Programming language and design of AI in DW2?

[Jorgen_CAB]

You seem to be assuming that game buyers are all 4X fans, a lot of players are new to genre and a lot of players are not seeking chess-like unbeatable game.

I've heard some game designers take this fact into account and design games so that they don't drive these group of people away from game.
For this reason I find it irritating that non-fans indirectly dictate how strategy should work.
You have surely heard of "the AI cheats" claim? that's one example of those newcomers to genre who don't even know what cheating really means. AI having bonuses is not cheating, cheating is when you use cheats such as instantly spawning a new fleet.
The worst thing is when they publish their disagreements on steam reviews, this further drives non-fans away.

To be honest.... no I don't assume anything. There is a market for the kind of players you describe... I intentionally stay away from games designed for these people.

I want my games to be as challenging as possible and there is a market for that too. This is most complex strategy games on the market.

Distant Worlds is not the kind of games that would attract the first group, it simply is too complex. The stated goal of the developers is also to have as good an AI as they can make it, they also will continually improve on it over time. If they could make a nearly unbeatable AI they would, players would just have to play the easier settings.

I never understood why you even play games if all you want is positive feedback on anything you do. It is like continuously pat yourself on the back and tell yourself how good you are when you have done nothing.

Of course the developers want more players to play their game and increase its revenue, but they also have some pride in their work and some principals they will not cross, at least many smaller developers do.

[Radamanthe]

I never understood why you even play games if all you want is positive feedback on anything you do.

Ego. I hardly understand it otherwise. We all need to feed our ego, more or less. Success is the food. It makes us feel good, that’s fine but we don’t evolve. Failure doesn’t make us feel good, that’s unfortunate but it makes us better. It’s by falling down that we learn to walk.

But the point here is that who can do the best can do the least. The challenge is making an unbeatable AI, and of course ideally without cheating. Once you reach that point (or close to it), then making it easier to beat is a piece of cake, hence difficulty settings.

Damn, sorry for the drift on philosophy, I’m incorrigible…

[Jorgen_CAB]

I never understood why you even play games if all you want is positive feedback on anything you do.

Ego. I hardly understand it otherwise. We all need to feed our ego, more or less. Success is the food. It makes us feel good, that’s fine but we don’t evolve. Failure doesn’t make us feel good, that’s unfortunate but it makes us better. It’s by falling down that we learn to walk.

But the point here is that who can do the best can do the least. The challenge is making an unbeatable AI, and of course ideally without cheating. Once you reach that point (or close to it), then making it easier to beat is a piece of cake, hence difficulty settings.

Damn, sorry for the drift on philosophy, I’m incorrigible…

I know that one Paradox employee ones said they switched their philosophy on game mechanics at one point from punishing players to instead giving them more or less positive feedback as that made people feel better when playing their games. So I understand... I also don't agree with this philosophy as after this point their games became very bland and boring. In addition to having extreme snowball issues to boot.

I want to play games that kick me in the nuts if I'm not careful. Or just because it is evil at times. It keeps me on my toes and failing should be as enjoyable at winning, in fact winning is much more enjoyable if you know that failing is very likely. As you say and as I always teach my children, failing is part of life and how you come out stronger than before. If you don't allow people to fail they don't evolve...

In any way... I don't argue against you because I don't want the best AI there can be.

Personally I like games that is not perfectly balanced either. I don't want my games to be a contest, I want them to challenge me and be fun. If there is one faction that is easier than the other, well that is easy mode, unless you create some staring conditions to make it more challenging. This is also the reason I stay away from most multi-player oriented games, they are too focused on being fair, that is no fun.

I have actually lost a few games in Distant Worlds (the older one) where the starting conditions turned out to be just too difficult as I spawned right next to some very strong Boskaran that simply just walked all over me... Well I fight as long as a I can, try to see if I can learn anything and move on. It still was an interesting story I could get from it. But I also have been able to turn the tide in similar games, perhaps managed to find an ally, just in time not to get swallowed whole, if you don't stick it out you will never know.

[zebanovich]

I know that one Paradox employee ones said they switched their philosophy on game mechanics at one point from punishing players to instead giving them more or less positive feedback as that made people feel better when playing their games. So I understand... I also don't agree with this philosophy as after this point their games became very bland and boring. In addition to having extreme snowball issues to boot.

I want to play games that kick me in the nuts if I'm not careful.

