Shadow Empire Poll posted
Moderator: Vic
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
Clearly I'm a softie, I voted for having the option to elope with the opposing major power's supreme leader.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
ORIGINAL: Jdane
Clearly I'm a softie, I voted for having the option to elope with the opposing major power's supreme leader.
One love baby.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
For the "What existing part of the game should have polishing priority?" question, I think a lot of people would like some improvements to the logistics system.
I wrote down my main issues with the logistics system here:
fb.asp?m=4828365
For example, it would be really nice if some automatic traffic light gets placed when civilians attach a building to an existing road network, so that they don't accidentally divert half of your logistics points without even telling you about it.
For what big new feature to focus on, I think navies is probably the biggest thing, since it's going to expand the planet generation process a whole lot and thus probably also the game's replayability.
Besides navies though, I would really like some additional diplomacy options. Especially diplomacy between you and your vassal states is pretty much nonexistant right now, which is kinda disappointing.
Edit:
Here are my thoughts on what I think is lacking about diplomacy with minors right now:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4833412
I wrote down my main issues with the logistics system here:
fb.asp?m=4828365
For example, it would be really nice if some automatic traffic light gets placed when civilians attach a building to an existing road network, so that they don't accidentally divert half of your logistics points without even telling you about it.
For what big new feature to focus on, I think navies is probably the biggest thing, since it's going to expand the planet generation process a whole lot and thus probably also the game's replayability.
Besides navies though, I would really like some additional diplomacy options. Especially diplomacy between you and your vassal states is pretty much nonexistant right now, which is kinda disappointing.
Edit:
Here are my thoughts on what I think is lacking about diplomacy with minors right now:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4833412
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
I reject the idea A.I. can't play by the same rules as the player but that comes with a huge "????" because it depends how much time is spent on it and how much the particular developer actually knows about A.I.
In my college days we weren't even to the PC yet (I'm 64) and we programmed in assembly. A.I. was not taught at all even though computer chess was already a thing. And that was a game that played by the same rules as the human and it was capable of regularly beating the player. Nowadays chess programs scale to player ability and teach. So it amazes me to read post after post filled with excuses why all other games have poor A,I, that must cheat to win and how impossible it would be to have A.I. that can play by the same rules and play well enough to win. It is possible, but it will likely never happen by a developer house churning titles out every couple of years. The best usually come from an independant not restricted by some time constaint alloted him by the game's head producer, which in my experience has never exceeded more than 14 days. So no your not going to produced a decent A.I. in 14 days unless the game is pretty simple.
To have any type of discussion about A.I. in a particular game one has to know the approach the programmer took and what type of A.I. is being used. Until that is known anything written is at best guesswork and at worse meaningless fluff based on false assumptions. I can pretty much spot good A.I. after hours of play. It is extremely rare but it does occur. sadly when it does most players miss it. They are used to poor A.I. sending harassing units early (but never formulating a winning strategy) and if they don't see that early on the wrongly assume the A.I. is bad, when in reality the A.I. is good but is playing to win. It isn't attacking early because first it doesn't have to and second it hasn't built up enough to be ready for the conflict. The A.I. may appear to be doing nothing for 50 turns when in fact those 50 turns are being spent doing a lot in getting ready for war.
I would ask then for readers to a take a few moments and read the rest of this post which will explain the different types of A.I. and those with many hours under the belt playing shadow Empires can then assess what's being used and with that knowledge then know what can be improved upon and what can't.
Today in most cases A.I. still isn't taught to any usable degree in the classroom. And no Developer is going to tell one of it's employee's "Gee go take 3 years paid time and learn A.I." If a developer actually understands and knows A.I. he taught himself on his own time just like myself and the truth is most dev houses put little to no resources toward it.
This is the reason A.I. sucks in most single player games- bar none. It has nothing to do with what can or can't be done.
So what generally happens is the programmer uses a bunch of "IF/THEN" statements. This ad-hoc approach can work in simple terms but it gets unwelding past the most basic stuff. It can 'see and attack' for example...but anything more complex and it can get very hairy and even blow up at a certain point.
In 2005 things got shook up. Monolith Productions released F.E.A.R. It blew people away. it wasn't the graphics or some new level design...it was the A.I. It could think. It took cover. It called for help. It worked with teammates. It flanked. frankly it done things no one had ever seen in a shooter. It was a PC game, and it used a full blown language with libraries (they did later port it to consoles via a third party dev but it lacked the A.I. of the computer version and did poorly).
The guy who did that was Jeff Orkin. That's where i started in my own learning of A.I. The guy does a lot of teaching and writing about A.I. and if anyone is interested in learning A.I. it's a great starting point.
So going back to the "IF/THEN" scene we all sorely experience in our games adding a little bit of structure to a bunch of otherwise disjointed rules maps over somewhat to the most basic of AI architectures—the finite state machine (FSM). The most basic part of a FSM is a state. That is, an AI agent is doing or being something at a given point in time. It is said to be “in” a state. The reason this organizes the agent behavior better is because everything the agent needs to know about what it is doing is contained in the code for the state that it is in. The animations it needs to play to act out a certain state, for example, are listed in the body of that state. The other part of the state machine is the logic for what to do next. This may involve switching to another state or even simply continuing to stay in the current one.
Usually state machines employ elaborate trigger mechanisms that involve the game logic and situation. For instance our “guard” state may have the logic, “if [the player enters the room] and [is holding a gun] and , then attack the player” at which point my state changes from “guard” to “attack”. Note the three individual criteria in the statement. We could certainly have a different statement that says, “if [the player enters the room] and [is holding a gun] and , then flee.” Obviously, the result of this is that I would transition from “guard” to “flee” instead.
