The best part of a game to me is the AI - does it pull the occasional trick? does it ever anticipate? does it do simple, yet effective, efforts at fighting - like concentrating forces and truly punishing you.
What are people's opinion on the best AI in a war game? Please include some reasons why instead of just naming a game.
That way, if I don't have it, I'll try it. Thanks!
GC2 pretty much the best AI I have ever faced.
I'd say Civilization IV seemed to have the best AI I've seen, with the expansions, it can actually put up a decent fight without extra resources. It still can't really exploit any weak spots you leave, and has problems with keeping more units than necessary on defense (many of them unupgraded from their original type), but at least it could produce a competitive empire without needing a massive handicap.
GalCiv2 is the only AI to call me out on my plan before I've even implemented it...
Battlefield Vietnam- an old(er, circa 2004) FPS game. Why? Well, the AI actually LEARNS from you, the player. As you get better, so does it.
Asteroids.. those damm rocks get me every time..
CIV IV AI can be quite ruthless now ( I play on monarch so the AI get some bonuses as well).
But then again I remember recently a 'oh man the GalCiv2 AI is awful' thread.
Some people seem to have this idea that the AI in any game should be utterly brilliant and be able to 'play like a human'. Yet these same people seem to complain that the AI is cheating when it wins. They want to play agaist a pro human, but that's not going to happen on your everyday PC. As games get more complex, the AI required gets even more complex. If you wanted you could have 90% of the processing power devoted to the AI but there wouldn't be much in the rest of the game.
Rise of Nations probably has the best I know, but it's not stellar or anything.
I uses the strengths of each nation to it's advantage. So for instance, if it's russian and it has strong territory and attrition bonuses, it will build wonders that enhance that to really put the pressure on your empire.
It uses defenses for what you'r attackign with. So if you have a lot of ground forces, it uses towers and fortresses. If you use sky it counters with AA guns.
I've also seen it attack with small armies on one side of your empire to draw your troops, then attack from another angle with a stronger force.
There are plenty of other examples, but really it's not comparable to a human, but still better than any other RTS's i've played.
Either GC2 or Massive Assault . Massive Assault puts up the best fight of any AI I've gone up against, and I'm a LOT better at MA than I am at GC2. GC2, however, does extremely well despite having to deal with a lot more variables than MA's AI does.
I've heard good things about AI Wars. But the best strat game AI...hmm...any mildly good chess program on its highest settings...that India Trading Company game isn't half bad in trading anwyay, player will kill the AI in war though. SOMETIMES the AI in Empire: Total War (The RTS AI) seems to do well (On hardest). The FIRST Gangsters game was pretty good from what I remember.
For me, 'good AI' doesn't mean 'plays to strengths in fixed way' or 'follows preset gameplans' or 'has extra knowledge or resources'. 'Good AI' is that which is able to make sensible decisions, 'intelligent' decisions. Every half-baked RTS has AI that can beat humans, using prefab strategies, omniscience, bonuses, reaction advantages, mutlti-tasking, etc... but games like GalCiv2 have AI that make decisions - sometimes mistakes - in a reasonable way. I've never had a game of Rise of Nations end with AI protecting my bases because it knows as soon as I die, the AI will lose to one of the OTHER AI who is in an alliance with everyone. That level of awareness - beyond simple 'build lots of teh tankz lol' - is what makes a game interesting.
Conquest Frontier Wars has AI that can beat me... but it's barely intelligent at all.
EDIT - Oh man, Total War AI? Oh dear. These are the games where single province nations will declare war on giant neighbours they had a treaty with for no reason other than 'diplomacy engine' = 'kill the player'. On hardest it's cheating to all hell too, and it's STILL hopeless.
For strategic (empire-level) AI:
Galactic Civilizations 2 wins that prize hands-down, especially with both expansion packs. The computer-controlled races are pretty damned good -- sometimes, almost frighteningly so -- at reacting to the other races' plans and exploiting weaknesses (including my own).
Honorable mentions: Sword of the Stars (Complete Edition) and Gary Grigsby's War Between the States.
For tactical (combat) AI:
Shogun Total War retains the top spot in my personal list of games. I've generally found it to be a competent opponent, and has in fact wiped the floor with me on any number of occasions. The AI's only real weakness (at least that I've noticed) is that it tends to be a bit reckless with its generals. Otherwise, however, it's awfully damned good.
Honorable mentions: Medieval Total War (the original) and Sins of a Solar Empire.
Sadly, I must agree. Even in my beloved Shogun and Medieval, the strategic AI has always been somewhat weak, and this problem was only exacerbated in later games with the introduction of the 3D campaign map.
