this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Former Total War dev accuses Creative Assembly of "mismanagement" and says strategy series AI is "limited by design" (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
submitted 5 months ago by nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

I mean, isn't all AI in games limited by design? What's the issue with that?

"Designers instructed us not to improve [the AI] in certain ways, because they believed that players enjoyed being able to dominate the AI and that we shouldn’t deprive them of that.”

This is true. Wait what? What's the issue? If you make the AI un-defeatable then players won't have fun. I can see where some limitations may be annoying to very advanced players, but most normal players typically struggle vs AI in strategy games at high difficulty settings. This is where Age of Empires 2s latest settings that include tunable options for AI are the ultimate way to handle AI. But the AI being limited by design isn't really a problem IMO.

[–] Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The map scale AI is brain dead. It’s not fun, it’s boring.

It becomes a chore to clean up the map from the enemy, but the enemy isn’t hard or challenging, only numerous and time consuming.

Battle AI is tolerable.

[–] slumlordthanatos@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

The only time it was challenging was back when AI factions had a hate boner for the player and ONLY the player. Like how they would leave their settlements undefended to march halfway across the map, through territory belonging to a faction they were at war with just to sack the player's settlements.

[–] Nighed@sffa.community 8 points 5 months ago

There should be options for hard difficulty that are due to the AI being better, not just getting massive buffs.

Some of the examples given were about the AI not even knowing about certain game mechanics!

[–] Tetsuo@jlai.lu 3 points 5 months ago

The devs said "improve AI" I don't understand it as make it godlike and unbeatable.

I disagree completely with your perception of AI in games.

I think AI are way to weak and primitive in this day and age. And it shouldn't. It should be scalable and able to challenge players who want to be and be braindead for others.

Right now in most game AI is borderline braindead.

An old game like FEAR has much better AI than most modern games and it's from 2005.

So yeah, I think AI being very limited in most modern games is definitely an issue and unfortunately nothing specific to the game in this topic.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

No, it’s not. The problem with bad AI in strategy games is that ultimately, what ends up happening is the AI doesn’t follow the same rules as the player and gets a ton of unfair advantages. If you were to play a total war game on the easiest difficulty, it’s just CA’s brain dead AI on equal footing with the player, which allows the player to stomp them out of existence with ease. But when you scale the difficulty up to normal or higher, the AI doesn’t get smarter, because it’s limited. So instead the AI gets a ton of money and resources for free even though it would be otherwise impossible for it to given its position.

For example, if a player was limited to one province, it would put the player on the back foot and is very tough to recover from. If you beat an AI back to one province however, the AI will be able to field an otherwise impossible two full stack armies in an alarming amount of time.

This hurts the experience beyond just “difficulty”. Strategy games are often intended to be deeper than just being about military power. There are often economic and diplomatic mechanics you can use to defeat enemies with, but those often break in these cases because unlike a player, even if you deprive an AI opponent of all of one resource, they’ll probably still have it anyway because it just cheats.

[–] Nighed@sffa.community 4 points 5 months ago

Link to the original blog post by the developer: https://medium.com/@julianmckinlay/total-war-rome-ii-and-creative-assembly-my-statement-ten-years-on-d964f65b0a8f