This is so true, I've read something similar on their forums, paradox is notorious when it comes to such game theories, I think I already mentioned here but on their forums was mentioned something similar (by devs) a long the line that: player must be able to win the game and it must be fun in doing so.

This means relaxing gameplay mechanics and reducing pressure on player as to assure that everybody wins and is having a great time, lol, so that nobody comes to forum complaining how difficult it is to play or win.

This rationale is so wrong, it is clearly focused or commercialization of game with the hope that more people will buy it even if that would make gameplay out of expected behavior.

The rationale is wrong simply because nobody is going to enjoy the game in the long run, take for example casino games, there you win very hard, but people keep going to play even though they know they'll loose money.

effect of PC games on people is not different, if it's hard to win they are going to enjoy it in the long run, with the only difference that less people might play it, as it's the case with casino games.

The reward (winning) is more sweet when earned hard, rather than given out for free by game.

[rxnnxs]

I for my part very much like a relaxing gameplay.
Thats why I play it. But thats where you have that slider: easy to hard.
But sure it is hard for the programmer to implement that right - if not impossible,

But what I do not like is the fact, that most companies do not let the players have fun fopr a long time,
but only get them some milliseconds to enjoy the game, and then, they want them to want more of this and more of that - and they use psychological tricks so the gamers do not enjpoy the game, but are addicted to it.
Playing moire, not for the fun, but becuase of the pressure it is layed upon them with many "mechanics".

and on top of it, the dlc thing, that lets all those that have the money, just buy it, without even playing the game intense.
so there are many tricks how some companies grew and grew and could not get enough.
The casual gamer, the one that wants to relax and those that want to have a really hard time, are a so little in size, most companies do not care fore them..

just my 2 cents.

And distant worlds is doing many things right. I thank them for that.

[100thMonkey]

The thirst for challenge varies immensely from one person to another.

I've known someone (dead now) who showed me his favorite game on his iPad. I don't remember what game it was, but believe it or not, it was a game that was playing itself, without him needing to intervene except to launch the game.

To him, that was very enjoyable!

This completely blew me away!

[Jorgen_CAB]

This is also why I don't always agree with the argument that if we do this and that we will get more people to play a specific game. If it means we make them less challenging, complex, deep etc... we are inviting the wrong people. They have their own games to play, don't invade the games that I want...

I get that you want a game to appeal to as big a market as possible, but there will always be room for niche games on the market, Distant Worlds is a pretty niche game. I prefer it stay that way... I also don't doubt the developer know what they want from this game and what it is and what it is not. Thankfully so...

[100thMonkey]

I agree completely. There are plenty of "non-challenging" games, and not that many good challenging ones.

I'm pretty sure though that Erik and Elliot would still want to get as big of a share market as possible (without dumbing the game down).

I think the game has great things going for it, and that it has a LOT of potential. But, IMHO, it suffers from a few things that, if they were corrected, could bring a lot more people, and, more importantly, would keep them playing.

I don't think it's necessary here to elaborate too much on what makes this game interesting, but I'll mention the following:

- A "living" galaxy / the private sector
- Not constrained (not too much, but a little though ) by "space lines", which brings a lot of tactical and strategic richness
- "Physical" resources, that need to be moved where they're needed
- It's scale.

As for what hinders the game, again, IMHO, especially in the perspective of getting and keeping new players that might be interested by such a game:

- An information problem (too much useless infos, and not enough useful infos)
- An interface that needs a lot of improvements.

For the information problem, if I remember correctly, there was no search function in DW:U's Galactopedia. And there definitely wasn't any in-game / galaxy search. So, as a new player, I kept getting messages about locations that I had no idea where they were. And finding info in the galactopedia was... not a pleasing experience. There's still no search function in DW2, and the Galactopedia has less content than in DW:U. Not good. Especially for new players.

I remember also not liking DW:U's tech tree. I liked its complexity and richness. But I didn't like the abundance of stats that didn't explain anything. No clear explanation of the purpose of the components and how they differ from the others. For some components, you can get an idea from the stats. Others were far more cryptic. And it's pretty much the same in DW2. Not ideal to hook and keep new players.

As for DW:U interface, simply: I stopped playing because of it! And I wanted to love the game so much! But the interface was too much for me (too big of a challenge ). DW2's interface is improved in some (many) ways, but worst in others. It has some good ideas, but, at this stage, they're incomplete, underdeveloped and only partly functional. For instance, filters, both in the control center and in the messaging could be greatly improved and made way more functional than they are.