So each state has the code for what to do while in that state and, more notably, when, if, and what to do next. While some of the criteria can access some of the same external checks, in the end each state has its own set of transition logic that is used solely for that state. Unfortunately, this comes with some drawbacks.
First, as the number of states increases, the number of potential transitions increases as well—at an alarming rate. If you assume for the moment that any given state could potentially transition to any of the other states, the number of transitions increases fairly quickly. If there are 4 states each of which can transition to 3 others for a total of 12 transitions. If we were to add a 5th state, this would increase to 20 transitions. 6 states would merit 30, etc. When you consider that games could potentially have dozens of states transitioning back and forth, you begin to appreciate the complexity. What really drives that issue home, however, is the realization of the workload that is involved in adding a new state to the mix. In order to have that state accessible, you have to go and touch every single other state that could potentially transition to it.
The second issue with FSMs is the predictability. The player soon learns the behavior and begins exploiting it because the same trigger occurs and always ends up with the same result. A Civ game comes to mind. Can anyone guess which one if not all of them use FSMs? Civs sending a unit or two repeatedly? FSMs. Works great in shooters. Absolutely sucks in strategy games.
At this point, it is useful to point out the difference between an action and a decision. In the FSM above, our agents were in one state at a time—that is, they were “doing something” at any given moment (even if that something was “doing nothing”). Inside each state was decision logic that told them if they should change to something else and, in fact, what they should change to. That logic often has very little to do with the state that it is contained in and more to do with what is going on outside the state or even outside the agent itself.
For example, if I hear a gunshot, it really doesn’t matter what I’m doing at the time—I’m going to flinch, duck for cover, wet myself, or any number of other appropriate responses. Therefore, why would I need to have the decision logic for “React to Gunshot” in each and every other state I could have been in at the time? There is a better way.
The behavior tree.
It separates the states from the decision logic. Both still exist in the AI code, but they are not arranged so that the decision logic is in the actual state code. Instead, the decision logic is removed to a stand-alone architecture called the behavior tree.
The main advantage to this is that all the decision logic is in a single place. We can make it as complicated as we need to without worrying about how to keep it all synchronized between different states. If we add a new behavior, we add the code to call it in one place rather than having to revisit all of the existing states. If we need to edit the transition logic for a particular behavior, we can edit it in one place rather than many.
Another advantage of behavior trees is that there is a far more formal method of building behaviors. Through a collection of tools, templates, and structures, very expressive behaviors can be written—even sequencing behaviors together that are meant to go together.
Now add a Planner. While the end result of a planner is a state (just like the FSM and behavior tree above), how it gets to that state is significantly different.
Like a behavior tree, the reasoning architecture behind a planner is separate from the code that “does stuff”. A planner compares its situation—the state of the world at the moment—and compares it to a collection of individual atomic actions that it could do. It then assembles one or more of these tasks into a sequence (the “plan”) so that its current goal is met. In SE that might be to build it's economy or it's defenses before finally attacking the nearest percieved threat.
Unlike other architectures that start at its current state and look forward, a planner actually works backwards from its goal . For example, if the goal is “kill player”, a planner might discover that one method of satisfying that goal is to “shoot player”. Of course, this requires having a gun. If the agent doesn’t have a gun, it would have to pick one up. If one is not nearby, it would have to move to one it knows exists. If it doesn’t know where one is, it may have to search for one. The result of searching backwards is a plan that can be executed forwards.
The planner diverges from the FSM and Behavior tree in that it isn’t specifically hand-authored. Therein lies the difference in planners—they actually solve situations based on what is available to do and how those available actions can be chained together. One of the benefits of this sort of structure is that it can often come up with solutions to novel situations that the designer or programmer didn’t necessarily account for and handle directly in code.
As I mentioned Jeff Orkin used them in Monolith’s shooter, F.E.A.R. His variant was referred to as Goal-Oriented Action Planning or GOAP.
To sum it up there's a lot to A.I. and I haven't even touched Utility based systems or NNs (neural network) and i'll note my own A.I. also includes personalities (20) that give weight to what the A.I. might do (a janitor will run and hide from a monster but a soldier will attack) but there's a small chance the Janitor is Bruce Willis so I'll give it 90-10 weight. But this way Patton can play like Patton and Rommel will behave like Rommel and everything is much less predictable.
So What does SE use?
I know it's not just "IF/THEN" statements. I know it's not just FSMs. How in depth and then we know what is possible.
What's not there?
In my A.I. you have a blackboard (where all game data is stored) then a Needs section and then the decision section. But in between the Blackboard and the Needs block is an A.I. blackboard section. This section is to keep the A.I. honest. It filters out information the A.I. should not know. --- if the guard didn't hear or see you he won't know your location. If such was in SE the same would be true--but there isn't one. Delete your defending troops in your cities and see how fast ALL the A.I. factions declare war on you. It knows your strengths, position...etc at all times.
But keep in mind everything is checks and balances. Turn times vs what the engine can handle, time wise in terms of development and so on. Often these things would be great in an unlimited engine with unlimited funds and unlimited time. You have to decide what you want in and what you can't do.
Hopefully what's here is very good. What's missing isn't having a huge impact on game play. But I haven't the play hours to determine that but I am working on it.
