AI fizzling out in long games

[Thorveim]

Something I noticed across my games is that the AI... Seems to just get dumber if the game lasts for a long time. In the early or mid game no complaint, the AI is both agressive and sends a full force fleet to defend worlds you attack, but if the game lasts long enough it seems it just... Stops. I've had cases where I could bomb planets into nothingness slowly with a lone titan and the AI wouldnt respond at all even if it had its own titan. Its even more jarring where the AI has half the solar system under its thumb in a 6 players map (so definitely has the fleet and ressources to respond) yet it wont bother sending any fleet to defend its own capital

And that was the the second to hardest AI whick I dont expect to see holding back. I think this needs a fix because it makes really long games end up in a sad grind where you only really deal with stragglers and planetary defenses while fleet fights vanish entirely

[Paddy]

Originally posted by Thorveim:

Something I noticed across my games is that the AI... Seems to just get dumber if the game lasts for a long time. In the early or mid game no complaint, the AI is both agressive and sends a full force fleet to defend worlds you attack, but if the game lasts long enough it seems it just... Stops. I've had cases where I could bomb planets into nothingness slowly with a lone titan and the AI wouldnt respond at all even if it had its own titan. Its even more jarring where the AI has half the solar system under its thumb in a 6 players map (so definitely has the fleet and ressources to respond) yet it wont bother sending any fleet to defend its own capital

And that was the the second to hardest AI whick I dont expect to see holding back. I think this needs a fix because it makes really long games end up in a sad grind where you only really deal with stragglers and planetary defenses while fleet fights vanish entirely

I'm actually noticing something similar in my almost 5 hour campaign. I have a ceasefire with an empire that now holds around 20 planets. They called it off but won't attack any of my planets despite really only being three of us left. I started boosting my defences in all my planets which border their territory but i'm starting to think there is no point

[Osawa Ascendant]

I noticed it once earlier as well, though I can't figure out what is actually causing it. I've played through 3 very long games so far (about ~8 hours total each), and 2 of those games were fine -- zero bugs encountered, other than one I already reported about the Kortul not benefiting from phase jump speed increases.

The third game had this AI fizzle occur, where I realized that the remaining 3 empires (who had all been pretty viciously aggressive up until that point) suddenly stopped coming at me. Curious, I went looking for them, and found massive fleets for all 3 of them just idling in the gravity well of a minor faction's homeworld. Not attacking them, not attacking each other, not attacking me. Just chilling.

I was frustrated enough that I quit out of the program after about 5 minutes of trying to goad them into action. Maybe tomorrow I'll load up the autosave to see if restarting the program/reloading fixes whatever it is.

[Hurricane]

It's called scripted ai... once it's ran it's script it cant think for itself and just derps

[Laughing Man]

Originally posted by Hurricane:

It's called scripted ai... once it's ran it's script it cant think for itself and just derps

AI in games uses approaches like state machines, behaviour trees or graph based stuff like goal oriented action planning (GOAP). Nobody is writing lengthy agent behaviour scripts that just... end.

That said this is definitely a bug and I've seen the same.

Originally posted by Mr. Huge:

Curious, I went looking for them, and found massive fleets for all 3 of them just idling in the gravity well of a minor faction's homeworld. Not attacking them, not attacking each other, not attacking me. Just chilling.

Perhaps this is the key? Might be a bug involving interaction with minor factions, maybe the agents are stuck in a state where they're trying to do something that isn't a valid action like attack a minor faction that they have an alliance with?

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by Laughing Man:

Originally posted by Hurricane:

It's called scripted ai... once it's ran it's script it cant think for itself and just derps

AI in games uses approaches like state machines, behaviour trees or graph based stuff like goal oriented action planning (GOAP). Nobody is writing lengthy agent behaviour scripts that just... end.

That said this is definitely a bug and I've seen the same.

Originally posted by Mr. Huge:

Curious, I went looking for them, and found massive fleets for all 3 of them just idling in the gravity well of a minor faction's homeworld. Not attacking them, not attacking each other, not attacking me. Just chilling.

Perhaps this is the key? Might be a bug involving interaction with minor factions, maybe the agents are stuck in a state where they're trying to do something that isn't a valid action like attack a minor faction that they have an alliance with?

What u on about... how do you think AI works... from scripts...

They will get build orders and then follow a basic AI pattern and just cycle that pattern, the ai cant think.

I play enough strategy games to see this... totalwar, stellaris, endless space...

[Laughing Man]

Originally posted by Hurricane:

Originally posted by Laughing Man:

AI in games uses approaches like state machines, behaviour trees or graph based stuff like goal oriented action planning (GOAP). Nobody is writing lengthy agent behaviour scripts that just... end.

That said this is definitely a bug and I've seen the same.


Perhaps this is the key? Might be a bug involving interaction with minor factions, maybe the agents are stuck in a state where they're trying to do something that isn't a valid action like attack a minor faction that they have an alliance with?

What u on about... how do you think AI works... from scripts...

They will get build orders and then follow a basic AI pattern and just cycle that pattern, the ai cant think.

I play enough strategy games to see this... totalwar, stellaris, endless space...

