ORIGINAL: wodin
ORIGINAL: DSWargamer
And they all play just fine without a dithering idiot artificial intelligence.
Mate every post you make you slag off the AI..please lots here only play AI and are happy to do so..we all know you don't like it and find them no challenge, but personally I do and if games stopped coming with an AI I would stop buying them. However I don't resent the fact games have ways to play multiplayer..honestly mate you know I like you but could you give the "AI is useless" comments a rest? It sort of belittles us and what we like about games and feels like we must be stupid to even warrant wanting to play against an AI.
You actually want me to stop slagging the state of artificial intelligence, as it calls into question your own intelligence? Did I read that correct?
Hell I don't even need to be insulting there, you just walked all over it yourself.
If they stopped making pointless stupid and utterly valueless AIs, I suspect nothing bad would happen at all. You'd have the same choice you have today, play them, or not play them, but either way, the companies would not fail any more than the board gaming industry which hasn't by the way.
I have no plans to discontinue making it plain designing AIs is a waste of time, as it isn't likely to stop. We all know plenty of things are self evident, but it seems humanity is not interested in caring. It's why drug dealers can continue to sell drugs, and why people yet still smoke cigarettes. We all know using drugs and smoking cigarettes is the choice of idiots, but, they still do it. And people still make money off of the fact they refuse to quit. It doesn't mean it isn't dumb.
You find yourself hard pressed to beat the AI, and that's no different than saying I have a hard time understanding cars. I'm the last person you want taking care of your car. If I had to take a person somewhere in an emergency, driving your car will be more dangerous than walking very fast
It's a shame you feel 'inadequate' vs the AI. I don't myself. I find playing a game for significant spans of time, only to be confronted by the eventual revelation that I was playing a worthless adversary to be a great bloody waste of time. The AI is no challenge. That's a cold hard fact. It's a brutally true fact. It's rock solid. There are no games on the market where the AI is better than me, not even close to me.
I have played precisely 3 long campaigns in Steel Panthers. A game I love to death. But when you can cherry pick a batch of 88s a batch of 155mm arty and then place a sprinkling of tanks to go and mop up stranglers, you realize, even the games we call great, are not great due to the AI. I was actually parking the infantry and the halftracks in the rear out of the way and imagined they were all having barbeques while listening to the battle on radios like it was a sporting event.
The Mega campaigns are great because the player doesn't get to cherry pick their forces. The scenarios are great, because the player is given specific forces and a specific mission and they must figure it out with what is at hand.
But the moment you play a game the second time, all the surprises are gone. No surprises and the AI just blindly walks into the trap. It isn't able to think.
Now on the other hand, playing Battle Academy player vs player, you can never know what silly notion the other person has come up with. And some of the best ploys, are actually just that, silly notions that will confound the other player. You can intentionally skip turn one, and totally throw off an experienced player. They will just conclude you made the most logical superior choices. So when you don't, they are off by a full turn, and none of your forces will be where they logically would be.
With board games, all is visible, so all must be utterly on the mark. The above notion won't work in a board game environment. But with a board game you also must learn the game, not the interface but the actual game.
You know what would happen if Slitherine Group marketed games sans AI? Well for one thing, all the AI dependent players would have a choice, play digital board games, or not. The board game industry might panic a bit, because digital board games would likely impact the sale of actual board games. If I had a choice of playing World in Flames on a table, a BIG table, or playing a digital version, bereft of AI, but missing the need of the BIG table, I'm picking the digital version. I'd gladly buy it for the equal in price of the board game, which I think these days runs quite the hefty price tag.
I own a set of ASL. It rarely gets played sadly. I know I can play it via VASL, but the program sadly is something of a dog. Always being tweaked, always being fiddled with. I wish it was a single installer, did all the set up, and then just mimicked the board game and nothing else. No AI whatsoever. Alas, the digital rights are not available. They even have issues about emanuals. I'd gladly drop several hundred for the program. Yes several HUNDRED bucks. Heck my actual collection is worth about 5 THOUSAND bucks, so spending 500 for a complete digital set would seem cheap.
Yeah I know, good luck getting joe nobody to buy a program for several hundred bucks. But wait, people routinely do. Windows, several office like programs, Adobe, Autocad, it's not really that much of a stretch to contemplate software worth a lot of money. But businesses usually write off those expenses too. The average gamer normally expects to spend 50ish bucks, play something to death in a month and then discard it. I don't think wargamers are much different. They aren't really interested in being social and I think that is the problem here.
Me, I am a social gamer, a REAL social gamer, I actually expect to play the games against people. If a person is not interested in playing a two player game against another human being, I really can't support that. Sorry.
If after all this you feel put upon Jason, it is not my mission. I have seen you flutter about though never ever happy with any of the games you try. I am not sure what you are looking for.
Me, I am really only looking for 1980. Well there abouts. It was the time before games meant something on a machine.
To me hard core gamer, is someone that makes the effort to play a game for real.
That means if you have a choice of World of Warcraft or Dungeons and Dragons for role playing, you pick D&D. You don't pick Steel Panthers over ASL. You are not waiting to play Strategic Command 3, you are already playing A3R regularly.
And you don't hide behind a lifestyle that doesn't give you the time. Heck you MAKE the time if it actually matters. You don't claim you live in the middle of nowhere, heck you picked where you live.
I always win when I play Civilization V in a fair game of Prince vs Prince mode AIs. I am lucky to win at all against a local friend of mine though. That just says to me, I'm a fairly bland human opponent, that can walk all over the AI none the less. Conclusion, if the AIs is beating you, well, I'd likely trash you in a game
I have too many too complicated wargames, and not enough sufficiently interested non wargamer friends.