In my college days we weren't even to the PC yet (I'm 64) and we programmed in assembly. A.I. was not taught at all even though computer chess was already a thing. And that was a game that played by the same rules as the human and it was capable of regularly beating the player. Nowadays chess programs scale to player ability and teach. So it amazes me to read post after post filled with excuses why all other games have poor A,I, that must cheat to win and how impossible it would be to have A.I. that can play by the same rules and play well enough to win. It is possible, but it will likely never happen by a developer house churning titles out every couple of years. The best usually come from an independant not restricted by some time constaint alloted him by the game's head producer, which in my experience has never exceeded more than 14 days. So no your not going to produced a decent A.I. in 14 days unless the game is pretty simple.
To have any type of discussion about A.I. in a particular game one has to know the approach the programmer took and what type of A.I. is being used. Until that is known anything written is at best guesswork and at worse meaningless fluff based on false assumptions. I can pretty much spot good A.I. after hours of play. It is extremely rare but it does occur. sadly when it does most players miss it. They are used to poor A.I. sending harassing units early (but never formulating a winning strategy) and if they don't see that early on the wrongly assume the A.I. is bad, when in reality the A.I. is good but is playing to win. It isn't attacking early because first it doesn't have to and second it hasn't built up enough to be ready for the conflict. The A.I. may appear to be doing nothing for 50 turns when in fact those 50 turns are being spent doing a lot in getting ready for war.
I would ask then for readers to a take a few moments and read the rest of this post which will explain the different types of A.I. and those with many hours under the belt playing shadow Empires can then assess what's being used and with that knowledge then know what can be improved upon and what can't.
Today in most cases A.I. still isn't taught to any usable degree in the classroom. And no Developer is going to tell one of it's employee's "Gee go take 3 years paid time and learn A.I." If a developer actually understands and knows A.I. he taught himself on his own time just like myself and the truth is most dev houses put little to no resources toward it.
This is the reason A.I. sucks in most single player games- bar none. It has nothing to do with what can or can't be done.
So what generally happens is the programmer uses a bunch of "IF/THEN" statements. This ad-hoc approach can work in simple terms but it gets unwelding past the most basic stuff. It can 'see and attack' for example...but anything more complex and it can get very hairy and even blow up at a certain point.
In 2005 things got shook up. Monolith Productions released F.E.A.R. It blew people away. it wasn't the graphics or some new level design...it was the A.I. It could think. It took cover. It called for help. It worked with teammates. It flanked. frankly it done things no one had ever seen in a shooter. It was a PC game, and it used a full blown language with libraries (they did later port it to consoles via a third party dev but it lacked the A.I. of the computer version and did poorly).
The guy who did that was Jeff Orkin. That's where i started in my own learning of A.I. The guy does a lot of teaching and writing about A.I. and if anyone is interested in learning A.I. it's a great starting point.
So going back to the "IF/THEN" scene we all sorely experience in our games adding a little bit of structure to a bunch of otherwise disjointed rules maps over somewhat to the most basic of AI architectures—the finite state machine (FSM). The most basic part of a FSM is a state. That is, an AI agent is doing or being something at a given point in time. It is said to be “in” a state. The reason this organizes the agent behavior better is because everything the agent needs to know about what it is doing is contained in the code for the state that it is in. The animations it needs to play to act out a certain state, for example, are listed in the body of that state. The other part of the state machine is the logic for what to do next. This may involve switching to another state or even simply continuing to stay in the current one.
Usually state machines employ elaborate trigger mechanisms that involve the game logic and situation. For instance our “guard” state may have the logic, “if [the player enters the room] and [is holding a gun] and , then attack the player” at which point my state changes from “guard” to “attack”. Note the three individual criteria in the statement. We could certainly have a different statement that says, “if [the player enters the room] and [is holding a gun] and , then flee.” Obviously, the result of this is that I would transition from “guard” to “flee” instead.
So each state has the code for what to do while in that state and, more notably, when, if, and what to do next. While some of the criteria can access some of the same external checks, in the end each state has its own set of transition logic that is used solely for that state. Unfortunately, this comes with some drawbacks.
First, as the number of states increases, the number of potential transitions increases as well—at an alarming rate. If you assume for the moment that any given state could potentially transition to any of the other states, the number of transitions increases fairly quickly. If there are 4 states each of which can transition to 3 others for a total of 12 transitions. If we were to add a 5th state, this would increase to 20 transitions. 6 states would merit 30, etc. When you consider that games could potentially have dozens of states transitioning back and forth, you begin to appreciate the complexity. What really drives that issue home, however, is the realization of the workload that is involved in adding a new state to the mix. In order to have that state accessible, you have to go and touch every single other state that could potentially transition to it.
The second issue with FSMs is the predictability. The player soon learns the behavior and begins exploiting it because the same trigger occurs and always ends up with the same result. A Civ game comes to mind. Can anyone guess which one if not all of them use FSMs? Civs sending a unit or two repeatedly? FSMs. Works great in shooters. Absolutely sucks in strategy games.
At this point, it is useful to point out the difference between an action and a decision. In the FSM above, our agents were in one state at a time—that is, they were “doing something” at any given moment (even if that something was “doing nothing”). Inside each state was decision logic that told them if they should change to something else and, in fact, what they should change to. That logic often has very little to do with the state that it is contained in and more to do with what is going on outside the state or even outside the agent itself.
For example, if I hear a gunshot, it really doesn’t matter what I’m doing at the time—I’m going to flinch, duck for cover, wet myself, or any number of other appropriate responses. Therefore, why would I need to have the decision logic for “React to Gunshot” in each and every other state I could have been in at the time? There is a better way.
The behavior tree.
It separates the states from the decision logic. Both still exist in the AI code, but they are not arranged so that the decision logic is in the actual state code. Instead, the decision logic is removed to a stand-alone architecture called the behavior tree.
