AI Help

[Elijah Meeks <elijahmeeks at yahoo dot com>]

Managing to build an AI that can function as well for
games involving zombies as it can for games involving
battlefleets is a daunting task.  I'm wondering,
though, if there's a way to take a little pressure off
the coders and put it into the hands of the designers.
 As it stands, the AI pretty much analyzes everything
and comes up with its own ideas based on that (With a
little help from tags like, 'air' and 'naval', but it
doesn't seem like much).  

So maybe there could be some Roshambo tables to give
the AI a little help.  I say Roshambo, or
rock-paper-scissors, because much of game design
follows a strategy of X beats Y.  You could have a
preferred-opponent table that reads something like
this:

(table preferred-opponent
   (infantry archers 100)
   (infantry infantry 75)
   (infantry cavalry 50)
   (infantry killer-robot 0)
)

This would be an override to the AI decision code, so
that in this case, if the infantry unit ever had a
chance to attack an archer unit, it'd take it, while
it would have a 25% chance to consider a different
course of action for other infantry units (Which may
still result in an attack, but may result in
continuing to move somewhere else or attacking a
different unit).  While a table like the example would
reduce XConq to mob warfare, a less aggressive table
like:

(table preferred-opponent
   (army place-types 15)
   (army aircraft-types 10)
   (army evil-dictator-types 20)
)

Would make the AI a little more opportunistic on the
unit level, where I see it avoiding easily destroyed
and expensive units in favor of, apparently, some
earlier plan.  This would also help with AI for some
more esoteric games, such as if you want to make
Zombies or the Borg or whatever and you want them to
be utterly singleminded:

(table preferred-opponent
   (zombies has-brains-types 100)
   (borg redshirt 50)
   (borg junior-officer 75)
   (borg important-guy 100)
)

I'm looking at this not from an ai-tactical-range
view, but from a purely adjacent, target of
opportunity view (Which may be a better name for this
table).

I think the idea would also be good for unit building,
to create a table that forces the AI to build based on
set guidelines, rather than overarching strategy.

(table ai-build-queue
   (city legion 50)
   (city fleet 10)
   (city facility-types 10)
   (city wonder 5)
)

Again, this would be a suggestion table, so that the
AI would first check through each of the entries and
if it came false, it would instead choose to build
what it wanted on its own.




		
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