A.I. Frustration

Nightmare AI should recieve extra exp and gold

Hard AI should not

However whenever I try to play a tournament on hard AI, if the game lasts longer than 20-30mins, the AI gets turbocharged. Also on hard, the enemy demigods totally destroy my team, who usually have somewhere in the region of 0 kills and 10 deaths by the end of the game, whereas i will have the opposite.

The tournament isnt a good thing to compare to a normal game shake its so messed up you cant compare. Hard AI doesnt cheat, Nightmare however does. New players arent gonna be playing nightmare and probably not even hard. So relax, if you hate cheating AI so much just play online.

In tournament, your team gets Normal AI's regardless of the difficulty so you're at a marked disadvantage on Hard and Nightmare levels in that setting.

As was said though, the Hard AI by itself doesn't get any specific advantage over you and, having played quite a few matches against it, I've never seen it do anything that it shouldn't have the capacity to do.

I think that hard AI has an exp boost. Because demigods that rarely see battle or even farm creeps such as UB still manage with maybe 1 kill to be a level higher than me... AS TORCHBEARER. I'll be level 10 and farming a row to myself and the other 2 will be on the other side struggling to kill their demigods and creeps yet they are higher leveled.

The AI's job isn't to be fair, but to present a challenge. In a real-time game of this nature it can be difficult to make an AI that can compete effectively by gameplay alone, so the bonuses are used to make up that gap.

But it does that job VERY poorly on the hard skill setting by nerfing your teammates. Nightmare I can understand, but having nerfed teammates in a team game doesn't make it hard, it makes it pointless.

@ Resist:

I play online mainly.
At the moment, tournament AI is cheating on hard.
I see their attack speed + move speed + hp + all stats go to ridiculous levels in a longer game (we are talking 10k hp+, as well as faster move speed than possible) ON HARD DIFFICULTY SETTINGS - not even nightmare

I never knew your side was always normal AI, that would explain a lot ^^

We often play over LAN and realized, that hard AI is still too weak if we are 5 people to fit ta 3on3 ! So we  put it on nightmare. It was really a nightmare because at about lvl16 the AI was unbeatable, havein an attack spped being unbelievable delivering unseen damage. Guess it has three of the best rings which costs 25000 ! It didn´t kill any of us in early game so it is cheating very very hard, not being any chaleenge anymore. This just suxx !

I don't think the actual "I" part of "AI" improves between Hard and Nightmare, so if you want cheating set to "Off" just play on Hard instead of Nightmare. Hard AI might cheat a little bit, but easily overcome. In fact, I barely notice a skill difference even between Normal and Hard AI, but there probably is a little.

As this really isn't meant to be a single-player game, I don't expect GPG to spend too much time developing the AI.

I understand the reasoning behind giving A.I. statistical advantages. That still doesn`t change the fact fighting opponents with those kinds of advantages sucks. I can play my ass off and behold the experience levels of my A.I. foes, who despite good luck and precision playing (when I am fortunate enough to do so) are leaps and bounds beyond my own or those of my teamates.

The advice to "play online multiplayer" I would classify as a cop-out. If single player play is so immaterial to the Demigod experience, then remove it.

I hate to play the following card, but other rts games have succeeded in presenting challenging A.I.  opponents without arbitrary statistical bonuses... maybe its difficult, fine, but it *is* possible. Supreme Commander comes to mind, actually.

Btw, beyond statistical boosts, I also believe the A.I. has the bs capacity to drink potions while moving.

An Option, please...

Supreme Commander also gives players (AI or otherwise) a much larger amount of tactical options and space in which to employ them.  The AI is more challenging in larger games like this because it's better managing several tasks at once than most players (and as you know, multi-tasking ability is incredibly helpful in SupCom since there is 'always' something you can be doing).  The AI's overall strategy tends to come up short but it does do a good job of keeping things from going idle.

In Demigod, there really isn't a whole heck of a lot that a player can be doing at any one time and there aren't as many angles to be attacked from so that advantage isn't nearly as pronounced.  In this setting, I imagine it's much harder to make an AI play effectively. 

That said, the AI in SupCom is still incredibly easy to beat with pretty much any strategy you can come up with.  That is, of course, unless you're playing on the AIx setting which is, as you probably know, an outright cheat.

They really should beef the AI up A LOT as this game, whether we like it or not, is going to force the AI on us in constant situations. Players drop, matchmaking fubars, etc the AI is a fundamental piece of the game...even moreso than most other games. Because of this, the AI must be beefed up considerably. This is unfortuneate, as the AI in Demigod is some of the weakest I have ever encountered.

I have to agree that without cheats, the AI completely sucks. It routinely overextends and gets crappy skills (yetis ftl!). I just don't think the solution to this is spending more time on the AI.

