Heroes III Computerplayers versus humans

[JPtheMapMaker]

Hello - this is my first post. Can anyone tell me why computerplayers sometimes enter a one-way entrance gate without having visited/marked an unvisited/unmarked goldmine located next to the one-way entrance gate? A human would never do that. Further, why do computerplayers sometimes repeat the same forward + backward movement day after day and week after week?

[Kristo]

Here's what I understand about how the AI moves on the adventure map. At any time, a hero has up to 8 possible moves (we're talking one square at a time here). It evaluates which move is best based on a number of factors such as getting closer to resources, exploring terrain, and avoiding danger. Whichever square scores highest is the one it moves to. Then it repeats the process at the new square.

Now, in the situation you mentioned, that particular AI player may have a higher priority assigned to exploration than resource gathering. Entering a teleporter will possibly uncover a whole bunch of black squares. That probably scored higher than grabbing the gold mine. It could be too that the AI doesn't distinguish between one-way and two-way teleporters and figures it can just come back later for the mine.

As for the repeated back-and-forth movement, it's probably a flaw in the scoring algorithm. Those two squares are probably equidistant from two equally valuable items (or something similar to that). So, at either square, the highest scoring move is the other one.

[Gaidal Cain]

That seems like an awkward way of doing it. In heroes 3, at least, each object on the map got awarded a certain point (not each direction), and the AI went for the one with the highest point. I think some of the H4 AI's trouble is in the fact that once it's completed an objective (such as to kill off a stack), it doesn't recalculate points, and thus can't see that it just had liberated a gold mine, so instead it does something else than to capture it.