Personal Babysitter AI for late game

Please read post before voting, thanks

I think this idea will be pretty polarising but i wanted to throw it out there to see what you guys think. I love playing the Total War series but when it gets to late game I can sometime spend half an hour just checking all my provinces and preparing for the next turn. Luckily Total War games are turn based so I can take all the time in the world but PA is always running in real time.

Total War has an option for in battle where you can give AI control to a group of units, as if a captain was in command under you as the general. The captain can be given simple commands such as attack here, or defend this point and the AI will use those units accordingly. It stops you having to micro everything and basically makes huge battles more fun because you can focus your attention where you want without having to worry about units outside your view acting like zombies.

PA mid to late game will be on a much bigger scale than 'in battle' Total War games, arguably it will be even bigger than a Total War strategy map. I'm worried that it will be difficult to properly manage multiple planets at once (the spherical maps, while fun, will likely even add to the complexity). I would personally like to be able to give AI command to some of my planets so I can stop worrying about their micro.

I'm not 100% sure how this would work - i don't think the AI should be too clever, after all you are fighting a human player so the responsibility should be theirs to win the match. But at the same time, if I am watching planet A and engaged in a battle while the other player is watching planet B I might completely steamroll his base simply because he was elsewhere. That's not fun.

Perhaps the AI could organise the defense of a planet - by rebuilding destroyed units and structures and building AA when it's attacked by bombers etc. Or maybe it could even be aggressive, sending waves of units to keep the enemy on its toes. I even thought of this maybe being linked to a structure like a high tier AI processing core that, if destroyed forces your base to be all player controlled again.

Anyway specifics aside, I believe this would not only look awesome (there could be multiple active fronts of battle) but also I think make the game more fun, letting you focus on the strategy and allowing you to grow onto more planets easily.

Thanks for reading!

I don,t believe an AI should ever have control of your army or resourcss. However, I am all for smart unit AI. I want to see things like Engineers moving around to reclaim between waves of enemies, and falling back behind defenses after shots get fired. I would also like to see mobile units roaming around and actually aggressively engaging enemy attackers if they are ordered to do so.

However, an AI that actually organizes units into groups, rebuilds lost units and autobuilds defenses defeats the purpose of a sneak attack, which removes a LOT of tactical versatility.

I agree with this. If you have a tactically/strategically deep game, anything that let's you focus further on strategy/tactics is welcome.

1. its a game, and it will be used for fun games but also for tournament games. Imagine a tournament game, where Player A wins, because the AI did **** to Player B's economy or defense or anything

2. AI will never make you happy when it does something for you. You probably will always have more work repairing the damage or **** build order the ai did for you.

3. eventually this may be an idea for a mod, but nothing Uber should concentrate right now or within next 12 months. just my opinion

You can use a similar feature in the Hearts of Iron style games by having the AI command theaters of war that you designate. It's very handy not having to micro the entire Red Army for example.

This is a good point. Perhaps it could be an option at the start of the game if player AI assistance is allowed or not? I would imagine the hardcore tournament games would not use any assistance.

Thing is, an AI is always worse or better then the player. So you may end up with a bad player doing oke because the AI kicked in. Or a great player doing bad because the AI makes bad decisions.

I'll leave it up to Uber to decide if they want to spend any resource on this sort of thing, I'm sure Sorian already has his hands more full than he'd like :mrgreen:

I do know that Sorian (and/or Neutrino) have mentioned before that they want units to be as autonomous as possible; engineers that don't just idle but actively repair / rebuild without needing to have specific orders, combat units that know to retreat (or attack) when they come under fire etc. exactly because it allows the player to focus more on the larger picture, without having to micro everything because the units are dumber than mud.

Having said that, I find this sort of thing interesting myself, so I suspect I'll be looking at the unit AI as it emerges and seeing what / how much we can play with as modders. I'd also be looking at how easy (or not) it would be to build an actual player replacement AI, which could also be used as a partner AI.

Mainly as a result of my laziness TBH; I'd much rather have a script doing all the work for me if I can

An ai that just builds extractors on the metalspotts would be nice.

If you fight on 2 planets and you controll one it would be everything but not fun to build all the extractors.

Nice, I didn't know that was there position. Do you have a source on that?

I think the OP phrased his suggestion poorly (don't quit your job and become a pollster ) but there certainly is a difference between smart units and the game playing itself. If I want to order my units to patrol-repair-reclaim an area or zig-zag when approaching enemy units that just allows deeper control. If I want my armies to build, compose and choose targets themselves that's verging on the game playing itself.

The regular forum already has quite a bit on UI tools to make large scale games possible. I don't think this particular idea would work well. AI helpers need to be reasonably predictable and reliable for them to be useful. Otherwise you don't know what it will do and so it will probably do something bad. Instead of a large overarching AI we should have smaller high level tasks which can be assigned to make things manageable.

I'm struggling to find a post stating that, so I'm starting to think it may have been in one of the livestreams (which would have been Neutrino rather than Sorian) :/

That or it's the figment of an overactive imagination

It's about where you personally wish to draw the line... I, personally, would love to be able to add my own AI behaviour, either through modding client-side unit behaviours myself, or creating scripted / templated behaviours that the UI can implement for me. As long as it cannot do anything I as a player could not do, I would argue that it is equivalent to a player of sufficient skill manually performing those tasks.