The main advantage to this is that all the decision logic is in a single place. We can make it as complicated as we need to without worrying about how to keep it all synchronized between different states. If we add a new behavior, we add the code to call it in one place rather than having to revisit all of the existing states. If we need to edit the transition logic for a particular behavior, we can edit it in one place rather than many.
Another advantage of behavior trees is that there is a far more formal method of building behaviors. Through a collection of tools, templates, and structures, very expressive behaviors can be written—even sequencing behaviors together that are meant to go together.
Now add a Planner. While the end result of a planner is a state (just like the FSM and behavior tree above), how it gets to that state is significantly different.
Like a behavior tree, the reasoning architecture behind a planner is separate from the code that “does stuff”. A planner compares its situation—the state of the world at the moment—and compares it to a collection of individual atomic actions that it could do. It then assembles one or more of these tasks into a sequence (the “plan”) so that its current goal is met. In SE that might be to build it's economy or it's defenses before finally attacking the nearest percieved threat.
Unlike other architectures that start at its current state and look forward, a planner actually works backwards from its goal . For example, if the goal is “kill player”, a planner might discover that one method of satisfying that goal is to “shoot player”. Of course, this requires having a gun. If the agent doesn’t have a gun, it would have to pick one up. If one is not nearby, it would have to move to one it knows exists. If it doesn’t know where one is, it may have to search for one. The result of searching backwards is a plan that can be executed forwards.
The planner diverges from the FSM and Behavior tree in that it isn’t specifically hand-authored. Therein lies the difference in planners—they actually solve situations based on what is available to do and how those available actions can be chained together. One of the benefits of this sort of structure is that it can often come up with solutions to novel situations that the designer or programmer didn’t necessarily account for and handle directly in code.
As I mentioned Jeff Orkin used them in Monolith’s shooter, F.E.A.R. His variant was referred to as Goal-Oriented Action Planning or GOAP.
To sum it up there's a lot to A.I. and I haven't even touched Utility based systems or NNs (neural network) and i'll note my own A.I. also includes personalities (20) that give weight to what the A.I. might do (a janitor will run and hide from a monster but a soldier will attack) but there's a small chance the Janitor is Bruce Willis so I'll give it 90-10 weight. But this way Patton can play like Patton and Rommel will behave like Rommel and everything is much less predictable.
So What does SE use?
I know it's not just "IF/THEN" statements. I know it's not just FSMs. How in depth and then we know what is possible.
What's not there?
In my A.I. you have a blackboard (where all game data is stored) then a Needs section and then the decision section. But in between the Blackboard and the Needs block is an A.I. blackboard section. This section is to keep the A.I. honest. It filters out information the A.I. should not know. --- if the guard didn't hear or see you he won't know your location. If such was in SE the same would be true--but there isn't one. Delete your defending troops in your cities and see how fast ALL the A.I. factions declare war on you. It knows your strengths, position...etc at all times.
But keep in mind everything is checks and balances. Turn times vs what the engine can handle, time wise in terms of development and so on. Often these things would be great in an unlimited engine with unlimited funds and unlimited time. You have to decide what you want in and what you can't do.
Hopefully what's here is very good. What's missing isn't having a huge impact on game play. But I haven't the play hours to determine that but I am working on it.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
Tough choices 
Naval/Air assets are definitely one of the top things for a lot of people. Having more tools to play with will definitely help all aspects of the game. One of the best parts of Shadow Empire is how the 4X and logistics element tie in directly to the wargaming element too (i.e. attacking your enemy's means of production and their road/rails to disrupt their supply chain). Adding air/navy on top of that definitely extends the strategic depth of war.
Naval/Air assets are definitely one of the top things for a lot of people. Having more tools to play with will definitely help all aspects of the game. One of the best parts of Shadow Empire is how the 4X and logistics element tie in directly to the wargaming element too (i.e. attacking your enemy's means of production and their road/rails to disrupt their supply chain). Adding air/navy on top of that definitely extends the strategic depth of war.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
Thing is I would have definitely voted for more Shadow stuff if there hadn't been such strong competition.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
I want everything on that list of course but here's my choices and why:
Adding new features
Game is largely bug-free. I've only had a crash once. Still needs more polish and clarity in certain areas like the UI, terminology and the whole logistics system.
AI
Easy one. It needs to be more aggressive in fielding as many vehicles, tanks and artillery as possible so that models like tank destroyers and heavy tanks actually become worthwhile.
More variety and far more challenging that way. I've had young planets with little fuel and old planets with an overabundance of fuel, it doesn't matter, AI fields just a few tanks here and there but never concentrated panzer corps rampaging through my lines.
Also needs significant diplomacy improvements; they need to not start wars on multiple fronts and make peace efforts whatever the cost to end wars in such situations. They just get annihilated when they behave like that. In my current game, an AI empire was trapped between my empire and another AI empire. What does it do? Start wars with both in short order and gets crushed. Alliances and NAP's in general needs to be more common. Of course, victory is the ultimate goal so I personally don't mind sudden backstabbing although that's a very unpopular opinion (most gamers hate it and wants an AI that's *cough* 'role playing'; think Civ 4 AI vs Civ 5 AI...)
More AI personality would be much welcome as well.
Make it play more with the same rules as Human Majors do
Still no answer whether they abide by the FoW rules or not and to what extent. A bit fishy to go through such details in AI vs human in the "AI rules differences" section of the manual but not addressing one of the most fundamental aspects of strategy gaming. My guess is of course, it doesn't abide by any FoW like in most games which is a big weakness to me, but I might be alone on this.