Yes and I was just highlighting that those "scripts" don't just follow through some finite list of actions and terminate. Playing games doesn't really give you an innate sense of how these agents work under the hood.

[HappyCamperBubbleBelow]

I have seen AI trapped perm in the star gravity well because my trade ships were constantly jumping in and they were going for the kill... to the point any enemy ships that went into the gravity well were trapped for all time in my trade coalition black hole.
Ai I needs to ignore trade ships and escorts when it wants to do something.

[Thorveim]

Originally posted by Hurricane:

It's called scripted ai... once it's ran it's script it cant think for itself and just derps

the AI cant be fully scripted as it just wouldnt mix with randomly generated or player-made maps; it just wouldnt really function in those.

and the issue here is more that if the game lasts long enough it just stops doing anything ratehr than keep doing what it was doing before, which was more than fine. It may be something like if a value gets too high, the AI bugs out and stops acting anymore

[Alan]

Originally posted by Hurricane:

Originally posted by Laughing Man:

AI in games uses approaches like state machines, behaviour trees or graph based stuff like goal oriented action planning (GOAP). Nobody is writing lengthy agent behaviour scripts that just... end.

That said this is definitely a bug and I've seen the same.


Perhaps this is the key? Might be a bug involving interaction with minor factions, maybe the agents are stuck in a state where they're trying to do something that isn't a valid action like attack a minor faction that they have an alliance with?

What u on about... how do you think AI works... from scripts...

They will get build orders and then follow a basic AI pattern and just cycle that pattern, the ai cant think.

I play enough strategy games to see this... totalwar, stellaris, endless space...

In Total war, this does NOT happen, I have over 10 hours on the War-hammer series alone, the AI will always play just as well as the first 100 turns regardless if your on turn 400. So you stand point just dropped. It was the older Total games like Empire than had poor AI.

Some games like RTS which are continuous sims, look at age of Empires and many more like it, as well as this title, the AI are just not built very well, take a look at stellaris, the AI has no issues. Its the quality of the coding, the devs etc...

[Thorveim]

Originally posted by Hurricane:

They will get build orders and then follow a basic AI pattern and just cycle that pattern, the ai cant think.

I play enough strategy games to see this... totalwar, stellaris, endless space...

thats the thing though: eventually the Ai just... stops altogether and just sits there.

[General T.Montana Tropic Thunder]

Originally posted by Paddy:

Originally posted by Thorveim:

Something I noticed across my games is that the AI... Seems to just get dumber if the game lasts for a long time. In the early or mid game no complaint, the AI is both agressive and sends a full force fleet to defend worlds you attack, but if the game lasts long enough it seems it just... Stops. I've had cases where I could bomb planets into nothingness slowly with a lone titan and the AI wouldnt respond at all even if it had its own titan. Its even more jarring where the AI has half the solar system under its thumb in a 6 players map (so definitely has the fleet and ressources to respond) yet it wont bother sending any fleet to defend its own capital

And that was the the second to hardest AI whick I dont expect to see holding back. I think this needs a fix because it makes really long games end up in a sad grind where you only really deal with stragglers and planetary defenses while fleet fights vanish entirely

I'm actually noticing something similar in my almost 5 hour campaign. I have a ceasefire with an empire that now holds around 20 planets. They called it off but won't attack any of my planets despite really only being three of us left. I started boosting my defences in all my planets which border their territory but i'm starting to think there is no point

How many AI`s are there and what difficulty are they set to ?
Kind regards, wishing a nice time in the game

[=(e)= Lemonater47]

I noticed when an AI faction holds too many planets they get real stupid with their fleet movement.

I assume they keep changing their goals or try and react to things. Leading to their main fleet moving back and forth across it's own territory. Rarely actually managing to make an assault.

[Paddy]

Originally posted by HornPub Best Actress:

Originally posted by Paddy:

I'm actually noticing something similar in my almost 5 hour campaign. I have a ceasefire with an empire that now holds around 20 planets. They called it off but won't attack any of my planets despite really only being three of us left. I started boosting my defences in all my planets which border their territory but i'm starting to think there is no point

How many AI`s are there and what difficulty are they set to ?
Kind regards, wishing a nice time in the game :tt_kawaii::spaceduck:

In my game there are 8 Ai factions. Each set to default. It might be because the other large faction remaining is TEC like myself. We were on a ceasefire for most of the game until they just broke it off. I expected them to come at me with their fleets however they haven't sent one fleet to any of my systems even though I have attacked several of theirs. I'll see how it progresses and ends before I make a final verdict. I might set the Ai to hard next time.

Thank you. Glad to hear your enjoying it. I'm looking forward to more content and mods to see what direction it goes

[Protocol7]

One thing I noticed, and maybe it's related to the aggressive/defensive behaviors, is that if an AI sends me a fleet and I destroy them, they will often just send ships one by one into my fleet that's parked into the same grav well. Which kind of trivializes the game at that point because you can just park a tiny fleet there to pick off their stuff, and then send your main fleet through another way (if one exists, of course), and then bob's your uncle.

Haven't tried hard AI yet but I'm sure it just cheats a little to make it difficult. Seems fairly consistent with medium AIs and easy AIs are a comp stomp for me with 13 hours of gameplay clocked now.