A thought on Computer AI

[Jamis]

One of the glaring problems with the game right now is that the AI isn't smart enough to mass up armies by itself and then attack.  (This problem might be directly related to the 32 population cap on seedling production per asteroid I mention in my other post)

As it stands now, it will continually send 5-12 seed armies at me and get wiped out.  The problem is that it doesn't learn from its attacks.  If there was somehow a way it could realize that X defensive trees on an asteroid + y enemy seedlings on said asteroid would take z offensive seedlings to capture.  Until it has that many seedlings amassed, it should probably be doing something else.

That X variable will also need to take in to consideration the setting of the defensive trees power in the level config file.  Or, maybe also the computer could tell that some of the defensive trees are damaged and wouldn't require the full amount of seeds to destroy...

Just a thought...

[wogan]

I think they mentioned they were working on improving the AI for the next version, so they'll probably have that covered.

*sigh* It looks like we'll have to wait until after IGF for all these spoken-about changes to be released.

[Alex]

The AI does in fact have an idea about armies, and holds up to (i think) 4 of them at any time. This does depend on how many asteroids that AI owns though. At the start they don't have any armies. What they do is send a bunch of their own seedlings to wherever their current army or armies are, or move the armies around from one place to another.

What the AI doesn't do is any kind of learning at all - it's much easier to do things like examining targets and deciding how many seedlings to send / whether to send seedlings at all, than to implement learning from mistakes, although that would be much cooler.

[Camel Jockey]

What if it had "If" coding, like if the first attack failed add 20% to base number of seedlings?