Airforces
This is relevant in all planet types unlike Navies...of course continental/ocean planets would be an entirely new arena of the game where Navies are a must have. It'd add so much depth beyond having navies...so it makes sense to vote for navies here yet I picked airforce... because I think it's less work, and ultimately more important in modern warfare.
Adding new features
Game is largely bug-free. I've only had a crash once. Still needs more polish and clarity in certain areas like the UI, terminology and the whole logistics system.
AI
Easy one. It needs to be more aggressive in fielding as many vehicles, tanks and artillery as possible so that models like tank destroyers and heavy tanks actually become worthwhile.
More variety and far more challenging that way. I've had young planets with little fuel and old planets with an overabundance of fuel, it doesn't matter, AI fields just a few tanks here and there but never concentrated panzer corps rampaging through my lines.
Also needs significant diplomacy improvements; they need to not start wars on multiple fronts and make peace efforts whatever the cost to end wars in such situations. They just get annihilated when they behave like that. In my current game, an AI empire was trapped between my empire and another AI empire. What does it do? Start wars with both in short order and gets crushed. Alliances and NAP's in general needs to be more common. Of course, victory is the ultimate goal so I personally don't mind sudden backstabbing although that's a very unpopular opinion (most gamers hate it and wants an AI that's *cough* 'role playing'; think Civ 4 AI vs Civ 5 AI...)
More AI personality would be much welcome as well.
Make it play more with the same rules as Human Majors do
Still no answer whether they abide by the FoW rules or not and to what extent. A bit fishy to go through such details in AI vs human in the "AI rules differences" section of the manual but not addressing one of the most fundamental aspects of strategy gaming. My guess is of course, it doesn't abide by any FoW like in most games which is a big weakness to me, but I might be alone on this.
Airforces
This is relevant in all planet types unlike Navies...of course continental/ocean planets would be an entirely new arena of the game where Navies are a must have. It'd add so much depth beyond having navies...so it makes sense to vote for navies here yet I picked airforce... because I think it's less work, and ultimately more important in modern warfare.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
I took the time to read attentively eyegore's very detailed post whose length scared me away at first.
I found it both educative and thought-provoking. (Although I'm not a programmer, so I haven't been training in this.) It deserves to be the opening post of a dedicated topic in my opinion.
Because I'm a silly sod, I will of course remember this quote :
But thanks for your time and effort in writing this, eyegore, that's not the only thing I will remember from your contribution. (It'll just be a mnemonic trigger for remembering the rest.)
I found it both educative and thought-provoking. (Although I'm not a programmer, so I haven't been training in this.) It deserves to be the opening post of a dedicated topic in my opinion.
Because I'm a silly sod, I will of course remember this quote :
[:D]ORIGINAL: eyegore
there's a small chance the Janitor is Bruce Willis so I'll give it 90-10 weight
But thanks for your time and effort in writing this, eyegore, that's not the only thing I will remember from your contribution. (It'll just be a mnemonic trigger for remembering the rest.)
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
ORIGINAL: t1it
Still no answer whether they abide by the FoW rules or not and to what extent.
I'm pretty sure Vic stated somewhere they don't and have a slight recon/spying advantage. I probably could find the source and would, but not just now. My clock is screaming at me.
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diamondspider
- Posts: 141
- Joined: Fri May 15, 2020 1:54 am
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
Another bit of opinion on air in this game: I am very much a "the more different ways to play the merrier" sort of guy, but after more thought and play, if anything beyond some kind of rickety low tech ornithopter or such, or GR levitation tech that is hard to come by is put into this game for air, I request that this can be disabled entirely as an option.
Why do I feel so strongly about this?
1) I love the interesting recon mechanics. Even though I play with the map showing, the FOW is excellent and a big part of the challenge. Flying around allows excellent collection of recon info, and so I'd think that would kill this aspect of the game for the most part. Sure, you could say with anti-air, interceptors, etc. etc. this could be defeated, but that starts to involve a very complex layer of addition (perhaps like War in the West). Nothing wrong with all of that, but I like the odd setting that includes not going back to WWII or modern to that extent. In any case, if I can turn it all off, no problem.
2) Terrain is the other thing I love about this game. It has very strong impacts on both battle and logistics. Among the best parts of air is being able to ignore terrain. Just bomb them until they glow. So, once again, this works against another one of my favorite aspects of the game.
On navy, that bugs me a lot less. I don't put much ocean on my maps, so that one is easy to avoid. Also, boats are much lower tech potentially than an airforce, so I could see myself perhaps doing something with a low tech navy. Still, about as far from the top of my own wish list as possible.
I realize that there is no point in arguing over matters of taste, and the more features the better, but we should be honest about the fact that if an entire air infrastructure is put into the game that it will probably need to change the rest of it quite a bit to balance for that, regardless of if I can turn it off. So while the poll didn't have a "I really DON'T want this" option, this is my comment on that.
Why do I feel so strongly about this?
1) I love the interesting recon mechanics. Even though I play with the map showing, the FOW is excellent and a big part of the challenge. Flying around allows excellent collection of recon info, and so I'd think that would kill this aspect of the game for the most part. Sure, you could say with anti-air, interceptors, etc. etc. this could be defeated, but that starts to involve a very complex layer of addition (perhaps like War in the West). Nothing wrong with all of that, but I like the odd setting that includes not going back to WWII or modern to that extent. In any case, if I can turn it all off, no problem.
2) Terrain is the other thing I love about this game. It has very strong impacts on both battle and logistics. Among the best parts of air is being able to ignore terrain. Just bomb them until they glow. So, once again, this works against another one of my favorite aspects of the game.