I can also understand why people who are interested in the competitive side of gaming would want to ensure a level playing field. At its strictest, this would mean no difference in unit AI between players. If you were to allow modified unit AI for players, all players would need access to be able to do so, and you then end up measuring the AI writing skills as well as the actual game playing skills; not necessarily a bad thing, but it may want to be split into a different league (e.g. Unmodified League and Modified League) so you can compare like for like.

If I remember this correctly there is meant to be an issue of just how long a game could be....
Lets say we've got a 100 planets and 50 players, that could go on for hours upon hours. So perhaps an AI that carried on doing what you were doing if you needed to sleep. So when you came back to the game in the morning you'd still be in the game?
I'm not a programmer so don't know if thats even possible but I remember them talking about early in the kickstarter....

Well it looks like opinion is pretty divided at the moment, thanks for all of your thoughts!

When I comes down to it, I think its really about what system is in place to allow players to manage multiple planets and hundreds of units late game. If there is a cleverly designed UI in place to make this easy and enjoyable for players to do it all on their own, then that's great.

I'm a little skeptical that this will be possible however... I would love to be proven wrong but from what i'm seeing late game could end up requiring players to manage something equivalent to 3 to 4+ large supcom games at once. Some people might be able to handle that (and even enjoy it!) but i'm not a super pro-gamer, i'm just a regular gamer and I think i would need a hand to play without getting completely overwhelmed. That's why i'm suggesting some form of AI assistance.

The earlier idea of clever units rather than an overarching AI is a good one... whether this is an actual difference or just a superficial one - i'm not too sure.

For me it comes down to what will net the deeper gameplay. If an RTS were designed with custom AI helpers in mind, and I think we'll see one eventually, it could result in deeper gameplay. I don't think PA is that RTS though. I do agree that having this capability in the non-competitive games would be nice.

Paradox Games are well suited to AI helpers.

I came up with this way pre alpha.

And voted yes.

It will make a new player extremely effective if they have to focus less on repetitive tasks while base building. Some newbies will slowly chew through each click.

Also, it would be a great use of the badass AI they say they plan on getting sorian to really put some work in getting smart and powerful play out of.

To elaborate, here are my ideas on the subject:

-It would be a great set of training wheels if you could have the AI literally play for you in wholesale, and you just "monitor" it's decisions. It helps new players get the basic idea of how the AI logically decides where to build, what to build first, and what to do with units. Naturally, this should have an option to disallow in servers.
-There should be a way to hand over buildings/units to the AI and have them use it like it was theirs. This way, you could assign AIs control over bases you arent currently watching, or even assign multiple seperate AIs their own base to use, or instead of buildings hand the AI the combat groups of units you produce so they can go attack with it while you simply focus on production.
-Some specific tools would be nice too. Like 4 or 5 quick options to set up AI control for you. Like an option that automatically replaces structures or units when destroyed. Or an option that automatically produces units from idle factories when your economy is full and wasting extra resources. Or an option that constantly produces a set group of units, rallies them all up, and once all are built sends them against the enemy and starts building the group all over again. Again, this would be useful to constantly produce waves of attacks while just focusing on the main base or economy.

These sort of features would allow the game to be accessible to newer players, bridge the skillgap amongst the lower skills, set a more relaxing style of play instead of clicking in a hurry to try to save time over the opponent (because again, newbies will chew over each click and spend a minute deciding each structure they build), and trying to make sure to squeeze every resource out of your economy instead of letting them "full bar" away.

These options can always be toggleable in pregame options menu, and would make another new frontier of rts for Planetary Annihilation to step into by making players only need to be "upper management" if they desire.

I think AI should be completely mod-able, Both the server side AI that you play agents and the unit helper AI.

Agreed, but I'm against the AI playing the game for you.


Also, I think we may already be getting this with the standard unit patrol behavior like SupCom had. Expanding on the unit behavior settings and standing orders might be a good idea.

But, I will reserve my finial opinion for once we have had a chance to play with multiple planets.

I'm in favor of Macros (Wikipedia Definition).
The player should have a good set of tutorials. not an AI 'baby sitter'.

More on this topic:
Too much micro management....my rough idea to improve
The good side of Micro

I don't want an AI to make decision for me but I prefere not having to tell a unit how to fight (micro dodging etc.)

Ever since the shared armies feature came up, I've always imagined PA multiplayer like being played by multiple independent players on multiple worlds, in one huge game universe, where players would kind of come and go, and the game always goes on in real time, so long as there is someone playing it.

You'd basically join and pick a world and an army and then play, assisting in any active game, try to win and when you had your fill you'd leave and leave the game to the other players on the same army on the same planet.

But that would mean (though unlikely with sufficient numbers of players) that sometimes, an army on a world would be left unattended if no players were connected to it at the time. I figured the AI would take over the army at that point, until somebody connected again.

That way you'd kind of avoid the "I was winning but then all my units blew up when my internet died on me" situation, which is kind of the feature I figured Uber was going for with shared armies...