Neilster
Posts: 2890
Joined: 10/27/2003
From: Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: hakon
A challange one is faced when creating an AI for a historical game like wif, where a lot of the players will already be quite familiar with the actual history of the simulated events, is that the game mechanics of the game in many cases will favor non-historical play.
Examples:
- A German invasion of Norway does not happen very often in WiF.
- It is not very common for Germany to go both for a med campaign simultaniously with a 41 barbarossa.
- Japan often focuses on a land war in wif, attacking china and/or the USSR in much greater strength than historical
- The USSR rarely defend at the border (except when attempting to keep garrison)
- When playing a med strategy, many german players will usually take Malta and/or Gibraltar, even if it means attacking Spain.
Creating and AI that (usually) plays historically, will be most appealing to many players, and i suspect this will increase the sales to less-hardcore-grognards. On the other hand, it will take away from the challenge from veteran wif players.
Creating an AI that actually uses an algorith (aside for a statistical one) for deciding which main strategies to shoot for, i expect a game of this type to be based on some kind of decision tree, where each fork in the tree will have a hard-coded probability. For instance:
German 41 main strategy:
40% All out barbarossa 41, pulling all axis forces out of africa
20% All out med strategy, trying to seal the med, prepare for 42 barb or sitz
20% All out med strategy, attempt seelöwe, prepare sitz vs the USSR
20% Historical strategy of a medium effort middle east strat combined with a barbarossa 41
My suggestion, would be to, for most of these kinds of decisions, to designate one choice as "historical". It would then be possible (indeed quite easy) to make the AI favor the historical option by supressing alternative choices by a certain percentage. Imagine having an AI option, saying "historical AI", that supresses non-historical AI strategy selections by 75%. The above distribution would then transform to:
German 41 main strategy (historical AI):
10% All out barbarossa 41
5% All out med strategy, trying to seal the med, prepare for 42 barb or sitz
5% All out med strategy, attempt seelöwe, prepare sitz vs the USSR
80% Historical strategy of a medium effort middle east strat combined with a barbarossa 41
(The historicalness of the AI could even be made a slider, where non-historical strategies could be supressed by 0-100%)
So why do I want this option. Well, first of all I want to be able to turn it off :) But I realize that having the AI play more historically will be an advantage when facing critical reviews by non-wiffer-wargamers, as well as history-buff wargamers.
Second, I expect that an AI that plays more according to history will be more attractive if the player chooses to only control one of the smaller major powers, like china or france, or even Japan or the Commonwealth.
How much would this require in terms of work? Not much, I would imagine. The supression algorithm is trivial, so the problem is more or less reduced to creating an additional UI element at startup, as well as going through the main AI code, and adding a historical-flag to any historical decision. Of course, if the main strategy AI is not decision-tree based, it could be a lot harder.
Now what do you think?
(My applogies if this has already been discussed.)
A potential problem is that even if the AI embarks on a historical course, the game will usually quickly diverge from history. Even if the game doesn't, the player will have too much knowledge about what the AI is going to try next.
Many WiF scenarios start after the end of some major historical campaign and that channels the game into more historical avenues, at least for a while.
Many moons ago, when I suggested a video replay feature (which is still on the cards AFAIK), I also proposed that a saved game could be hard-coded that represented as closely as possible the historical war (with the appropriate abstractions and with WiF granularity). I thought it would be very interesting to watch this MWiF WW2, with it's stunning early Axis victories and the gradual turning of the tide, the massive Allied production build-up and their powerful counter-blows.
I then suggested that if it were possible to "jump into" a game being replayed at the beginning of any turn, it would be possible to enter this historical saved game and play on from there.
I think enough MWiF games will follow a roughly historical path (at least in 39-41 and with the exception of Norway) to satisfy the gamers you mention, but those that don't will provide essential variety and replayability.
Cheers, Neilster
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