This is the one reason I HATE playing AI's. They have NO intelligence. All they have is just more. More health, more money, more levels, more minions, more damage, more....
This game does not need a tutorial because playing the AI is the TUTORIAL. After a few weeks....boring! And with online connective problems...frustrating! Boring and frustrating are not two qualities I look for in a game.
Other than NO CAMPAGIN and NO DEPTH in the manual on skills, spell, minions, etc.....this is a nice twist on RTS/Strat games.
All of this is assuming that Moore's Law holds steady, and right now it doesn't look like that will happen -- we are instead shifting outward to the side, adding multiple cores and such. This is useful to a point, and the human brain is certainly massively parallel, but right now we don't really have good ways of writing coherent software logic that spans multiple cores. Most software (like mine) that can be split across multiple core is basically only split by feature -- AI on one, music on another, graphics on the graphics CPU, etc. Right now there isn't a game around that splits its core simulation across multiple cores (not that I'm aware of, anyway). This problem is SO hard, in fact that, IMB has a $1 million USD prize for the programmer(s) who come up with a way to compile single-core style code so that it can be run on multiple cores. That's kind of one of the holy grails of current computing, and I'm not sure it's even possible (but that's totally outside my area).
But yes, even with processing power at our disposal the software issue is still very much an issue. I think we are just hitting a point where the software is getting more development attention because we finally have the extra processing power to do something more advanced. Before it was always the hardware that was the limitation, but now that that limitation is easing, the software has new options that are just starting to be explored. And, people can complain all they want about the AI in any given modern game, but the fact remains that the AI is much better than what was in games 10 or especially 20 years ago. The field is advancing, but it's doing so slowly over time.
One big challenge is that a lot of the researchers that are looking into AI are focused more on true sentience, simulating actual brains, etc -- and that's the sort of thing that requires supercomputers. Game programmers are never trying to actually create true intelligence, they are only trying to mimic it, and so that comes with a whole set of challenges all its own. AI is improving overall, slowly but surely. Hopefully we'll see a marked jump upwards in quality in the next few years (now that the hardware issue is mitigated for a short while), but we'll just see.
Furthermore, AI with human-like sentience is improbable due to the fact that a computer does not hum with the same random trains of thought as a human brain does-- a computer has no imagination, and thus cannot provide links between objects A and B, unless given a direct link by the programmer. Computers also have difficulty learning outside small branches, and between these two points it is unlikely at best to see a computer reach sentience, at least within our lifespans.
This is not surprising at all.
Some of you might be interested in checking out a more extensive version of the A.I.-design-philosophy text I quoted in my previous reply #15, as posted yesterday on one of his blog webpages, by A.I.-War dev x4000 (who has posted on this thread) :
http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2009/06/designing-emergent-ai-part-1.html
Thanks, I'll read it when I feel like it later.
Being a software engineer (or should be, sort of) I have touched the edges of artificial intelligence programming. Thank god we only touched the subject, because it gets real complicated real fast.
I wonder how much a neural network could help with this. If AI could learn of what human players do and if they could learn of their own deaths then it could turn into a pretty hard to beat AI. Too bad it takes too much cpu for games (though you usually build the network 'offline' but I don't see any gamer run an AI teaching app between games. besides you'd get mixed up AI in online games which would break all. Maybe GPG could train an AI network and provide new AI with every patch)
I feel that the DemiGod AI is pretty good (for what it is). My only complaint is that it is nearly impossible to defeat them once they reach level 14/15. I've played at least 20 games now, and although I still consider myself quite a n00b, I feel that this is somewhat harsh. It's gotten to the point that my friends and I totally ignore the Demigods and just capture the portals and then the game is pretty much won. It's rare that the AI will ever go after / recapture the portals behind/inside their base.
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