AI in Heroes of Might and Magic 5 - Nival principles

[okrane]

@TT & DL ... okay... I'll let you big bad proffesional posters enjoy your war with your ennemy... the Joker
Excuse me for intruding :p

[DaemianLucifer]

You got that one wrong. I don't have to prove it wrong, you have to prove it right. It's like I'd say, Vega has an earthlilke planet in orbit. There's life on one of the bigger Jupiter or Saturn moons. The human brain is just a big organic computer. Yeah, right.

Actually you are the one who is wrong.Those are the things that are neither right or wrong until at least one is proven.Vega might have an earthlike planet,and it might not,we dont know yet,so you cannot say it does,or that it doesnt.Life might as well exist on many bodies in our solar system,but we still dont know if it actually does or does not.However,about the brain,we do know a lot.We know its exact structure,or the hardwaremif you wish.We dont know the complete software yet,but that doesnt mean we wont know it some day.And heisenbergs rule doesnt apply to the brain because it works with big particles(so to speak).Sure,a small glitch can indeed change one thought,but a small glitch might also lead to a program doing something that it wasnt intended to do.But considering the complexity of a brain and computer program,it is much more easier for such a glitch to happen in the brain than in any current program.

And, no, the AI does NOT follow pre-programmed patterns that are very similar to decisions a human would make. Definitely not.

It doesnt because the algorithms we currently have arent advanced enough.But it is quite close to it in some more simpler situations.For example,if it faces a decision of wheter to attack a stack of archers or wait until later.It will act exactly like a human in that situation(well,not really,because AI knows the exact size of the stack while humans dont,but if they did,they would act the same).

@TT & DL ... okay... I'll let you big bad proffesional posters enjoy your war with your ennemy... the Joker
Excuse me for intruding :p

So,TT is robin,right?

[MistWeaver]

JJ that won't do. Its like if you have almost ignored my post.
Lets start over.

1) All thread long you were putting accent on battles in heroes. H1&H2 they were to simple. H3 battle AI was dumb, H4 battles were not so complex if to look deeper, but H4 battle AI was still dumb and therefor in H4 you had no opponent
... and at last how GodDamn good battle AI is in H5.
That is quite understandable because battle part of the H5 AI is only thing that can be taken as "normal". So you are mentioning it as offten as you can.
But when it comes to facts... So how about to admit that H4 battles are more complex that those in H5. And therefor harder to program for AI ?


2)

RULES. Let's have a look at a certain kind of single-player map we all know of since Heroes III: the ones that have a portal EXIT near your town. Yes, the annoying ones. I'd say, on all these maps - and there are quite a few - the AI opponent is NOT playing under the same rules than the human. The AI opponent may surprise the human every time, but not the other way round, so the rules are QUITE different - with the sole purpose to make things difficult for the human.

I see you did not unterstand me. I was talking about entertaiment while playing ANY TBS, and how UGLY cheating can ruin it.
For what hell you are starting to tell me about some stupid H3 map ?

I did a chess example. Thats how exactly H5 plays now. It will put back his dead pieces until will yeild by itself or lose king because of stupidity.
Thats what I ment about rules and ugly cheating. Thats why cheating can be bad for game and not acceptable for most of gamers even if it was accepted by you.
H2 cheating is not ugly. Lets say it has one more queen instead of bishop. But it still plays by the rules.

For me this is ABSOLUTELY within the set of rules.

Dont be rediculos. AI that do not know what economy is, what defeat by neutrals is, that gets bunus XP - is not playing by rules. He ignores too much of them.

There's a plethora of maps that give the AI a massive amount of everything. Playing under the same rules?

Once again. I dont care about "some maps". I say that on regular map, H2 will give pretty honest play by rules. And H5 will give play not by rules on ANY map.

The AI does NOT get additional creatures out of nowhere (as opposed to previous Homms)

Who said that ? I asked this in "questions to devs" thread on nival.ru, but it was skipped. What does it mean ?

The main problem some people seem to have is the fact that no AI can emulate the thought processes of a human being

Forget about "emulating human being". Lets call it honest AI that plays strictly by game rules and can defeat moderate human. That IS possible.


