Posted by: Conscript Gary
« on: August 15, 2013, 02:44:20 AM »Even without higher-level decision-making ability, AI reactionary decisions could be scripted fairly successfully I think. Take missile design. I'm not sure how Steve has them programmed, but I suspect they use constrained random designs according to your own tech. As we all know, designing for yourself is a good start but what lets a player wipe out an AI decisively is the ability to design for your enemy. If the AI instead designed its missiles with known alien ships or missiles as a target goal it would increase their bite and reaction ability significantly.
The trick with such a thing is that it doesn't have to depend on AI work. Just taking the mathematical analyses people have made on the forum, refining them a bit, fuzzing them randomly so that not every missile is the optimal design, and there you have it.
I make a hell of a lot of assumptions in this post as to how things work, but I stand by my opinion that poring over the actual numbers and equations behind the mechanics is critical from a balance standpoint and can be useful to emulate decision-making.
I want to further articulate my point with an example, a relatively simple one that should be familiar to many of us.
Scenario: We've spotted a new ship, and it's father than anything we've seen before! Holy cow! Do we need to design new missiles?
As a human, one might answer this simply. You would check whether it can outrun your standard ASM outright, and if the to-hit chance is still acceptable. If it's still good, you carry on. If it's deficient, and you want to be able to hit said ship, you design a new one. There's numerous judgement calls there, but for a human it's manageable.
As an AI, the first stepup is similar enough. 'Can it outrun my missiles' is a simple comparison of speeds. But how do you decide what an 'acceptable' to-hit chance is? That depends on how many missiles you carry, how many you volley and how fast, and plain old simple taste. Given those factors as racial attributes, if we can make some weighted numerical metric than the AI can indeed answer that question.
Let's say our current ASM falls below that calculated tthreshold, so it's time to fire up the missile design code. You have your target speed and target to-hit percentage. You have your existing missile engines, your standard launcher size, standard engagement range, and you churn all of those cconstraints and parameters to get the closest you can get to that optimal design. Is it impossible to attain? Check backwards to see if a new engine design would satisfy your parameters, and if that fails try while projecting other tech advances or constraint changes. Weigh those results with their cost (In time, RP, resources, doctrine momentum) and go after the one that's best, even if that's 'no change'.
...It's a hell of a lot of factors to account for, and I even glazed over some. Properly reducing design decisions mathematically gets tricky for more abstract aspects. Still, I also think that randomly-racially assigning those 'taste' decisions to a more extensive level will also enrich the game.
I think this topic of how to improve the AI might warrant its own thread sooner or later.
The trick with such a thing is that it doesn't have to depend on AI work. Just taking the mathematical analyses people have made on the forum, refining them a bit, fuzzing them randomly so that not every missile is the optimal design, and there you have it.
I make a hell of a lot of assumptions in this post as to how things work, but I stand by my opinion that poring over the actual numbers and equations behind the mechanics is critical from a balance standpoint and can be useful to emulate decision-making.
I want to further articulate my point with an example, a relatively simple one that should be familiar to many of us.
Scenario: We've spotted a new ship, and it's father than anything we've seen before! Holy cow! Do we need to design new missiles?
As a human, one might answer this simply. You would check whether it can outrun your standard ASM outright, and if the to-hit chance is still acceptable. If it's still good, you carry on. If it's deficient, and you want to be able to hit said ship, you design a new one. There's numerous judgement calls there, but for a human it's manageable.
As an AI, the first stepup is similar enough. 'Can it outrun my missiles' is a simple comparison of speeds. But how do you decide what an 'acceptable' to-hit chance is? That depends on how many missiles you carry, how many you volley and how fast, and plain old simple taste. Given those factors as racial attributes, if we can make some weighted numerical metric than the AI can indeed answer that question.
Let's say our current ASM falls below that calculated tthreshold, so it's time to fire up the missile design code. You have your target speed and target to-hit percentage. You have your existing missile engines, your standard launcher size, standard engagement range, and you churn all of those cconstraints and parameters to get the closest you can get to that optimal design. Is it impossible to attain? Check backwards to see if a new engine design would satisfy your parameters, and if that fails try while projecting other tech advances or constraint changes. Weigh those results with their cost (In time, RP, resources, doctrine momentum) and go after the one that's best, even if that's 'no change'.
...It's a hell of a lot of factors to account for, and I even glazed over some. Properly reducing design decisions mathematically gets tricky for more abstract aspects. Still, I also think that randomly-racially assigning those 'taste' decisions to a more extensive level will also enrich the game.
I think this topic of how to improve the AI might warrant its own thread sooner or later.