After a search I didn't see what I was looking for, anyways... My idea is this, I want an AI that basically does a matchmaking set-up with you, so you play a few games against an AI and it figures out how good you are, then you can play against it and it will fight you at a difficulty to match your skill. I find it is fun to fight people or AIs who are closely matched to your skill level so having an AI that can do that would be really great for people who prefer to fight AIs over other people. And this would ensure that you face something of a similar skill level so you wouldn't be overtaken but you would also have to fight to win, the "goldilocks zone" as it were. I know this would be really hard to implement so please don't smash this post with "that can't be done!" lets just talk about the philosophy or possible implementation ideas. I don't know how to program an AI so maybe we could start with that.
What you basicly want is to several AI's with different strengths, and after a few games it tell's you how strong you would perform again a human. The main issue is that a AI plays very differently from humans, you can probably tell if a player is very weak and maybe if he is a bit stronger than that, but there is currently no AI in RTS games that can replace a very strong player. However, you could create some games against AI's and observe the behaviour of the player to find out his most likely strenght. Things that can be monitored: - scouting behaviour - the kind of buildings build in the first minutes - etc i'm pretty sure experienced players have different playing styles that can be recognized. However this is not needed if you have a proper ladder system. You might loose some games in the beginning but that just part of the game. The way people behave is much more important than the initial strenghts when you start playing online. Just make love AND war
http://faforever.com/faf/leaderboards/r ... p?board=AI The highest, big, cheating AI is ranked like a below average noob player. The AI in PA will be better, but it's probable that the highest-non-cheating AI will not top the cheating one from FA. That's sadly not a scale good enough to rate people. And to be honest, I would be annoyed to have to play 5 games against an AI. The only challenge I got from them is to find how to exploit them.
Since that ladder does not contain any humans the scores cannot be compared to the human ladder. I am pretty sure that the cheating AI can beat average players in normal setups. At least if the players dont know how the AI plays in advance. But yeah, letting the AI rate a player is probably not gonna work. AI's are just too different from human players.
For an nice matchmaking ai a good AI is needed.... i realy like to see a good AI, that can beat average players without cheating + an extra hard mode with cheats
Yeah, i know that current AIs for supcomm cant do this but seeing as Sorian is giving this a good crack im hoping it might at least get better. I also just realized that Starcraft II is implementing a system like this with HotS which makes me very happy, along with their unranked play mode. That kind of thing would be awesome to see in PA in some form or other.
However, the week AI is still a problem. even with Cheat the highest difficulty is not that challenging, also the starcraft AI works mostly scripted and the playstyle does not variate much. If there would be AI update to match the meta game; that would be great.
The AIs are ranking versus players. They are not in the same leaderboard because it wouldn't have any sense, but they rate on the same scale and so are comparable. But it's true that knowing what the AI is is helping.
