I have a suspicion about the AI

from GalCiv3 Forums

I have suspicions.

I suspect that the AI's development has been hampered by the tools it has been given to appraise the strategic situation and that it will continue to be hampered in the future unless those tools are improved.

Good decisions require good information.

If I'm not mistaken, the AI's decisions are greatly influenced by power rankings.

I suspect that the equations for determining player's power rankings were thrown together in Alpha and never revisited.

As you can tell, I'm a very suspicious person.

Given the gripes I often hear on the forums about the AI, and my own experience playing the game, I think it could use some work.

Just throwing it out there that work on the AI might best be begun by giving it better tools for its decisions BEFORE working on it's decision making skills.

31,668 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I think there are far more things than its decision making that gimps the AI:

One Action per Turn

Bad AI Governors

Bad Blueprints

Not knowing how to adjust the "population" slider for colony/transport ships

Not knowing what to do with defunct colony ships, you know them colony ships that are hanging around planets for turn after turn after turn because you beat the AI too them.

Limited number of AI Strategies

All I can remember off the top of my head.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I disagree that the AI govs are outright 'bad'. I feel that they're pretty good at building out planets, all things considered. When they were overhauled, it marked a huge improvement over what they were when the game had launched. There certainly are caveats to what I have stated, and there is definitely lots of room for improvement, particularly regarding how the AI utilizes unique, or culture buildings as well as building placement. 

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Last i checked building wise the ai used fixed stradegies. You can modify these stradegies. Other than diplomacy and victory conditions. What I'm suggesting is to assign a value to everything use logical comparisen tools. And read the stats to decide what to do. I think that is a better way. At least the computer would try to adapt to your play style. This would be dependent on how accurate your stats would be. 

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The power graph is definitely broken. The Yor were terrifyingly ahead on the graph, declared war on the apparently inferior (but technologically ahead so less is more and all that ;) ) Torians, and were swiftly left crippled.

Of course the Torians, then the Terrans pounded on the Yor for a bit but... didn't actually grab any planets. Meanwhile I nabbed 4 despite having nowhere near the ability to have taken anything from the Yor without the AI's hamfisted attempt to wage a war against them leaving them crippled.

But yeah that leads to the bigger problem, having obtained total dominance over another AI... they didn't make any meaningful inroads. I've had another game when the Terrans were totally cleaned out by the Altarians like literally 0 ships and shipyards left and then suddenly they made peace... Ofc I just helped myself lol.

So most recent two games on Incredible, this last one particularly when I had a terrible start but I just play on anyway because why nots lol, the AI gifted me a shot at victory by cleaning someone out that they should have nabbed for themselves really.

 

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I think you might touched a nerve here, it may be the case that the "power algorithm" is quite old. An update to that could improve the AI a lot.

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top


I have suspicions.

I suspect that the AI's development has been hampered by the tools it has been given to appraise the strategic situation and that it will continue to be hampered in the future unless those tools are improved.

Good decisions require good information.

If I'm not mistaken, the AI's decisions are greatly influenced by power rankings.

I suspect that the equations for determining player's power rankings were thrown together in Alpha and never revisited.

As you can tell, I'm a very suspicious person.

Given the gripes I often hear on the forums about the AI, and my own experience playing the game, I think it could use some work.

Just throwing it out there that work on the AI might best be begun by giving it better tools for its decisions BEFORE working on it's decision making skills.
End of quote

It's easier to criticize an ai system than it is to improve it or even  too give the details needed to see what/how/why an ai is coming to a poor decision.  Brad/Frogboy had a blogpost somewhere lonnng ago that went into detail on it, but I can't seem to find it.  

 

at a minimum, the folks at stardock need enough information to see specifically what it's doing to cause your disgruntled feelings... it is likely to be incredibly helpful if you can also show what lead up to the wonkyness itself.  here are a number of things you can do to help:

  • if you are seeing something that consistently seems screwy, save the game where it's happening & upload it to dropbox or something with a link in your post describing what is funky in as much detail as you can.
  • if you get in the habit of saving games with names like [mercs race game x turn xxx], you can easily pull out a bunch of gamestate snapshots that show how things were along the way.
    • more importantly in some cases, they will also give a way where adjustments & alterations in whatever caused the issue to be tested against the actual screwy situation

There are a lot of things since beta that were addressed following those sorts of details & provided foundation.