On navy, that bugs me a lot less. I don't put much ocean on my maps, so that one is easy to avoid. Also, boats are much lower tech potentially than an airforce, so I could see myself perhaps doing something with a low tech navy. Still, about as far from the top of my own wish list as possible.
I realize that there is no point in arguing over matters of taste, and the more features the better, but we should be honest about the fact that if an entire air infrastructure is put into the game that it will probably need to change the rest of it quite a bit to balance for that, regardless of if I can turn it off. So while the poll didn't have a "I really DON'T want this" option, this is my comment on that.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
Backstabbing Player in multiplayer often get a coalition against them in eu4 you know.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
ORIGINAL: diamondspider
Another bit of opinion on air in this game: I am very much a "the more different ways to play the merrier" sort of guy, but after more thought and play, if anything beyond some kind of rickety low tech ornithopter or such, or GR levitation tech that is hard to come by is put into this game for air, I request that this can be disabled entirely as an option.
Why do I feel so strongly about this?
1) I love the interesting recon mechanics. Even though I play with the map showing, the FOW is excellent and a big part of the challenge. Flying around allows excellent collection of recon info, and so I'd think that would kill this aspect of the game for the most part. Sure, you could say with anti-air, interceptors, etc. etc. this could be defeated, but that starts to involve a very complex layer of addition (perhaps like War in the West). Nothing wrong with all of that, but I like the odd setting that includes not going back to WWII or modern to that extent. In any case, if I can turn it all off, no problem.
2) Terrain is the other thing I love about this game. It has very strong impacts on both battle and logistics. Among the best parts of air is being able to ignore terrain. Just bomb them until they glow. So, once again, this works against another one of my favorite aspects of the game.
On navy, that bugs me a lot less. I don't put much ocean on my maps, so that one is easy to avoid. Also, boats are much lower tech potentially than an airforce, so I could see myself perhaps doing something with a low tech navy. Still, about as far from the top of my own wish list as possible.
I realize that there is no point in arguing over matters of taste, and the more features the better, but we should be honest about the fact that if an entire air infrastructure is put into the game that it will probably need to change the rest of it quite a bit to balance for that, regardless of if I can turn it off. So while the poll didn't have a "I really DON'T want this" option, this is my comment on that.
One of the main problems with navy than I can think of, its than normally they take a long time to be build and without air force it would be just a game of who makes the biggest battleship. But also that would mean than we could have marines, military divers and we could have big deposits of fuel in the ocean.
Amateurs talk about strategy. Professionals talk about logistics!
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
Soon there will be 10! that is right 10!!!! that voted story around shadow presence 
Right now its at 7! it was 3 a few hours ago
Okay the other choices were good too in that one. But I just like stories in games My 2nd choice would be terraforming and I probably could have voted for that instead. But I think terraforming would be amazing. Though way I picture it is changing a planets climate (for bad or good). So like siwa if you get a planet generated where can breathe outside and plants all over, but something bad happens or terraform badly can find themselves an unbreathable planet with no alien life or oxygen. Similar the Seth planet, be cool to turn the desert and make it like an oasis. Would add a lot of gameplay (at least to me it would).
Though you can actually slightly terraform seth btw if anyones curious. I'm not sure exact conditions needed, but you can build outdoor farms near canyons (or are they ravines? The stuff that looks like space going through the land, doesnt really look like a canyon/ravine...either way) and farms spread along the canyon turning the tile green. I had one seth game where this was possible and it was pretty cool.
Right now its at 7! it was 3 a few hours agoOkay the other choices were good too in that one. But I just like stories in games
My 2nd choice would be terraforming and I probably could have voted for that instead. But I think terraforming would be amazing. Though way I picture it is changing a planets climate (for bad or good). So like siwa if you get a planet generated where can breathe outside and plants all over, but something bad happens or terraform badly can find themselves an unbreathable planet with no alien life or oxygen. Similar the Seth planet, be cool to turn the desert and make it like an oasis. Would add a lot of gameplay (at least to me it would). Though you can actually slightly terraform seth btw if anyones curious. I'm not sure exact conditions needed, but you can build outdoor farms near canyons (or are they ravines? The stuff that looks like space going through the land, doesnt really look like a canyon/ravine...either way) and farms spread along the canyon turning the tile green. I had one seth game where this was possible and it was pretty cool.
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Soar_Slitherine
- Posts: 597
- Joined: Sun Jun 07, 2020 11:33 am
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
For those wondering about whether the AI has fog of war, the manual states that it doesn't use spies, and instead has "a rather vague view on your empire". It does seem like it knows the location of (at least some) units in the fog of war - recently, an AI mobile militia unit I thought was too far away to get there in one move managed to cut off my supply line, and after I loaded the autosave and moved some units to guard the road, the militia drove off towards some completely different front instead.
For what it's worth, I've been making extensive use of spies in this playthrough and probably have better intel than the AI in the zones where the frontlines are, if the manual's statement about the information it gets being "vague" is accurate.
For what it's worth, I've been making extensive use of spies in this playthrough and probably have better intel than the AI in the zones where the frontlines are, if the manual's statement about the information it gets being "vague" is accurate.
Not affiliated with Slitherine. They added it to my name when they merged the Slitherine and Matrix account systems.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
I'm one of those 
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
It is nice for you that you reject reality. But until you figure out a way for AI to genuinly plan ahead, that is really just a "you" thing.ORIGINAL: eyegore
I reject the idea A.I. can't play by the same rules as the player but that comes with a huge "????" because it depends how much time is spent on it and how much the particular developer actually knows about A.I.
