For Backers Only: AI building stuff

I think it's because people are used to economic multipliers being "baked in" to difficulty settings. Plus it's not obvious what that feature does or how it works to a player base that will likely have never seen such a setting before.

Seems about right except they're complaining about the normal ai being too hard.

What we really need is an interactive tutorial (at least somewhat) to get these players off the ground. Most new players jump right into GW so they don't have economic multipliers, and don't know **** about playing the game.

Frankly, with even the vaguest sense on how to play the game, the normal AI in GW should be a piece of cake. The problem is people don't have that atm, and would rather bitch about it rather than go find a gameplay video.

So, I thought you were kidding about this... so I went to check the Steam Forums.
And...

But you know that wasn't so bad and I thought it was just an isolated incident.
But then...

It's everywhere. If you look back over the last week there are countless threads on this topic. People are getting really angry.

Victory!

my god. i suck at this game, and the normal ai is still almost brain dead to me. i guess they just don't know the controls. some of them don't even know how to que up buildings. sorian, would it be hard to just copy paste some o the guides on the forums into a little tutorial button on the main menu to help newbies?

There's already a tutorial though.

(although it is somewhat outdated, Brad should update it some time

it is from an early beta biuld and is mostly useless as it dosent talk about queing, infinite biuld, or hotkeys among other important things.

It mostly seems to be from developers who have made a bad AI.

There's some AIs where you build a wall, you put a hole in your wall, you put archers behind the hole. The AI will always attack the "weak spot" in your wall, and will always get dominated. You can stop defending the entire wall, you simply have to defend the kill zone.

I'm pretty sure that happens in Black and White 2.

I think an issue for the coders is making a consistent AI. A consistent AI is easy to test, but it isn't necessarily "good", because it's predictable and easy to exploit, and if it's adaptive, its predictively adaptive.

The other thing of course is that sometimes suboptimal decisions are better than optimal decisions.

I'm not really sure how you would program the importance of proximity and location into an AI. e.g. the on movement per turn rule in Civilisation V really hurt the AI's military ability, and the economic cheats don't really do much for it by comparison.

I kind of sympathise with the second guy... if you were to come with any other RTS game, with a research tree, you would expect that you would be able to research up the same technology level as the AI and not be in a situation where you're simply defeated by superior tech, unless you're playing one of those campaign levels where the objective is to lose but not get crushed until x minutes in.

On the other hand, as that isn't what PA GW is, he has to learn how to play PA.

My main problem with his post is that he's saying the game was a waste of money simply because the AI was too good.

That's like saying Counter Strike: GO is a waste of money because other players are too good.

Is Dynamic Alliances support planned? I know that in most games with this feature the AI simply ignores it.

Looking at the reviews on steam does not give me faith in human intelligence.

so many of the "not recommended" ones spend less than a couple hours at it, some even as little as 10-20 minutes before giving up and bitching.

I think the biggest problem right now actually is the brokenness of GW. People just don't get that it is first pass, and is going to have lots of brokenness.

renaming the multiplayer button back to Play, or maybe Multiplayer/Skirmish would really help guide people to games where they have full tech access and can see all that the game is supposed to be.

The funny thing is that when I got a friend into PA, we got thrashed because he was learning the game, and so what would be a normal game to me was like playing with a handicap. Once he got the hang of the game, the AI didn't completely roll him (and in turn me) each round. He was impressed with the AI because it doesn't mess around.

My gripe is that the AI needs to learn when to stop making stuff. For example, in our last game we had a planet 100% locked down, but an AI teammate kept on making air units that were totally useless to the fight. Instead, it could have been making more ground units to send in through the teleporter linked to a moon that we were invading.

Of course, that would make the AI even tougher but I like that the AI isn't stupid. I like the AI being difficult, because it makes you stay aware of the overall situation. I don't do a whole lot of PvP (though I enjoy it when I do) so not having a brain dead AI that is predictable is a good thing. None of this hand holding AI that some RTSs of late tend to throw out. Well, I can predict the AI will rush my base and try to go all Terminator on my sorry hide.

For long term enjoyment, the ai needs to be as good as possible, as anyone who likes PA a lot (= probably plays a lot) will eventually become quite good at the game and therefore wants a decent challenge.
So, there is no questioning that

Of course, easier difficulties need to be there, as well, but I would prefer to have a "cheap" easy difficulty (like handicapping the ai siginifcantly) than a "cheap" hard difficulty (making the ai cheat to provide a challenge).

Most games do the latter because developing a decent ai is very hard but I can see Sorian creating an ai that can be challenging to an experienced player without cheating if he is allowed to work on it long enough.

Isn't there already a means to handicap the AI via resources?

Also, I find it a little funny that people complain when an AI is "too easy" and then will complain that the AI is then "too hard". I feel like for some of those comments, they weren't going to like PA anyway and needed something/anything to hate about the game. This isn't Starcraft (a good game in its own right), and (fortunately) not Supreme Commander 2 (which was a decent RTS if you didn't call it Supreme Commander).

If you have the time sometime, would you post a guide to adding a unit to the ai's build list complete with an explanation for the lines added to each file?

?