Also, as you've already pointed out, diplomacy throughout virtually the entire series has been broken. It wasn't *quite* so bad in Shogun (as it was, in fact, rather common during the Sengoku Jidai period for the various clans to betray each other at some point), but diplomacy been vritually meaningless in every other TW title since then -- and it should be a major factor.
The "RTS AI", as I said above, can SOMETIMES be good.
Do you mean the tactical battles or the strategic stuff? They're both horrible but in different ways; even on VH/VH you could defeat fullstack armies losing 9 guys if you knew what you were doing, because the AI never adapted to what you did (and the combat mechanics were broken, which didn't help). Every battle, same tactics, same result. The strategic stuff on the open map was pretty poor (you built a fortress where? you refused what offer?) but really comes back to CA trying to invent difficulty out of nowhere.
I have to agree I didn't find it as galling in Shogun, but a combination of rose-tinted glasses and the simpler nature (7 factions vs more than a dozen, much simpler map, formalised diplomacy) probably figures into it. It seems likely that as the games got more complex and the AI couldn't keep up, they kept up the pressure on player with things like 'spawn armies from nowhere' and 'attack the player even if such is suicidal' and the like.
For strategic AI then of course galciv 2 wins... as long as you play on at least a medium map. For some reason I found out that the AI needs space in order to function proberly, there is some sort of critical size to AI empires before they start to function. In all games I have played there are always 1 or 2 AI empires that does well... and the rest are just "why bother"... even though they dont suffer from initial wars or anything to hamper their growth. And the fun thing is if I take down one of the doing well empires then suddenly one of the other ones start doing well after 200 turns of doing nothing special. I figure that this has something to do with the total amount of "thinking time" allowed to each AI .. so the larger your cpu capacity then the better more AI should play.
For Tactical AI... then there are many titles. But common for them all then its only in team games AI's fail (except in uncommon instances where their "CHARGE" tactics actually make sense), in deathmatches and FFA's they can be fun and brutal. But I guess it cooks down to the fact that it would take too long to write a good teamworking AI for the developers to do it.
Pnakotus, have you played Empire?? Anyway, I meant the tactical AI. I've also had a much better time diplomatically...although there's some big problems they're hoping to fix in next patch for Campaign AI. Anyway..
GalCiv2 seems to be the gold standard amongst empire building games. That said, it's still pretty awful compared to a human.
From what people tell me, the technology to implement 'human-like' opponents in modern computer games just isn't there yet. It's the one thing that keeps single-player-only RTS/TBS games from being able to hold my attention for more than a few weeks. This is why I'm so excited about Elemental, I can finally play with my friends and family!
Bah, the quote button doesn't work. No, I haven't played Empire (I got tired of buying broken CA games some time ago) but I have heard that the diplomacy is much improved. From what I hear it's still sub-GalCiv2, but it's a step in the right direction.
The best AI I have seen in an RTS is probably the Dawn of Skirmish mod for Dawn of War (The first one).
A team of independant developers went to work on the AI and made a damn good job.
Populous: The Beginning. Anybody else remember this game?
Course....it might be that a lot of the maps were 3v1 from the start.
CIV IV is indeed a good AI it was always a chalenge.
In FPS the best AI I saw so far has to be from the STALKER series. the normal difficulty settings the AI doesnt have penalties or advantages. It just fights with it's skills and it always very decent at finding cover and pining you. What it does lack is group cohesion. IE multiple enemies seems to work only as individuals most fot he time and not as a team. But they do do teamwork at time but it still needs some improvements.
OFP and Arma 2!
When it works, it really puts the fear into you. Unfortunatly it dosn't always work perfectly but what do you expect from a super hard core developer with a niche product? Certainly not CoD style scriptlols.
(Not OFP2:Console Rising though, which is an acceseable CM cash in built around the concept of OFP)
But then people will also say a human opponent must be cheating if they use some strategy they haven't seen before too
Where the hell did you hear that nonsense?? Whoever told you that was either lying, or utterly deluded. The diplomacy in ETW is more broken than ever, especially since the last couple patches (1.2 and 1.3). It's gotten so bad, that players are now calling it the "Black Knight" AI (after the infamously hilarious scene from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail).
Factions declare war on you for no reason, and -- more often than not -- from a position of weakness. Also, it's pointless forming alliances with any faction that has territory bordering your own, as they inevitably break the alliance and declare war on you (regardless of whatever favors you may have done for them). In addition, factions all too often reject even the most reasonable/generous of treaty offers....including and especially if they're on the losing end of a war with you, and their very survival likely depends on negotiating some sort of peace with your faction.
Supposedly the 1.4 update coming out at the end of this month is going to rectify at least some of the problems with the rubbish diplomatic system, but I'm not holding my breath.
I must just get extremly lucky in my E:TW games.
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