games I mentioned here are RTS, not TBS. I had never seen this future in TBS, but I think for the game with such stress on mod-ability, it should be a must.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Femmefatal48, reply 1
Spartan by Slitherine allowed for ai script writing also. I remember a ravinhood101 ai from Kohan II that was awesome to play against. One of the best written ai's in the game. If it found you early you were dead usually. It came at you in hordes.

Yeah, Ravinhood was one of the best AI that rushed very well. The other one was storm...something. Those were good days...

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

By the way, does anyone know if AI is moddable in this game at all? Is it hard-coded or is it in one of those xml files? Unfortunately I can not check it myself due to recent uninstalation of beta 4 thinking that the game release happen for beta testers.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

I think currently it is just Frogboy and Co's code, but opening up the AI to players and modders would be an excellent way of improving the AI, and gaining access to many more human-hours than just the one organisation can supply.  And it is true, we can mod other stuff, so why not the AI? |-)

So Frogboy, could the AI code be opened up at some stage (sooner rather than later would be great!)?

Best regards,
Steven.