Until that happens, the reality is that no game AI can even plan 1 Hex or 1 Game Tick ahead. And it needs some changes to rules and incomes to offset this "planing inability".
The AI should be less willing to go through mountains - but only because doing so ruins the defensive effect mountains have for it. I can survive them getting free dirt roads, because I got human level planing ability.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
One of the greatest changes would be if AI could play a bit more like human players in terms of supply network and retain being competitive. I am not saying the same rules but being affected by terrain just a little bit so it cannot spam roads in mountains or forests willy nilly. Right now harsher terrain is only an obstacle for the human player. Also anything that could improve dirt road gore would be much welcome.
Another thing that I view as a priority is a reduction of turn times and time for logistical preview calculations - these can be very long once you have a fully developed network.
In other words I would like to see improvements to the game and AI before introducing anything new. Of course any changes would be welcome if they didn't make AI perform worse. I know that I already mentioned that but I can't stress enough how important that is
Another thing that I view as a priority is a reduction of turn times and time for logistical preview calculations - these can be very long once you have a fully developed network.
In other words I would like to see improvements to the game and AI before introducing anything new. Of course any changes would be welcome if they didn't make AI perform worse. I know that I already mentioned that but I can't stress enough how important that is
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
ORIGINAL: zgrssd
It is nice for you that you reject reality. But until you figure out a way for AI to genuinly plan ahead, that is really just a "you" thing.ORIGINAL: eyegore
I reject the idea A.I. can't play by the same rules as the player but that comes with a huge "????" because it depends how much time is spent on it and how much the particular developer actually knows about A.I.
Until that happens, the reality is that no game AI can even plan 1 Hex or 1 Game Tick ahead. And it needs some changes to rules and incomes to offset this "planing inability".
The AI should be less willing to go through mountains - but only because doing so ruins the defensive effect mountains have for it. I can survive them getting free dirt roads, because I got human level planing ability.
It is nice for you that you reject reality. But until you figure out a way for AI to genuinly plan ahead, that is really just a "you" thing.
Until that happens, the reality is that no game AI can even plan 1 Hex or 1 Game Tick ahead. And it needs some changes to rules and incomes to offset this "planing inability".
The AI should be less willing to go through mountains - but only because doing so ruins the defensive effect mountains have for it. I can survive them getting free dirt roads, because I got human level planing ability.
The A.I. in an average Chess program plans several turns ahead. There's nothing impossible about it. It's really the mindset of developers and the acceptance of the players that keep game A.I. crippled.
Sure the little Indy guy could develop it as he's the only one that'll ever allocate the time but he doesn't have the funds to use an engine that could pull it off. Likely he's using something that costs a couple hundred dollars. It's memory usage is basic at best, It likely relies on a scripting language which in turn makers the argument mute because the type of A.I. I suggest needs databases that are extremely fast and data can be accessed on the fly and that's something a scripting language chokes on. You end up with unacceptable turn times but the reality is that low budget engine isn't supporting C# or C++, and without such a fast language with full libaries your at best using a behavior tree and even then turn time becomes an issue.
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diamondspider
- Posts: 141
- Joined: Fri May 15, 2020 1:54 am
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
It took many, many, years for computers to be able to play good chess. Chess has extremely simply and extremely bounded rules. The problem with writing strong AI for a game like this is that the rules are very complicated and a basic premise is that they will keep changing as the dev adds new features. You could have a chess program that can beat a world champion, but change one rule like that castling is not allowed and a beginner could have a shot at beating that program because it thinks it can castle when I cannot.
So I'd guess that millions of hours went into making chess play excellently. Not only can this not happen with any war game but, if it did, the author would give up on changing it because it would break the AI.
New programs like Alpha Zero have a way of abstracting rules and then allowing it to play against itself and get better. Even this kind of system, I think, would fail at S.E. because the rules are so complicated that the AI designers would give up on trying to define them long before they started the first iteration of self-play.
So I'd guess that millions of hours went into making chess play excellently. Not only can this not happen with any war game but, if it did, the author would give up on changing it because it would break the AI.
New programs like Alpha Zero have a way of abstracting rules and then allowing it to play against itself and get better. Even this kind of system, I think, would fail at S.E. because the rules are so complicated that the AI designers would give up on trying to define them long before they started the first iteration of self-play.
RE: Shadow Empire Poll posted
ORIGINAL: eyegore
ORIGINAL: zgrssd
It is nice for you that you reject reality. But until you figure out a way for AI to genuinly plan ahead, that is really just a "you" thing.ORIGINAL: eyegore
I reject the idea A.I. can't play by the same rules as the player but that comes with a huge "????" because it depends how much time is spent on it and how much the particular developer actually knows about A.I.
Until that happens, the reality is that no game AI can even plan 1 Hex or 1 Game Tick ahead. And it needs some changes to rules and incomes to offset this "planing inability".
The AI should be less willing to go through mountains - but only because doing so ruins the defensive effect mountains have for it. I can survive them getting free dirt roads, because I got human level planing ability.It is nice for you that you reject reality. But until you figure out a way for AI to genuinly plan ahead, that is really just a "you" thing.
Until that happens, the reality is that no game AI can even plan 1 Hex or 1 Game Tick ahead. And it needs some changes to rules and incomes to offset this "planing inability".
The AI should be less willing to go through mountains - but only because doing so ruins the defensive effect mountains have for it. I can survive them getting free dirt roads, because I got human level planing ability.
The A.I. in an average Chess program plans several turns ahead. There's nothing impossible about it. It's really the mindset of developers and the acceptance of the players that keep game A.I. crippled.
