Kassiopeija wrote:defaultuser wrote:There's nothing that I'm aware of that they can't use, so you're describing areas where the AI developers need to improve.
The information I have on this subject is very limited and may also be outdated, but out the top of my head there are some areas:
- Logistics Focus
- Many items involving "knowledge of the map" like Planetary Starlane Drive, Stargates
- Special stuff like Bio-Terminators etc
- I've never seen the AI creating an artifical Black Hole, errecting a Gateway to the Void
- You can actually derive from the gamefiles which technologies (and their order) will be enqueued by the AI - all other remaining techs won't be used and I expect the AI isn't coded to use them even if they get them once they run out of queuable techs (ie. towards Transcendence)
To my knowledge, most of this is correct—the AI does use Artificial Black Hole in the late game if it hasn't found a normal black hole, I've captured a half complete one once, the rest I've never seen: doesn't even use terraform or gaia transform yet.
It does/will research everything not given a priority if/when it's run out of other things to research, so in the very late game it starts having hidden planets, but it's not (yet) set to use the esoteric buildings and similar.
Maybe around 30% of the technology tree that is... mostly fancy stuff but still the point stands. Thing is the trend is actually to add new stuff to the tree which only increases the gap of the player having an advantage over the AI, not reducing it.
Realisticially, you either do the AI coding by yourself or the thing you're asking for is never going to happen.
It may not even be a good thing for the AI in the first place - even in many commercial games AIs normally can't use the game's stuff fully - because this involves increasing the complexity of the code, which (a) requires time (b) harbours more bugs (c) incites the AI to do silly stuff in unusual situations.
I agree with this mostly, what I think I would like to see is if individual AI empires are set to use 'different' special things so you do sometimes have one using, say, starlane bores (this'll be hard, they don't get topography yet) and a different one using spatial distortion or gateway to the void.
There is some ongoing work (that I am barely able to follow) to give the AIs different traits and/or character but overall, yes, the backend devs and scripters have managed to race ahead of the AI team in the last year or so so there are new features that aren't accounted for and, frankly, we need to give them time to catch up before doing more weird stuff that requires adapting: fortunately some of the work they have done is to set things up so that it's easier for me/non AI coders to adapt the AIs for basic changes, which has been essential in the work I've been doing on the Fighters branch, for example—when I made up a basic tech tree, I could tell the AIs how to use the stuff by changing a single, easy to understand file and not go into the guts of the code. This speeds things up and allows me to make other cost/balance tweaks without waiting on the AI devs to be able to test things.
edit:
And the greatest disadvantage they have is that they can't play the game in such an intelligent and reactive style like a human can. The ability to look at the map, monitor what's going on, and adjust the research of technologies in accordance to that is much more worth than a handful of flat-out bonuses increases IMO
Yup, we can plan (and setup distractions and misdirections), the AI can basically only react or set targets. It's getting better at that, but it still sometimes does weird stuff.
(some of this is why, despite wanting to do other things, my main work this cycle is going to be on Fighters and tweaking the Species balance, because the AI is already setup to know different species stuff and doesn't require more work)