Increasing AI capabilities and making it more aggressive?

[zivs]

The thing is - playing single player games, AI seem to be more aggressive and expanding than adding it on standard game (Custom match). Whenever me and girlfriend want to play together, we usually go with custom match and as a third we add an AI.

Now we played probably some 20 games or more, but no matter which difficulty we take, no matter even which one of avatars for it we take, it still seems that it's all stuck in something like "abuse me - I won't mind that" mode where it's even barely building anything and doing anything.

What we noticed:
AI (all difficulties) is:
1. Rarely building roads (maximum we seen - total of 3 (2+1) roads on board
2. Tends to abuse the player who's not the game's host (doesn't even much pay attention to points, game dice statistics whatsoever)

• Ignores host on 7's and knight card's play, even if host got 9 points and the other real player just 2 points
  
• Somewhat concentrates on one hex and keeps blocking it even if it is absolutely irrelevant from the ongoing game statistics point of view

3. Doing some not explainable trades (not sure at this point if it even has ever asked once for clay, lol)

So, this is issue just for us or that's how it is supposed to be? We kinda want a challenging AI, but all we get is just a dummy, letting us play almost like one on one, not minding AI being in game at all.

Are there any solution for this?

[USM [CM]]

There are differnces between the SP and the MP AI, mostly due to technical requirements in MP games (handling of offline/disconnected/rejoining players) and turntimer restrictions.

This can definitely cause the AI in single-player games to appear cleverer, but should not extend to these extremes you are describing.

I've added this for review by the dev team.

[aKaSchorschi]

i have the same problems with the Ai.
We always play custom match with 1-2 bots. It barley even plays the game and is only a blocker. The ai was way better before the last big update

[zivs]

Any updates on this matter from the devs?

[msdogra]

He is right, AI is dumb while playing multi-player games. AI wont take longest road , wont prevent others from taking longest road, doesnt play knight cards, pulls cards randomly (or sometimes for Upgrading). The only thing it does is to try and upgrade most of times.

[zivs]

Ok, little update (which we will check later on) - if host (who bought the standard game) adds four players to the game (Host-AI-guest-AI), then all of a sudden the AI is actually getting useful - AI trades (at least between themselves), they build stuff, they use knights and in general are no dummies anymore.

I hope that this is not a glitch (having two folks and two AI's on standard game) and won't be removed or fixed, but - yeah - the AI is way more aggressive this way.

[HOMESLICE]

Ok so if I am understanding the last post to work around the AI not being a relevant opponent, I would need to add the AI in as every other in a custom match and then they would play more like they did before the last major update which took away any skill the AI had regardless of the difficulty you'd set them on. So the custom game (even in a 3 player where it is 1 other human and 1 AI), should go Host, AI, Human? Has anyone else seen this as a fix? This has been the biggest frustration as my wife and I used to play and add an AI player in to make our 3rd and since that major update, the AI has been irrelevant. Never builds, may or may not trade, hoards cards, etc.

[mikeljonn]

I agree with the comments above about the degraded AI players being bad for the game. It was better when the AI players were smarter. Sure, occasionally they would win a game, which was annoying, but if one is behind there is no ally possible with these new AI players. They just roll over and die.

[panzerbourne]

The AI is crap. They rarely ever build boats in seafarers and are totally usless in the special scenarios.

[Miathan]

Originally posted by Catan Universe CM:

There are differnces between the SP and the MP AI, mostly due to technical requirements in MP games (handling of offline/disconnected/rejoining players) and turntimer restrictions.

This can definitely cause the AI in single-player games to appear cleverer, but should not extend to these extremes you are describing.

I've added this for review by the dev team.

But in multiplayer the AI barely plays the game at all. I just played an entire match without the AI even building a single street. All it did was buy development cards and hoard resources.

Edit: and another match where the same thing happened. The AI does everything except build streets. It upgrades cities, engages in trade, plays cards, builds knights if you're playing with CaK, but it refuses to build even a single street.

[Miathan]

Bump because still a problem

[zivs]

So, it's been like two months and still no message from devs about existing problems with AI capabilities. Is there anything in works or is this a stealthy d*ck move to pass this problem into nowhere and oblivion?