Ah. Not to jump on the bandwagon. Interesting to see they considered machine learning AI, something I wrote and was disappointed not to see. Yet no machine learning or anything 2022ish to this day. It would have been 1 redemption factor for an otherwise not-so-good game to view such a cool thing.
Even AoE2’s ‘newer AI’ is mostly like they could take scripts (like on aokheavengames’s AI files) so it was just needed to package them into the game. It still doesn’t learn, but it’s still something that proved players enjoyed even just repackaging of basically mods into the game (for convenience and that); it seems likely a significant amount of players did not know about pre-steam mods and files, even as large as it all was. So it’s just noteable aoe4 is a hardcoded AI that just presses random buttons and attackmoves. Lol.
Even so impressive to me they developed such a rules/modding files that let you literally make ‘better AI’, definitely something you don’t see nowadays. That was made in like, 1999, and they made standard AI from cheating and kinda predictable, to like ‘choosing/doing’ humanlike strats by free modding, wtf? Pretty cool. It is also why I think the original engines like aoe2/aom seem much better by mods.
There is a big reason why AoE2 1999 AI is so moddable and AoE4 2021 AI is not. I put the years there on purpose to show how far we’ve come in regressing. AoE2 AI is “open source”, so modders can go crazy with it. Modders seem to always do a better job than the companies themselves, I guess it’s because a modder has a passion for a specific thing in the game and takes the time to fine-tune it.
Anyway, AoE4 AI, while somewhat moddable, is not entirely open source. So modders cannot, for example, mod AoE4 AI behaviors. They can just try to limit or encourage certain behaviors, which do or do not work depending on how the AI “feels” during a match it seems. So until the developers make the AI code open source, modders can only do so much. Knowing Relic with how they limited modding in CoH2 a lot more compared to CoH1, this is unlikely to ever happen.
Speaking as a modder and a (software, not games) developer, the big thing is the lack of deadlines. Everything when working in a job has an end of the day, end of the sprint, end of the milestone, etc, deadline. It has to go into a release, and releases are locked well in advance of it actually being deployed, etc.
Meanwhile if I was just modding, I could spend all of that time tweaking stuff, changing stuff, and it doesn’t need to be deployed in the classical sense because the developers have created that pipeline for us (sure, we need to burn the assets and publish the update, but that’s a far cry from scheduling, building, and rolling out a production release with notified downtime for customers).
I’m hoping Relic / World’s Edge get the time to add more to the tools (and to what is exposed to us as moddable data) over time. They’ve been great at updating the guides on this site (not the forums, the main site) and being communicative with us in the modding Discord I’m on. The game has a stable playerbase and we have a roadmap for the next Season or so. I’m just hoping modding improvements are also being considered
Yes, that’s what I meant, but you said it better. I work for myself with architecture and graphics, and it’s all about deadlines. Especially more so what the client wants. Never mind what works or looks better, what the client wants is what you give them. And do not go over deadlines.
The same could be said for people working in the gaming industry; you have deadlines and stuff has to be approved by upper management. So in the end you make sure that what you’re working on works as expected, within the time frame expected. No time to go and play around and tweak stuff to make it even better. Especially not when it goes outside the original brief. Nobody asked if the AI could make better decisions when it comes to the economy or correctly responds to the human player’s military force. So you’re not wasting time trying to make things work better if it wasn’t part of the brief.
Thus, an AI that is able to play a game against a human opponent, that doesn’t crash and fights to the end, was pretty much achieved. So job done. This is why modders are so important to games, people like you who take things further where the devs couldn’t or didn’t. Not the dev’s fault, but a difference between a passion and a job.
I agree with so much of your post, but I do want to push gently back on the passion thing. Games developers have buckets of it. The constraints of the job don’t mean they don’t have it.
Heck, I have passion for the things I work on. Well, specific things. I don’t think anybody has passion for a JIRA backlog
Oh, I agree with you! Maybe that was not the right way of phrasing it. Obviously, someone who works in such a specific industry has a passion for the job. My stepdad is the best artist I know (yes I know nobody is ever the “best”, he even use to say “just remember, there is always someone better than you, in a joking way”, he loves to paint and work with pastels, etc, anyway he was the art director for a big advertisement company, his work was always amazing. But his personal work, which he did in his own time, was obviously on an entirely different level. It’s not comparable though. But having the time to “play”, if I can put it that way, with your passion, compared to working on a strict deadline with a team, there’s a difference.
