Some thoughts of AI in strategy game after Playing warcraft III
by Matthew Shapiro · in Technical Issues · 12/01/2002 (5:38 am) · 4 replies
Well my brother came into town and made me be totally unproductive yesterday. We networked my laptop and my desktop together and played warcraft III all day against each other. While it was fun It got fustrating some times, mainly when fighting against the computer. The computer was practically impossible to beat and kept kicking our butt at the beginning of gameplay. I didn't understand it untill we had a computer on our team and I could see what he was doing.
I thought I"d do this small little rant to alert people who are making a strategy game really. Now as I was mentioning, even on easy the AI was practically impossible 2vs2 (2 people against 2 ai) Finally I figured out why. The AI wasn't built with any handycap to consider how long the same actions take with humans. They are able to easily both manage parties while doing stuff at their base with ease, able to make dicisions in a snap, able to skip going throuhg menus to select abilities or buildings. They aren't brought down to speed of actual people.
Now yes there might be some people that can be that fast but as I said we were playing easy which shoudl indicate that we weren't that fast. This setup made the game not fun to play at all against the computer, which is a shame as it would be fun to play it on car trips or whatnot. Anyways just a rant of mine.
--KallDrexx
I thought I"d do this small little rant to alert people who are making a strategy game really. Now as I was mentioning, even on easy the AI was practically impossible 2vs2 (2 people against 2 ai) Finally I figured out why. The AI wasn't built with any handycap to consider how long the same actions take with humans. They are able to easily both manage parties while doing stuff at their base with ease, able to make dicisions in a snap, able to skip going throuhg menus to select abilities or buildings. They aren't brought down to speed of actual people.
Now yes there might be some people that can be that fast but as I said we were playing easy which shoudl indicate that we weren't that fast. This setup made the game not fun to play at all against the computer, which is a shame as it would be fun to play it on car trips or whatnot. Anyways just a rant of mine.
--KallDrexx
#2
WC3 trash talking aside, I agree with you to a point about The AI.
I see the problem more of a lack of strategy altering in the computer. It doesn't think of the various ways of utilizing the units, or reacting well to what you put against it.
But then again Blizzard really makes these games now for the online play, with little thought of computer AI. The online play is what fuels their player base/sales. SO they spend little time with the computer ai and more time with the balance of the game. They didn't even have different levels of AI till well after the release of the game (in custom games).
01/10/2003 (7:43 pm)
I hate to ruin your rant about WC3 AI, but the Warcraft AI is actually quite easy if you know the game. Its not playing/knowing the game properly that leads the computer to be able to trounce on you.WC3 trash talking aside, I agree with you to a point about The AI.
I see the problem more of a lack of strategy altering in the computer. It doesn't think of the various ways of utilizing the units, or reacting well to what you put against it.
But then again Blizzard really makes these games now for the online play, with little thought of computer AI. The online play is what fuels their player base/sales. SO they spend little time with the computer ai and more time with the balance of the game. They didn't even have different levels of AI till well after the release of the game (in custom games).
#3
Missions are a bit better because the AI can be scripted to perform certain actions, as if to simulate a real opponent (I need to go here and do this first, while also trying to achieve this objective, and after that, I do these things, then I win.)
But I have yet to see many games where the AI doesn't either have an expert system driving it (so that it always knows the Right Move; for instance, if it can determine damage factors numerically, it can know that building so many of such and such a unit will always beat so many of some other unit...), an artificial advantage (clicks infinitely fast, has no attention, etc.), or a lot of human input (missions; scripted AIs; half-life's AI is this way, for instance).
There are a very few games that don't follow this rule. For instance, the Creatures franchise uses neural nets and other techniques to simulate a learning, biological entity. This works pretty well... but I don't think you'd want to lead your Creatures in battle.
The problem with neural nets is that they _can_ be trained to behave properly but if they screw up or they act suboptimally, it can be extremely difficult to work with them. "Oh, look, 5% of the time the neural nets on my units make them seek and destroy each other! Whoops! Too bad I don't know which of these constants control that behaviour..."
The battle ground between the AI and humans needs to be flattened. And that's all I say for now on that topic.
01/10/2003 (8:54 pm)
But even in "real" games, the AI doesn't win because it's being intelligent, it wins because it knows the Right Way to play (ie, I perform these actions in these orders with these conditionals and I win.)Missions are a bit better because the AI can be scripted to perform certain actions, as if to simulate a real opponent (I need to go here and do this first, while also trying to achieve this objective, and after that, I do these things, then I win.)
But I have yet to see many games where the AI doesn't either have an expert system driving it (so that it always knows the Right Move; for instance, if it can determine damage factors numerically, it can know that building so many of such and such a unit will always beat so many of some other unit...), an artificial advantage (clicks infinitely fast, has no attention, etc.), or a lot of human input (missions; scripted AIs; half-life's AI is this way, for instance).
There are a very few games that don't follow this rule. For instance, the Creatures franchise uses neural nets and other techniques to simulate a learning, biological entity. This works pretty well... but I don't think you'd want to lead your Creatures in battle.
The problem with neural nets is that they _can_ be trained to behave properly but if they screw up or they act suboptimally, it can be extremely difficult to work with them. "Oh, look, 5% of the time the neural nets on my units make them seek and destroy each other! Whoops! Too bad I don't know which of these constants control that behaviour..."
The battle ground between the AI and humans needs to be flattened. And that's all I say for now on that topic.
#4
My game has a fairly simple rule set and suits automation pariculary well but has an aweful lot of combinations so I tried out the Neural Net system, but it just seems to fumble around making fairly stupid errors :( Which was no doubt my fault for not training it properly.
As with Warcraft III the best way to beat the computer is play to it's (artificial) weaknesses. The most human like play I got out of my AI was to construct three strategies (virtually rock-paper-scissors) and have it swap strategies when it was either losing badly or detected what strategy it thought the opponent was doing.
01/13/2003 (4:58 am)
There's a whole load of research that goes into AI. I've been playing around a bit with it in my own game now, and as it's previously been mentioned. It's mighty easy to write an AI that will wipe the floor with a human player. The trick seems to be in making it dumb enough to be beatable but not look stupid at the same time.My game has a fairly simple rule set and suits automation pariculary well but has an aweful lot of combinations so I tried out the Neural Net system, but it just seems to fumble around making fairly stupid errors :( Which was no doubt my fault for not training it properly.
As with Warcraft III the best way to beat the computer is play to it's (artificial) weaknesses. The most human like play I got out of my AI was to construct three strategies (virtually rock-paper-scissors) and have it swap strategies when it was either losing badly or detected what strategy it thought the opponent was doing.
Torque Owner J. Donavan Stanley
The true challenge in game AI isn't to make computer driven players that can trounce the humans. The challange is to make AI that's dumb enough to make human mistakes.
I could be wrong but I think neural nets could solve a lot of these types of problems. If you want a dumber oponent simply don't train the net as completely as you normaly would. Then you'd get an AI that makes non-opitmal choices now and then.