Chessack Posted February 17, 2002 Share Posted February 17, 2002 Pretend you are at LucasArts, and you are working on the Xpac. Your job is to slightly, minorly (not in a major way) tweak the AI (both unit AI, and strategic 'civ' AI, at your discretion). You can't change the engine or re-write the overall AI programming. All you're allowed to do is change a few things about the details of the AI, to make it a little "smarter" and more challenging -- so that to make it Hard, the computer no longer needs to "cheat." What would you do? My top 3 suggestions would be: 1. Make sure the computer knows enough to properly defend itself against air power. At the moment, the computer will only build a few AA towers, and a few AA troops, at most. I would try to get the computer to build more air defense -- in particular, building some AA mobiles, which are much tougher than AA troopers and can stand up to a greater pounding (and thus, dish out more damage over the long run). 2. Make the computer civilization more responsive to what he sees the player doing. That is, if a player air rushes early in T3, and the computer manages to turn the air rush back (this happened last night to me), the computer should do what any human would do -- get paranoid and start defending like crazy against a second air attack. Last night I air-rushed (as Naboo) the computer (as the TF). It had 5 AA troopers (shockingly), and it took out my 5-fighter early-t3 rush. However, when I went back in T4, with 30 fighters and 30 bombers, after another 45 minutes of being able to prep its defenses, the computer had a grand total of 3 AA towers and 6 AA troopers. That's something a human wouldn't do... and since the computer "knows" which units counter which other units, it doesn't seem liked it'd be too hard to have it try to build units that counter what it sees its opponent doing/producing. 3. Make the computer smart enough to figure out what "works" and what "doesn't." That is, if you rush the player with 20 strike and destroyer mechs, and the attack gets chewed to pieces, how stupid are you to just repeat the attack over again? It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to build a probability function that decreases the probability of including units in an attack after a rush with them in it gets trounced. So, those are my suggestions... what would the rest of you do, if you had your way? Again, only minor things that you could actually do in an Xpac, not total game re-designs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Diversion Posted February 17, 2002 Share Posted February 17, 2002 Well this has more to do with your own units but still... Many times my units have been firing at lets say a wall or prefab shelter only to ignore the enemy troopers(which can be inferior in numbers) who are picking the off one by one. The AI should have some kind of threat priority making them attack enemy fighting units before moving on to harmless structures. As it is now you can't leave them on stand ground and trust that you get the most out of them(getting killed my a force you would easily have beaten if you weren't occupied elsewhere). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chessack Posted February 17, 2002 Author Share Posted February 17, 2002 Right... I have not looked at the AI scripts at all (and probably wouldn't understand the language if I did), but it appears that they pretty much have a simple "nearest neighbor" attack algorithm. Attack any enemy building, object, etc, that is nearest them. There are some exceptions, but that's what happens most of the time -- and thus if the nearest neighbor is less of a threat than someone else, they end up attacking what we, as humans, see as the "wrong" item. I agree, that a better threat priority system would be nice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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