Now lets move to other part. It shows to me that you did not know much about H5 cheating.

The AI in H5 doesn't cheat on NORMAL. It can even build only every second day. The AI should always play its best. It's handicapped anyway.

a) It is cheating on NORMAL. Same 10k/day from the 3rd week. And it is not lossing trops in non-vsHuman fights.
b) It not playing to its best. According to Nival it will lose purposely.

The AI doesn't cheat at all in battles against a human.

It does Jolly, it does! More good luck and morale. Less bad luck&morale.
Knowing nival, I will not be surprized if AI has damage dispersion moved more to highest.

And one more thing. Do you know how long it takes to completely build up one town and start buying all population from it, having only one mine for each res ? That would take long. But not for AI. It will be near you in 4 weeks with bunch of archdevils.

[MistWeaver]

Congratulations everyone. Nival's crucial developers from HoMM5 team were moved to "Nival Online" spin-off which was sold to an undisclosed party.

Good luck on next addons & patches.

[Jolly Joker]

Why is this (Heroes II):
"Furthermore, they gain two of each resource each turn, free of charge, and they make twice as much gold as you would with the same amount of towns, castles, and mines."
honest cheating, but in Heroes 5 it's not?
Anyway, do we even know what the AI gets?
For H IV I don't think that the battle AI is hard to program. I think the battles are more on the easier side because you can set easy prorities here. What is extremely difficult in H IV (unprogrammable) is assessing the amount of map you have, the amount of experience there may be, how many heroes to hire to make the most out of it and - most important - WHICH heroes depending on the spells in your 3 guilds and so on. Here, I think the AI is clueless and will basically keep to "orthodox" strategies.
Foregoing everything too complicated it's not that difficult to prioritize things which is the only thing that matters (battlefield size, terrain, los and so on are secondary factors). It starts with downing everything in terms of potions you can (something the AI doesn't do, mind you). It goes over spell and targeting priorities (if you can down a Immortal potion do it, if not, kill a hero, if not possible, bring in additional troops if possible, if not cast a mass spell and so on), because the main difference in the game is that heroes are 1) on the battlefield and 2) a lot of them can bring additional troops.
Sure, you play H IV and it's your turn and you have a plethora of things you COULD do, but, as I said, it's easier to prioritize for the AI, or, in other words, it's easier to generalize the things that matter in combat.
Again, the difficult part in H IV is getting the right army. Fighting with it when you have it, is the easier part.

But as said, the battles are not the question, obviously. The adventure AI is.

[Jolly Joker]

DL, you know that in the 19th century Maxwell seemed to have solved the last physics problems with his work, except that they couldn't prove the existence of the ether?
The human brain is the same problem. Sure, people are collecting material, but a complete theory is something else completely.
Your trust in the sciences is a bit unfounded, I'd think.

[DaemianLucifer]

And even though physics was changed from its very foundations by the new theories,almost all of the old theories remained valid.We just built on top of them.And as the science progresses there are less and less groundbraking theories,and less and less those that are proven fundamentally wrong(like earth being the centre of the universe).No,doesnt seem unfounded to me.

[Alamar]

Why is this (Heroes II):
"Furthermore, they gain two of each resource each turn, free of charge, and they make twice as much gold as you would with the same amount of towns, castles, and mines."
honest cheating, but in Heroes 5 it's not?
Anyway, do we even know what the AI gets?

In other HoMMs the AI could not afford to build up their castles every day AND buy out its creatures without help from a map maker. The H5 AI can do this not just on one castle but EVERY castle on the map with money and resources left over.

Now which AI looks like the biggest [resource] cheater to you??????

We don't know the exact amount the AI gets but it's obvious, to those that wish to see, that it's too much too soon. With all the economic advantages and other bonuses the AI gets there's no excuse why the AI shouldn't win every single [balanced MP] map.

[ThunderTitan]

So,TT is robin,right?

It's Nightwing now, you perverted bat-jerk.



