AI- real smarter or bonuses?

[johnny_b_good]

I just wrote in one topic and one thing came on my mind- can CA make that AI on H/VH battles act smarter or again we will have bonuses (morale boost) for AI?

[Tongera]

I would perfer better AI, depending on the difficulty setting. But bonuses are going to be needed until the AI improvements can be done.

[Omar Nelson B.]

They will say that the AI is "better than ever" or something like that but in the end we will all find out that the AI is not "run by SKYNET" and that they do still cheat.

[Bethencourt]

I prefer multiplayer, multi- meaning more than two players.

[Queen Annes Revenge]

I don't think it's reasonable to expect an AI to compete with a person that's good at a strategy game without bonuses. Frankly, it's a lot harder to improve AI when it has varying degrees of "intelligence", I don't know if anyone recalls, but there was a debate long ago if Medieval II is more difficult on Hard or Very Hard.

Playing the AI on even footing should be "normal" and handicaps should be applied at advanced levels.

[Fallenempire]

I think it is possible to have an AI that relly does chalange the player without cheating. If darthmod is able to do that to the player than it means it is just a matter of polishing thier CA's AI.CA never seems to be able to grasp the full potential of thier AI in the vanilla game, but mods like total realism and darthmod has done so with each instalment in the franchise

[Surgeon]

I'd rather they just make the AI as smart as they can and simply give it handicaps or bonuses depending on difficulty. Probably easier and more efficient than coding several different AIs of varying intelligence anyway.

[SonOfCrusader76]

If we're talking about what we want - then smarter AI at higher levels, definitely. If we're talking about what they can do, I reckon we're looking at AI bonuses.

[The_King]

It shouldn't be too hard to make, Darth Mod did it.

[Bethencourt]

Maybe if you give different AI to different generals admirals you can get more varied battles.

In campaign it is done for different factions.

Or maybe create 50 different plans of battle and add randomly one to the AI before each battle. I think this is smarter than giving each unit an individual reaction to my units movement and actions. To avoid the pack fenomenon that you could see in previous games, units going without any formation from left to right and back again untill the end of the battle. So given a battle plan the units can react when acomplishing their part of the plan. Now it seems they go headless.

And it is realistic, all generals have some plan to execute in battle, no matter later it does not get perfectly done .

And going further on it, the AI could evaluate the superiority/ inferiority situation so the selection of the plan would be done betwen a list of offensive plans or deffensive plans depending on the situation. It doesn't mean that it always has to be deffensive when in inferiority(in quality or numbers), or vice versa, some general personality factor could be used.

[ShrikeArghast]

I would not expect markedly better AI, given that this is the last game to utilize the current engine.

[Evillemon325]

Sorry, in all the games I've looked through- AI right now just isn't that great. Everybody always requests that higher difficulties actually be difficult due to challenging AI, but there's really no AI in the world that can come close to an intelligent human player. It's been that way for a long time. Shooter AI's have really been the same since the original Half life. Maybe in 50 years higher difficulties will be difficult due to actually smarter AI's, but alas, nowadays we have to rely on bonuses and that won't change anytime soon. The AI will be marginally better in R2TW, just marginally. But I do think it'll be slightly better.

[The Useless Member]

I hope they don't offer the pathetic excuse saying the AI is better due to bonuses.

[Petroniu]

Ideally, you'd want different levels of AI for each difficulty level. They could do at least one for easy and normal, normal being the basic and on easy the AI is handicapped and another one for hard and very hard where the hard one is the basic (with no cheats or at least no bonuses) and the very hard one is where you as the player are handicapped and the AI retains its cheats and bonuses. That's what I want to see. Unfortunately, they make 1 AI level and at hard level the AI gets bonuses (cheats are there to ensure economy and game development, as far as I see it) and at very hard you are a little handicapped while the AI retains its bonuses. But sometimes is so obvious. I mean, in Shogun 2 I saw armies being spawned in 1 turn out of nowhere or damaged armies getting almost full replenishment in 1 turn in early game when provinces weren't by far developed to be able to do that. If they really worked on it hard and give it time, instead on working out the stupid graphics so much (they're already freaking cool, where the heck do they want to go with them?) we could have a much better AI. But that's still yet to be seen...

[PlacidDragon]

It will be through bonuses, i have absolutely no faith in CA to be able to produce an AI that is even slightly competent (they havent managed this far, so why should they suddenly manage it now ?).

So i expect that on very hard, the AI will be showered with free money, and bonuses will allow a unit of enemy peasants to rout your veteran frontline cohort.

[The dead one]

It will be through bonuses, i have absolutely no faith in CA to be able to produce an AI that is even slightly competent (they havent managed this far, so why should they suddenly manage it now ?).

So i expect that on very hard, the AI will be showered with free money, and bonuses will allow a unit of enemy peasants to rout your veteran frontline cohort.

Humm. I disagree. I think they improved it very much with S2 from napoleon and previous games. Also the new patch with the 40 unit cards in FOTS. The AI was much better to. Atleast in my experience. And if you play it with dartmod it gets even better. They are just starting to know how to program the AI and make it challenging. And they actually try to do so. It's impossible not to notice that the AI has improved alot since its prequels.

That's what I think. So I have no doubt that they will do an excellent job with this game to, and keep improving it

Bt I´m still very sure that the AI will get bonuses on H/VH and the human player on Easy/normal. Hopefully normal will be equally this time.

[PlacidDragon]

Humm. I disagree. I think they improved it very much with S2 from napoleon and previous games. Also the new patch with the 40 unit cards in FOTS. The AI was much better to. Atleast in my experience. And if you play it with dartmod it gets even better. They are just starting to know how to program the AI and make it challenging. And they actually try to do so. It's impossible not to notice that the AI has improved alot since its prequels.

That's what I think. So I have no doubt that they will do an excellent job with this game to, and keep improving it

Bt I´m still very sure that the AI will get bonuses on H/VH and the human player on Easy/normal. Hopefully normal will be equally this time.

Im crossing my fingers that you'll be correct

[SonOfCrusader76]

Humm. I disagree. I think they improved it very much with S2 from napoleon and previous games. Also the new patch with the 40 unit cards in FOTS. The AI was much better to. Atleast in my experience. And if you play it with dartmod it gets even better. They are just starting to know how to program the AI and make it challenging. And they actually try to do so. It's impossible not to notice that the AI has improved alot since its prequels.

That's what I think. So I have no doubt that they will do an excellent job with this game to, and keep improving it

Bt I´m still very sure that the AI will get bonuses on H/VH and the human player on Easy/normal. Hopefully normal will be equally this time.

Actually I have to agree there - the battlefield AI in FoTS seems much improved - they're crafty buggers now!

[Tim_Ward]

Well, it's not like they didn't already make a stupid AI (Empire) an ok AI (Medieval 2/Rome) and a good AI (shogun 2), so it's not like multiple levels of AI competency is beyond them but the problem is that their best AI to date is still not good enough to challenge a decent human without bonuses (which is a very significant challenge).

[General Maximus]

I prefer better AI. I have seen CA claim that AI will be better, but then after sometimes, they claim that "AI still has some small bonuses."

Some small bonuses? So Hanover was fielding a larger army than the superpower of France which owns more more than 3/4th of the map? And with just one province?! Seriously...

They made a very good AI for Shogun II though. And Napoleon's AI got somehow better than it was since last patch.

They could at least improve the Shogun II's AI. That would be enough for now. I fear they'll try to make AI even more perfect and may end up making the game worse and delaying release.