@SavageEmpire566
Will there be global changes to the AI in the next patch? I really want the next patch to give the AI a lot of fixes and improvements.
At this point, the AI has received very few patches and is still very poorly functioning
For what it’s worth, I have completely lost interest in games vs AI after watching the linked AI tournament video. It encapsules the problem so well that I don’t think I can find enjoyment in slapping around the AI anymore, it’s just pathetic.
I switched to playing ranked now and loving it so much more, might never play AI again. If you’re waiting for a challenge, wait no longer, play ranked! Once you get past the anxiety the games are a lot more fun, pure attention and competition compared to lazy tactics vs AI. I can already feel I’ve improved enormously from 2 weeks of playing ranked. AI lets you play dumb and isn’t as satisfying to beat.
I still hope they make AI better one day but at the rate I’m improving as a player, I don’t expect them to ever make it truly challenging for some people. They should still make it better though so it can be a learning tool for new players to watch their replays and learn build orders, etc. Ranked play has replaced that for me. After hundreds of flawless games vs AI, I was shut down by an English player, HRE rush, mirrors that boom better, etc. Now I’ve studied those builds and can counter them, which feels really good. You don’t get that feeling vs AI ever.
Unfortunately that’s a question I’m not allowed to answer, especially since things get pushed all the time. You’d have to just wait for the next set of patch / release notes to know for sure.
You are correct about ranked. However, you assume that people are playing against AI to get better at the game.
In my experience, people who play against AI don’t necessarily play to feel challenged or learn. They just like to “chill against AI”. Me and my friends belong to this kind. It’s mostly the “chill” that is important here, which is still not entirely stress-free, but it is predictable to an extent, so we can beat it without getting good at the game, and then call it a day and sleep. We do this once in a while.
So yes, if you start learning the game, the AI will never be good enough. But a good AI provides just the amount of challenge that we can beat without having to get too good.
Pointless you say. But that’s precisely the point. My friends and I have time only for one or two games a week. There is no time to get better. If we did, we wouldn’t need better AI.
People who play seriously sometimes never start with AI. They just jump straight to ranked and thats probably the best thing to do.
Yea, I like to chill too. But there’s a fine line between chillin and boredom. Some people have the time to play 5-6 games per day and choose to play them all vs AI. To each their own, but then I see they have zero ranked games and it’s like… you don’t know until you try. I’m just speaking from experience as one of those people that only played vs AI 5-6 games per day, and in retrospect I was a very bored player. PvP is admittedly more engaging whether you’re casual or not. There’s still quickplay if you don’t want to feel ranked.
For purely casual players, the AI being good or not shouldn’t even matter then. But if you’ve posted in this thread complaining about how terrible AI is, I suspect there is a small secret yearning for competition.
Sure enough, but at the current rate… you might as well try pvp. If you trust the system most of your games should eventually match your play rate and level of challenge. What’s the difference between getting that challenge and enjoyment from a player instead of an ai that may never come to be? Better to try finding a few matches through pvp that meet your satisfaction rather than be upset for years that the game is unplayably bad.
And I fully agree this game NEEDS a better AI, but from player to player, I’m simply saying don’t hold your breath.
Depends on how you define chill. My friends and I don’t intend to sit in our bases till we have 200 pop till we have an army after 2 hours.
We want to be challenged enough that it feels difficult but is actually predictable.
It’s like walking uphill everyday. It gets your heart rate up, but you know you can always make it. Compared to say, rockclimbing, which is exciting but you can also fail.
So what happens if they develop an AI that is slightly better than you have time to learn to beat? I don’t get the logic. They’re supposed to perfectly match AI to your level or aoe2’s level? You can still play vs a person and try as little or much as you want and enjoy it for what it’s worth. There are plenty of players I’ve encountered while climbing rank that were clearly just having fun. But yea I won’t push you on it anymore.