And the AI doesn't need to take into account every variable you do, mostly cause some of your decisions are based on outside the game influences. All he need to do is take into account the ingame variables and he'd do fine. He doesn't need a full human brain, just the parts that understand the game. Look at Deep Blue, sure he needed a few patches in betwenn games, but he did put up a great challange even before.

The current AI doesn't even know how to play the game. Take away the cheating and he'd defeat himself. That's what's wrong.

[Kadorak]

I haven't read through that much of this post, since it quickly degenerated into a flame fest, but to quickly talk about the original subject.

I actually think the basic philosophy is perfectly sound. It's just implemented in an awful and lazy way. I do think the end objective of the AI player is to provide an entertaining foe to the human player, and that on normal difficulty levels if you play a tight game you should almost certainly win. OTOH, it's only entertaining to win if you know that, if you screwed up, you wouldn't have won. My objection is not with the basic design idea but with the incredible rule-bending the AI uses. It is, essentially, playing a completely different game from the player, which removes many of the tactics you might like to employ and bends the game around from using similar strategies as you would in MP or in theory to using AI-busting exploits to overcome the insane troop number/resource bonuses by abusing its stupidity.

I'm not sure I've quite articulated this properly, but one point stands out among others - AI balance should not be based upon people exploiting its stupidity.

[MistWeaver]

It is, essentially, playing a completely different game from the player, which removes many of the tactics you might like to employ

Thats exactly what Ive meant while saying about rules breaking. And why H5 cheating is so wrong. Yet JJ doesnt seem to agree.

[zarakand]

I think the biggest problem all of us are having is that that Jolly Joker thinks the battle AI is very well done. Most of us I don't think are going to argue there. Nor, do must of us mind the cheats as much as we mind the fact that the AI does not attempt to flag mines, pick up resources, etc.

In short we want a revamped adventure AI, which according to JJ is very hard to do. Someone, I forget who, had mentioned a decent compromise which was to change the list of priorties for the adventure AI. Make attacking humans, flagging mines, grabbing resources a lot higher priority than it is.

Yesterday I played a game on heroic, and I was loosing badly. Then suddenly the AI decided enough with being aggressive and sulked in it's castle for a week allowing me to gather myself again and beat him. Now that's frustrating, I was having a lot of fun trying not too loose when the AI decided it's time to "loose gracefully."

[MistWeaver]

Yesterday I played a game on heroic, and I was loosing badly. Then suddenly the AI decided enough with being aggressive and sulked in it's castle for a week allowing me to gather myself again and beat him. Now that's frustrating, I was having a lot of fun trying not too loose when the AI decided it's time to "loose gracefully."

Thats it. Just like Nival planned and Ubi approved.
Yes, and didnt receive anwser on this subject from you JJ. How about that kind of opponent ?
You know, I just cant understand why you are defending every aspect of this game so much. This game is so far from being a masterpiece. It has a LOT of flaws, why continue to assert opposite ?

[Alamar]

I think the biggest problem all of us are having is that that Jolly Joker thinks the battle AI is very well done.

I think the biggest issue with JJ is that from all appearances he seems to be a complete HoMM5 homer.

[Jolly Joker]

The biggest problem is that people want an AI that they can be proud of of having it beaten because it is so darn smart.
Play the game a few weeks and no AI in the Homm world will beat you without having advantages over you.
Seriously, let's say you want a really tight game: if the AI plays under the same rules, how can the game be tight? First thing is, you need different amount of starting money and resources. That, however, is not nearly enough: if you get through the first, well, 5 or so weeks, you'll STILL beat it easily. So what? Do you want other production numbers for the AI? Like we had in H 2 and H 3? What?
Actually I find the current situation not bad: the AI seems to have as much money as it needs to build and buy. However, attacking needs going to the one attacked, so you are on the defense first. If the AI doesn't beat you in the time of material superiority for whatever the reason it goes on the defense. It will have the material it gets into town and you will be forced to fight a - sometimes - very tough end battle. If you have more than one opponent the game may develop different based on whether a far off AI player can conquer other AI players. If that's the case the AI will ruthlessly attack sending you one army after another.

