my god... the ai is terrible!

[Norush]

i was just wondering how you devs sleep at night knowing how bad the ai is when the player is in war. im not even bothering to give you an example. i will only say that the ai is at its worst when the player is at defensive war protecting an ally.
How is it going at the workplace? planning your next money grab, or is it perhaps like that you have unmotivated workers there? like in the game... is it a hint?
Could one blame this on the management? Or is it like "HEY JACK! DID YOU READ THIS LATEST POST AT THE STEAMS CK3 COMMUNITY FORUMS?!?! JACK I TOLD YOU TO FIX THAT ♥♥♥♥♥ AI OR U'LL GET FIRED YOU PIECE OF XXXX! NOW GET YOUR FEET OFF THE TABLE AND START CODING!

The fk is wrong with you paradox?

[Yaldabaoth]

Imagine a grown man raging this hard at a video game.

[Norush]

im not angry just baffled

[Spetsnaz]

No, if you were baffled you would give a example what happend and not go on and on about devs that just do their job and don't really have a say what will be added that would be management. You just started to rage about people not doing their job, that the just want money, how they can sleep at night and that they are unmotivated. I have complains for sure but give a example then just the AI is terrible will not help anyone.

[Norush]

well its funny how the ai often just walk by when ur fighting common enemy. Even when they have superior force and would absolutely win the battle.

[Norush]

or just wait at sea for you to attack when they are war leader and also have superior force

[shiggies713]

I look at it like this now, are there things that could be better? Yes.

But where else am I going to get a game that lets me roleplay the way i can in crusader kings? How much is $30 worth to you? Honestly I figure after i played a few hours i got my money's worth and I'm in the hundreds of hours now already. I've been playing pdx games for years and they've been pretty decent about eventually fixing things.

[Edmund Greyfox]

They walk by because battles don't do a lot for your war score unless you capture an important prisoner. The AI is focusing on trying to capture key towns that will give them the most war score gain.

But yes, the AI can be pretty dumb. There are only a handful of companies that make these grand strategy games, and pretty much all of them suffer from this same issue. In order to make the AI smarter and better able to react to what the player is doing it would require more frequent recalculations, which uses more system resources and leads into only top end machines being able to run the game without major lag issues. So, they either make dumber AI so more people can run the game, or they make it smarter and make the game unplayable for 50%+ of their customers.

[glythe]

Originally posted by Edmund Greyfox:

They walk by because battles don't do a lot for your war score unless you capture an important prisoner.

There are only a handful of companies that make these grand strategy games, and pretty much all of them suffer from this same issue. In order to make the AI smarter and better able to react to what the player is doing it would require more frequent recalculations, which uses more system resources and leads into only top end machines being able to run the game without major lag issues. So, they either make dumber AI so more people can run the game, or they make it smarter and make the game unplayable for 50%+ of their customers.

We have machine learning now and that is something we did not have when looking back at the games of my youth. That could be used to make games better but is not necessary to make a non cheating yet competitive AI.

I will counter argue that good scripting goes a long way to make an AI play better. What these games need is better scripting. If the AI was given better base instructions it would play much better. These games usually do not get good scripting because it takes years of extra development (which means more money). Almost all paradox games run on the "grandpa" Clauswitz engine that needs to be taken out to the shed and shot - like a 70 year old champion with one eye, one leg, infirmity and gout who still wants to be your personal bodyguard.

The strength of the computer is that it is a difference engine. It can very easily say this is more efficient than that. Most people making these games do not let do the computer do what it can do best. For example the civ series could let the AI "think" while the player is doing stuff. Even if it just rearranged tile use it would make the AI more efficient without needing any cheats.

And while CK3 has scripting it is very limited and formulaic. It could be so much better without needing to require robust calculations that slow down computers.

How difficult would it be for the AI to press the "station besiegers" button and then march an army to an adjacent province where the player was fighting. If the enemy has no army then they will lose as all their settlements become besieged with no opposition.

This is a perfect example of how we could have better scripting. If this happens with these limitations then you have a choice (the machine can calculate in a fraction of a second with little effort) to do ______ option.

[Norush]

Originally posted by glythe:

Originally posted by Edmund Greyfox:

They walk by because battles don't do a lot for your war score unless you capture an important prisoner.

There are only a handful of companies that make these grand strategy games, and pretty much all of them suffer from this same issue. In order to make the AI smarter and better able to react to what the player is doing it would require more frequent recalculations, which uses more system resources and leads into only top end machines being able to run the game without major lag issues. So, they either make dumber AI so more people can run the game, or they make it smarter and make the game unplayable for 50%+ of their customers.

We have machine learning now and that is something we did not have when looking back at the games of my youth. That could be used to make games better but is not necessary to make a non cheating yet competitive AI.

I will counter argue that good scripting goes a long way to make an AI play better. What these games need is better scripting. If the AI was given better base instructions it would play much better. These games usually do not get good scripting because it takes years of extra development (which means more money). Almost all paradox games run on the "grandpa" Clauswitz engine that needs to be taken out to the shed and shot - like a 70 year old champion with one eye, one leg, infirmity and gout who still wants to be your personal bodyguard.