Sure the little Indy guy could develop it as he's the only one that'll ever allocate the time but he doesn't have the funds to use an engine that could pull it off. Likely he's using something that costs a couple hundred dollars. It's memory usage is basic at best, It likely relies on a scripting language which in turn makers the argument mute because the type of A.I. I suggest needs databases that are extremely fast and data can be accessed on the fly and that's something a scripting language chokes on. You end up with unacceptable turn times but the reality is that low budget engine isn't supporting C# or C++, and without such a fast language with full libaries your at best using a behavior tree and even then turn time becomes an issue.
Eyegore the AI in this game definitely plans or gives the appearance of planning at least. It's not that hard to do, you're right.
The actual problem for a game like this is the balance of:
1. Developer time and skill
2. CPU time and requirements
3. Player perception and tolerance of AI/ ability to vary AI performance to player skill
4. Game engine constraints
5. Systems interplay
This is not a complete list of factors, just the few I could think of.
What do I mean by them all? Well dev time and skill should be obvious and you have already talked about it.
CPU time and requirements is one you have not mentioned but is key. Chess is a pretty easy game to get an AI to calculate. Modern systems (by this I means both CPUs and the AI software) can easily calculate all possible moves for both players several turns ahead of time. If players are willing to wait, the AI can push this further and further. This means it is easy to throttle AI to skill and it is easy to get the AI perfect, literally unbeatable (with enough CPU power) by any human. Solving this was a problem of CPU power/time and getting AIs to both simulate rounds correctly and 'understand' what those permutations mean such that it can choose the best possible course.
To pick an apt metaphor, AIs can approach Chess like the Bene Gesserit of Dune approach politics. They can see all possible paths ahead of time and, from that, prune paths to their advantage.
You have not mentioned the recent breakthrough regarding playing Go. This was huge news in the AI world because Go is basically not a game you can calculate, unlike Chess. Go has so many possible moves over so many turns that you must intuit. That is to say, an experienced player will know good or perfect moves not through calculation but through memory and a deep understanding of game rules and how game states evolve. Building an AI that can beat the world's best Go players means building an AI that can approximate human intuition and match the finely honed intuition of the very best Go players in the world. Subsequent generations of AlphaGo can now get to this point without the same level of training time and with smaller datasets. There is also a skill differential. Each new generation can beat the last consistently. Achieving this required big breakthroughs in implementing neural-net based learning and a metric ton of data and a huge amount of training time. Even with all of that, AlphaGo is not quick to make its moves, though it is not unusually slow for a high-level Go player.
Shadow Empire is more akin to Go than Chess. I have, in trying to help other players, sometimes just had to say: 'I don't know what is wrong and I cannot explain it to you but I know I could fix it if I had your save.' Why? Because my understanding of the logistics and combat systems is learned but also starting to become intuitive. I just manage my supplies and they work. Without having access to the actual game state and all the data it provides, I cannot troubleshoot some subtle or complex problems. Often because the player asking for troubleshooting does not know what data to provide to those trying to assist. Of course, I also sometimes cannot help because I'm flummoxed too. I am by no means an expert. Getting not one but 6 AIs to handle a system this complex in turn times players will accept (players are already antsy with turns times of 2 mins BTW) on a wide range of general-purpose personal CPUs... If you really think you can do that go start working for one of the deep AI companies and bring it to gaming please.
Player perception and tolerance is also crucial. I draw on RTSs here. It is relatively easy to get a RTS AI to micro perfectly. It wasn't always but you can now and you can probably do it with ordinary CPUs. The AI can click pixel-perfect thousands of times. It can and will out APM any human player every single time without fail if allowed to. Turns out players utterly, utterly hate this. It feels like the AI is cheating because no human player has truly pixel-perfect 100% of the time micro. Players f up and give opportunities to one another. So you have to get an AI to play very well but not perfectly in a way that feels like a person playing very well but not perfectly to a very skilled human player. Again this is not a trivial problem. AIs can now thrash the very best human players at SC. Players only stand a chance when they use very situational or off-meta builds that the AIs cannot train against, because they are rare, which the AIs do not always react to properly. Similar to how lower-skilled, though still very skilled players, do this in professional SC to get an advantage of a more skilled but conventional player.
This brings us back to points 1 and 2. The problem with cracking SC was not mirco but rather macro. Getting the AI to understand all possible build paths for all possible factions and the relative strengths of those build paths as well as figuring out the most likely build path of its opponent using limited scouting information. Solving that problem requires deep AI development with neural nets and lots of data. Like observing every single skilled ranked game of SC on a big ladder for days or weeks levels of data. Then playing thousands upon thousands of simulated games, with the AI playing both sides, to convert that data into skill. Ordinary game developers cannot do this. They simply cannot get enough data easily enough without releasing the game. Some niche games have AIs that learn as you play or, I think in the case of AI Wars, learn as all players play. This is generally a core selling point of the game and something built around from day 1 not an incidental add-on.
On to game engine constraints, the game may not be written in a way that makes it easy to plug in a neural net. I don't know enough about the technical details here but there will be technical limits to how the developer can construct the game with the available skill, time and money that will directly constrain what approaches can be taken to AI development.
Systems interplay I have already covered really. It's the Go or SC macro problem. SE has so many options and ways to play of varying levels of merit given how everyone else is playing that is really hard for a bunch of intelligent and increasingly skilled humans cooperating with one another to figure out best possible plays all of the time. Some intelligent players skilled in other games still cannot beat beginner AIs because they do not understand how some key systems interact yet and others are already only playing on extreme because regular is too easy. This I think gives an idea of the complex, almost chaotic, nature of how the game systems interact. This will never be a game you can just calculate your way through.