I think that games should be designed so that when a teammate drops, it's not subbed by an AI, but rather boost the team's passive income / XP gains to compensate.

The reason people make cheating AI is because writing "hard" AI is VERY difficult. Trying to reproduce what a person playing the game is thinking with code is almost imposable, let alone making them smarter.

they make a damn good job of it for DotA AI maps.............

I wish this game had Gal Civ 2's calibre of AI.

Of course, turn-based RTS is different, and they do get some bonuses at the high levels, but they are pretty competent IMO even at "fair" difficulty levels.

Ignore the manual, Hard DOES cheat, Nightmare cheats more.

Stop saying that it's almost impossible to make a good AI. Because it's not. There are many ways of making AI and many ways of making them better than humans.

I think GPG didn't try hard enough. It doesn't really need countless hours. A good AI can be done within a month.

And I will prove it! Though most of you won't see how I'll do it...

Well, I would really like an AI that cheats even more than the nightmare AI, a hell of a lot more! Maybe all cooldowns -25%, +20% on mana and 10% more autoattack damage.

Then the AI would probably be as hard to beat as the average players I get in custom games.

This contention flies in the face of every great single player game ever made...

This conversation isn't likely to go anywhere useful if it's just going to be about AI in general.

Demigod isn't the other games that are getting name-dropped here.  It's a completely different environment than you'd find in SupCom, GalCiv, or your typical great single-player game.  It's a relatively small-scale engagement with a very limited selection of actions available to the player at any one time.  I'm certainly not going to say that it's impossible to improve upon what we have but under the circumstances in Demigod, I suspect it's much more difficult because the advantages normally afforded to the AI in other games (better management of large amounts of information and large numbers of units, greater freedom of movement and more points of attack, more combat options to cycle through, or, most commonly, a handicap of some sort) aren't anywhere near as pronounced. 

We effectively have 'one' unit requiring any significant amount of micromanagement and that unit has only a handful of activities at its disposal at any given time.  It's a playing field that a decent player has a much easier time competing on (easier than, say, Galciv which can have literally hundreds of things that a player 'could' be doing and an AI probably 'will' be doing on a given turn). 

What Sakhari is saying is true... this isn't a place an AI can thrive.

I want basic issues - pathing for example - sorted out before this topic leads to some new, undiscovered method of implementing a superior cybernetic+dolphin hybrid that rules the world.

Specifically, very specifically, the AI currently can't path itself on the Crucible map.  All 3 times I've played the map single player, (normal AI) the computer lost without me having to do anything.

The OpFor just never really get very far out of their little "starting circle" at their end of the map.  Why the Opposing AI could do it, but the AI teamed with me could, I have no idea. [Edit: I meant to write, "Why the opposing AI could NOT do it, ...".  Sorry for my typo that made my critical point senseless.]  I believe it's a pathing issue however, simply because when I click ground to move my own DG, It goes the wrong way on that map in a specific case that would indicate the walk mesh can be improved.

Go to the Choose an Arena screen, because I'll reference compass points (north is up) using the image of Crucible on the map selection dialog.

From the South Citadel, move your DG to a point due north (crow flies, jump over the chasm to next roadway)

there is a wall and tower placeable by an intersection.

Move a little west at that Y intersection, following the short wall and go a little past the tower.

Leave your DG outside the circular node you're coming up on, and just a bit before that (2nd) intersection.

Click to move your DG back home, i.e, at a point near the center of your starter circle area.

On my system, DG moves Westbound, away from the correct path, then stops as it realizes it doesn't have the necessary jump-jets to cross the chasm.

I've not noticed this specific type of issue on any other map.

Pix says 1k words. If there is interest, or need, I'll do a mock up and host it someplace.  I'm just lazy right now and wanted to post on this before I forget.

tl:dr A.I. pathing on Crucible needs improvement.

I agree with this. However, it still stands that there are things that need vast improvement, which don't meet the conditions you mention in your post.

Pathing, as Aether Rising mentioned, is screwed up. It's especially noticeable on Crucible, but also pops up elsewhere. I did not have pathing issues in OLD games like Starcraft.

The AI just likes to SIT there. Doing nothing. For Rook, it's got independent weapons, so that's somewhat ok. However, DGs like UB will just sit there, not close to any grunts or flags, full health or getting beat on, doing nothing. THAT is a broken AI.

Things like those should not be happening regardless of the scale of the game.

That, I can agree with.  Outright stupidity like poor pathing and standing around are things that I took for a given as needing to be fixed.

Making the AI actually 'play' better once those issues are out of the way... (naively suggesting that the other issues are an 'easy' fix) that's the hard part.