The strength of the computer is that it is a difference engine. It can very easily say this is more efficient than that. Most people making these games do not let do the computer do what it can do best. For example the civ series could let the AI "think" while the player is doing stuff. Even if it just rearranged tile use it would make the AI more efficient without needing any cheats.

And while CK3 has scripting it is very limited and formulaic. It could be so much better without needing to require robust calculations that slow down computers.

How difficult would it be for the AI to press the "station besiegers" button and then march an army to an adjacent province where the player was fighting. If the enemy has no army then they will lose as all their settlements become besieged with no opposition.

This is a perfect example of how we could have better scripting. If this happens with these limitations then you have a choice (the machine can calculate in a fraction of a second with little effort) to do ______ option.

i simply agree. improvements on the ai is not productive money wise. company greed is what determines what they work on. paradox doesnt make games, they make money.

[mk11]

Alternatively, they could be trying for a historical feel, a lot of campaigns were really badly handled. Look at the whole Agincourt campaign - England launches an underequipped campaign, gets bogged down in a siege and then tries to run back to safety. Meanwhile, France sits around gathering forces and, eventually, decides to attack under the worst possible conditions.

[Obi Hung Kenobi]

whats wrong with the ai?

[St3amfails]

wait so a game modeling the behavior of what, by and large, were a bunch of illiterate, inbred meatheads that got their jobs based entirely on family tree with no regard to skill tends to make those rulers do dumb things?
Add in that a top down view of the world wasnt something any of them had available and it was entirely possible to simply not be able to find the battle in a timely manner....

[Edmund Greyfox]

Originally posted by Norush:

Originally posted by glythe:

We have machine learning now and that is something we did not have when looking back at the games of my youth. That could be used to make games better but is not necessary to make a non cheating yet competitive AI.

I will counter argue that good scripting goes a long way to make an AI play better. What these games need is better scripting. If the AI was given better base instructions it would play much better. These games usually do not get good scripting because it takes years of extra development (which means more money). Almost all paradox games run on the "grandpa" Clauswitz engine that needs to be taken out to the shed and shot - like a 70 year old champion with one eye, one leg, infirmity and gout who still wants to be your personal bodyguard.

The strength of the computer is that it is a difference engine. It can very easily say this is more efficient than that. Most people making these games do not let do the computer do what it can do best. For example the civ series could let the AI "think" while the player is doing stuff. Even if it just rearranged tile use it would make the AI more efficient without needing any cheats.

And while CK3 has scripting it is very limited and formulaic. It could be so much better without needing to require robust calculations that slow down computers.

How difficult would it be for the AI to press the "station besiegers" button and then march an army to an adjacent province where the player was fighting. If the enemy has no army then they will lose as all their settlements become besieged with no opposition.

This is a perfect example of how we could have better scripting. If this happens with these limitations then you have a choice (the machine can calculate in a fraction of a second with little effort) to do ______ option.

i simply agree. improvements on the ai is not productive money wise. company greed is what determines what they work on. paradox doesnt make games, they make money.

And i will counter that all you have do do is look at ANY paradox game and you will see the same issue. Every time they do something that improves AI it hurts performance and results in hordes of people posting about how the game is so laggy it's unplayable.

Maybe it's the engine. Maybe it's limitations in the tech. And maybe (and much more likely) its because it has to be able to run on all sorts of different rigs, many of which can't handle the level of constant recalculation needed to make the AI "smart" enough to react intelligently to what the player does. Not when there are umpteen hundred AI led factions that all have calculations going on that you never see.

[JC]

Every single RPG and strat game i've played for the last 10 years have had people complaining about how horrible the AI is. I don't recall a single game i own that has an AI, has not been complained about.

Personally i kinda find it funny, but here we are.

In the end people don't want a great AI because they want to win, but they want an AI that gives the illusion of playing well but just not well enough to give make them think they have outsmarted it. If you figure out how to do that you would become an over night Billionaire.

CKIII is getting some crusader AI update though as stated in the last notes in the next patch.


no game is perfect and i'm sure tweaks could be made. I dunno how open the AI side of things are in the mods but if it was easy to fix my guess is someone would be modding super AI for games all over. It's just not what's going on.

That said i think MIT or was it cal tech? i dunno someone made a killer AI for Starcraft that had even top comp players unable to beat it. It was on a artificial learning AI. You can DL it play it too!

[Ashling]

Originally posted by JC:

In the end people don't want a great AI because they want to win, but they want an AI that gives the illusion of playing well but just not well enough to give make them think they have outsmarted it. If you figure out how to do that you would become an over night Billionaire.

PVP games. CK3 even has a multiplayer function, big fun, people should check it out if they want harder intelligences.

Originally posted by JC:

I dunno how open the AI side of things are in the mods but if it was easy to fix my guess is someone would be modding super AI for games all over. It's just not what's going on.

That has happened before, people modding in better ai, and funnily they got hired on to Paradox to mix results.

Originally posted by JC:

That said i think MIT or was it cal tech? i dunno someone made a killer AI for Starcraft that had even top comp players unable to beat it. It was on a artificial learning AI. You can DL it play it too!

Yeah, those are super cool. It's funny how AIs have changed from needing cheats because it's unfair to the AI if it plays against a human to something that can destroy a game's human-built meta.