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| I tried some game called AI War by Bananadine 03/19/2011, 11:55am PDT | ||||
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AI War: Fleet Command specifically. This is what got me interested:
The AI is very excellent, and also an entirely unique concept. The longer you play, the more the AI will impress you, which is kind of backwards from most strategy games, right? We named this "AI War" for a reason. Non-stupid AI and procedural whatevers! NON-STUPID AI It is a "4X" game and you have a big map of planets to look at. The other main view is of the space around a single planet; that is where you can see your individual ships. Most of what you see in either view looks like a tangle of hair or a spatter of dirt. Ships are drawn as pre-rendered gray-and-black pieces of poop (unless they're owned by the AI, in which case they fall into the hair category), or as ugly, overly complex icons. They become fixed-size icons when you zoom out. They have to do this because some ships are very small and the map of a planet's area is very big. Because of the size of the maps, and because you can command thousands of ships at once, you very often need to drastically zoom in or out, or to move your view from one planet to another. Zooming is pretty easy, but still not as easy as it is useful. Sending your camera through the wormholes that connect planets is also extremely important, and less-than-extremely easy (it requires you to ctrl-click on a VERY small spot on your map). So, if you are me, then you're always either struggling to get your camera where it needs to be, or struggling to figure out what's happening in the place you're looking at--that is, whether the dirt is beating the hair, or vice-versa. I don't know how people more experienced with the game deal with this stuff. You harvest resources and build lots of ships and send them places, in the RTS style. Occasionally a huge clot of enemy ships will arrive at one of your planets and you have to hold off the attack, tower-defense-style. In the games I played (on difficulty level 7 out of 10), the enemy fleets always contained only one or two ship types, and they always attacked by flying toward my base until they met resistance, and then stopping and firing, over and over, until the battle was over. That is, they were extremely stupid. I gather from the game's website that the AI is supposed to be good at deciding what fleets to send where, and maybe not so much at controlling its fleets once they've arrived. Or maybe something else was stopping them from being smart. Regardless, it wasn't much fun for me. I just built lots of turrets and ships and held them off, no big deal. I guess the AI factions build up strength as you go and will eventually overrun you if you don't play skillfully, but I never got that far in my demo-sized games (each a few hours long). When I lost, which I always eventually did, it was only because I'd stopped trying very hard. I don't like micromanaging unless, as in turn-based games like Civilization, I can be assured complete control over my side. I don't find it fun to have to ALWAYS keep a large number of near-brainless units working right at the peak of efficiency, with no chance to relax. I guess that's just a personal preference. So I ended up disliking this game. Too cluttered-looking and awkward, and too much real-time micromanagement. (That said, the UI isn't terrible, and I can easily imagine a person who really loves RTS games forgiving its faults.) I wanted to at least play it long enough to see it adapting its AI to me or whatever; it's supposed to be able to surprise you by doing really smart things. The AI is almost all emergent, supposedly. But I only got far enough to learn that the reward I was seeking probably wouldn't be worth the effort. I had a question, the whole time, of how the AI in a tower-defense-ish game could be smart in the first place, if it wasn't going to cleverly pilot individual fighting units (like I said, enemy ships just moved in and stopped and fired). In a game that applies the same rules to each player, even when the player is an AI, the AI must work the rules better than the player does in order to win. That makes sense. But in this game, I guess the AI generates ships differently from how the human side does. It follows some of the same rules that apply to you, but not all of them, I think. So how can it intelligently compete with you, when it has the power (maybe) to just overwhelm you? It's not "intelligent" for a player bent on winning to refrain from exploiting an infinitely great power. But if it did exploit it, then the game certainly wouldn't be fun. So, maybe it's an AI designed to intelligently choose just the right attacks to keep challenging and surprising you, and NOT to maximize its own chance of winning? I guess that'd work. Anyway, this would be a good time for a heretofore unheard-from lurker who has been playing AI War intensively for years to pop up and explain the matter, thereby finishing my review. |
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I tried some game called AI War by 03/19/2011, 11:55am PDT  |