Reading this here you'd think here are two different opinions (except my own). One part is saying, well the AI is no challenge at all (due to Nival's philosophy of "losing graceful"), while the other part is saying, it's no fun because the AI has to massive advantages and you don't have something of a regular play in the beginning because of the overwhelming advantage.

Personally I think the game is a LOT of fun on HARD difficulty level. Honestly, I do think the game is a blast on hard.

Now, I have to confess that I'm playing the 2.0 version for a month or so, so I actually don't know much about 1.3, even though I don't think there is that much of a difference.

[DaemianLucifer]

The biggest problem is that people want an AI that they can be proud of of having it beaten because it is so darn smart.

Well,duh!Personally,I am proud only on winning C2M3 because I had extremly bad luck and I didnt know the game so well.If I did,it would be a cakewalk.

Play the game a few weeks and no AI in the Homm world will beat you without having advantages over you.

Again with the "it wasnt posible in previous games,so why should it be posible now" argument It doesnt work like that.Its if it was bad,fix it,if it was good,build on it.Status quo is not satisfactory.

Seriously, let's say you want a really tight game: if the AI plays under the same rules, how can the game be tight? First thing is, you need different amount of starting money and resources. That, however, is not nearly enough: if you get through the first, well, 5 or so weeks, you'll STILL beat it easily. So what? Do you want other production numbers for the AI? Like we had in H 2 and H 3? What?

Thats why you make your every next game more difficult by adding another player to play against you.By giving more resources to that same player,you just prolong the initial period,but it still remains relativelly easy if its not smart enough to begin with.Adding another player shows another aspect of the AI:Teamwork(well,it at least should show it).

Actually I find the current situation not bad: the AI seems to have as much money as it needs to build and buy. However, attacking needs going to the one attacked, so you are on the defense first. If the AI doesn't beat you in the time of material superiority for whatever the reason it goes on the defense. It will have the material it gets into town and you will be forced to fight a - sometimes - very tough end battle. If you have more than one opponent the game may develop different based on whether a far off AI player can conquer other AI players. If that's the case the AI will ruthlessly attack sending you one army after another.

It would be all peachy if that was the case,but its not.AI has more then enough money to buy creatures and buildings,but he doesnt need to spend it since most things are free.So the tactics of mine harrasment you might use against an economically supperior opponent doesnt work here,and that makes the current situation extremelly bad.

Reading this here you'd think here are two different opinions (except my own). One part is saying, well the AI is no challenge at all (due to Nival's philosophy of "losing graceful"), while the other part is saying, it's no fun because the AI has to massive advantages and you don't have something of a regular play in the beginning because of the overwhelming advantage.

I dont think they mind the advantage as much as the way that advantage is made.

Personally I think the game is a LOT of fun on HARD difficulty level. Honestly, I do think the game is a blast on hard.

I dont.I found it too easy even on hard.

Now, I have to confess that I'm playing the 2.0 version for a month or so, so I actually don't know much about 1.3, even though I don't think there is that much of a difference.

Yes,we know.Every version was a blast for you

[Jolly Joker]

Ah. So you play a map like Warlords or War of the Worlds on Hard or even Heroic and beat it easily? Ok. If that's the case, congrats. I can't do that.

[zarakand]

I think the biggest problem all of us are having is that that Jolly Joker thinks the battle AI is very well done.

I think the biggest issue with JJ is that from all appearances he seems to be a complete HoMM5 homer.

Why go here? I mean I disagree with him, but he's been fairly civil even when the majority of us attack his posts. It just seems pointless to go to this level.


Sorry if this question sounds noobish, as I'm fairly new to the forums. What do you mean playing version 2.0?

[DaemianLucifer]

I doubt those are hard because AI is so great.

Sorry if this question sounds noobish, as I'm fairly new to the forums. What do you mean playing version 2.0?

He means he works on the heroes as a translator,and thus gets each version much before us.He is playing farmers of hate for some time now,apparently.

[Meandor]

In other words JJ is playing another game so isn`t all this disccusion stupid and pointless?