Idea: Dynamic Unit Values

Cybah

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Jun 22, 2007
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An idea just came in my mind: Is it possible to increase the AI Weight / AI Unit Building Value for a unit every single kill and to decrease the AI Weight / AI Unit Building Value everytime the unit is losing a battle?

In a long war vs human players with 1000000 of tanks the AI would "learn" to build more counter units and less units which are worse vs. tanks.

Just an idea...
 
Since humans would constantly adapt their own strategy to the strategy that the AI was using at that moment, it would never reach an equilibrium, there would be no optimal final optimal state. There actually does not exist an optimal situation because ideally, the AI would adapt to what it sees you do during the game. I personally think that someone who both understands the game and has a decent knowledge of programming can come up with AI weights that are decent. If the AI would also react stronger to the forces built by its opponents, then it would become a stronger opponent. As far as I can see, it's this adaptation to its opponents that is not good enough.
 
Sounds good, but I think the value should apply to what the AI "sees" instead of waiting to get killed by them. Afterall, we can see most of what the AI has lying around in its own cities.

I think once someone builds 1,000,000 tanks (yikes!), the AI is a goner anyway. :D
 
Well, I did not mean, the AI should build only AT_Infantry when losing versus masses of tanks. My idea was to SLIGHTLY increase the value of units with the most success in time - like building X% more units of type A when winning X% more fights with type A than with other unit types. I also thought of a limit, maybe 100%: Building 100% more units of type A than under normal circumstances and NOT 100% = that unit type ONLY. ;)
 
Since humans would constantly adapt their own strategy to the strategy that the AI was using at that moment.

Honestly, most of the players are building tons of the strongest units with tons of siege units:

Macemen -> Riflemen (sometimes Grenadiers) -> Infantry -> Tanks -> Modern Armors/Mech Infantry

Cannot see any unit building strategy in stories.

The problem is: The AI is not able to counter those simple spamming "tactics". That's just stupid. A human player would adapt his strategy when he sees his enemy with tons of tanks.

Therefore I support the idea of AI scouting and then adapting the strategy.
 
Honestly, most of the players are building tons of the strongest units with tons of siege units:

Macemen -> Riflemen (sometimes Grenadiers) -> Infantry -> Tanks -> Modern Armors/Mech Infantry

Cannot see any unit building strategy in stories.

The problem is: The AI is not able to counter those simple spamming "tactics". That's just stupid. A human player would adapt his strategy when he sees his enemy with tons of tanks.

Therefore I support the idea of AI scouting and then adapting the strategy.

Scouting and then adapting or winning more battles with a certain unit type and then adapting? These are different choices, so what is your proposal?

I don't think that adaptation based on victory percentage will work well. A few problems that might arise:
-Siege units cannot win a battle, siege units lose a lot thus siege units are bad. Build less siege units.:crazyeye:
-If the AI were to build an army of 5 macemen, 2 crossbowmen and 2 pikemen plus 5 catapults, then that would be a nicely balanced stack. It would subsequently march it into my territory. I would sacrifice 3 catapults and lose 1 more unit while mopping up the stack. In this case, the macemen will likely be considered the best units since they likely beat my sacrificial catapults. But that's of course a nonsense conclusion. Building more macemen and less crossbowmen, pikemen and catapults will not create a better stack of units. It will become more vulnerable to counterattacks on the weaker areas where the stack lacks enough counterunits.
If the AI had added a few knights to that stack, then they'd likely have beat the catapults making them the preferred unit by the AI. But adding more and more knights to the stack while reducing other units wouldn't have made it a more dangerous stack. It would have likely made it more vulnerable to attacks by the counter unit of knights.

What I'm trying to say is that it's not necessarily the unit that does the killing that is most important in the stack of units. Some units are just there to avoid lethal counter strategies. These lethal counter strategies will then never be used and thus the unit proved its worth but that won't translate into a higher victory percentage of this unit and thus won't result in building it more. Shifting construction focus onto the unit that happened to win a higher percentage of battles can easily make the balance of units in a stack weaker.

However, I'm not against adaptation of the AI. I think it would be very good if the AI adapted to what it saw through scouting, but it's not easy to get the AI to do this well. For instance, if the AI can't scout your lands with units or espionage, then it has to guess and we of course don't want it to guess based on the 3 units of our army that it happened to see on its borders. So in that case, it probably will have to build a standard mix. This standard mix should then be adapted to what it encounters when it goes into a war and learns more about enemy troop composition. The AI should also adapt to multiple potential enemies at once with more weight towards the ones which it is more likely to get into conflict with.
Even if the AI can freely enter the lands of an opposing civilisation to scout, then I'm not sure if it will be easy to count the various numbers of units. It might be hard to teach the AI not to double count some units while missing others.
 
I think the big problem is ealry game you see quite a variety in the AI's army in non war state (I'e not building up a big stack to attack someone) just looking through the cities, you get axeman, archers, the odd sword, a spear etc

Later on, particularly come infantry, Ai defenders are uniformly infantry and in non war state, there army consisits of lots of infantry in each city defending and the add, arty or cavalry unit floating about

Because things like AT infantry has such a low str i don;t think the AI rates it as worthy of building, however early game, archers are weaker base str wise than other units, so the AI see's more value to the counter units like axes so you always them tucked in there with the main archer force etc

Infantry trumps the value of everything bar marines and paratroops + paratroops have a funny AI, so really the ai just get's lots of infantry for def in non war mode and leave it there with very few other units mixed in, unlike early game, i suspect if infantry were given a lower str but city def bonus's and a bigger Gunpowder bonus to keep it roughly same level of effectiveness in it's role but with a lower base str, and AT troops were given a higher base str, you would see more of them and more late game unit variety

Also a lot of late game units have Unit AI attack as the default AI value, were as earl units like Axes have Counter, which seems to get build more in peace time as well as war, were as attack units tend to get favoured when the ai is planning a war rather that to just have hanging around
 
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