And in this regard, the scale of DW2 plays against it: the bigger the scale, the better the management tools and the UI in general need to be. And, let's just say that there's room for improvement... Lot's of room...

I understand that the dev team is small (I remember reading a post where Elliot wrote that he WAS the dev team ). I'm just saying that to get and keep new players, I'm convinced these things need to be improved. If learning how to play the game is too much of a challenge for someone, that someone won't keep playing the game, and might not be interested in trying future expansion packs. Ditto if the interface is a far greater opponent than the AI, as it was the case for me with DW:U.

Having said all that, I sincerely hope that one day DW2 will be the game that I believe it can be!

[Jorgen_CAB]

If we go back to the original Distant Worlds released I mean the very first version... then DW2 is a dream game in terms of UI and information etc... so this time around they are stepping of from a MUCH better start.

I find the UI and overall game interface in DW2 is very good, but as you say, it needs allot of improvement. You definitely need a search function, I think everything should have a hyperlink to corresponding galactopedia entry, range tool to measure ranges for planning and many other small improvements to the UI.

I'm very certain most of these things will be looked over in time. We have to acknowledge that Distant Worlds is a game of giant scope pretty much created by one person, or at least coded by one person. So their resources are thin to say the least.

I do think that being able to have more people playing the game do benefit us all, it means they might even be able to have more people working on the game and in extension give us more improvements AND more features. So making sure the game appeal to more people is a good thing as long as the game does not sacrifice it's core principal integrity in complexity and scope (which I don't see either Elliot or Erik wanting to do).

Talking about AI, I do see that there can be lots of improvement, such as economy, ship design and how they use their ships.

Overall I find the game in a pretty solid state, now they need to work on the AI and QoL stuff before they start looking to add to the the game, in my opinion.

[100thMonkey]

Overall I find the game in a pretty solid state, now they need to work on the AI and QoL stuff before they start looking to add to the the game, in my opinion.

There's one addition though that I'd like to see... yesterday: the ability to have multiple designs per role/hull in fleet templates. When I learned that work had started on DW2, I was really hoping that multiple designs (per role/hull) would have better support than in DW:U. I know it's coming. I hope it's in a not too distant future...

[arvcran2]

This is an interesting thread!

One thing I would like to hone in on is the Automation options feature provided to the player, I believe, to be the window to the game's underlying AI. If this is the case we can surmise based on the automation what the AI does to an extent. Albeit a lot of assumption and educated guesswork is need to come up with an understanding for what the game AI's approaches are.

So based on the assumption that the player's automation features are in fact parts of the AI for the opposing empires, improving those AI processes will not affect the relative advantages between the player and the AI empires for the areas that the player chooses to automate. This of course is also dependent on any milestones ratios due to difficulty levels.

I believe that the difficulty levels should in fact add or substract certain scripted priority policies of the AI empires at a strategic level on top of affecting any milestone values. These scripted aspects would be, in my view, also part of the automated features but would be either enabled or disabled depending on the difficulty level and wither the Automation is an AI empire or a player empire.

For example: let's look at colonization specifically. The Automation currently focuses on colonizing within the empire's territory as a priority, whereby I would argue that territory grabbing may be considered to be an advanced difficulty level setting for higher player difficulty but applied to the AI empire's priority policy. So the scripting advantages could sway up, down, or the same in effectiveness for either the player automation or the AI player automation depending on the player difficulty setting. Other areas for scripting could be tech paths and strategic goals like aggressive exploration expansion and research potential enablement.

The fact is that allowing for complex automation optional combinations combined with other policy settings for the player, adds more difficulty in determining and effectuating a standard difficulty rating.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Overall I find the game in a pretty solid state, now they need to work on the AI and QoL stuff before they start looking to add to the the game, in my opinion.

There's one addition though that I'd like to see... yesterday: the ability to have multiple designs per role/hull in fleet templates. When I learned that work had started on DW2, I was really hoping that multiple designs (per role/hull) would have better support than in DW:U. I know it's coming. I hope it's in a not too distant future...

I think most people would like to have this... I think that fleet templates should just allow you to select a ship type, not necessarily one from each class, this is just limiting for no good reason. Just make AI templates different, or better yet, make the AI more dynamic in creating fleets. Currently the AI can only form four different fleets and they will all be the same if they can build all the classes of ships.

The AI should not have "fixed" fleet formations... it should form fleets more dynamically depending on their needs and available technologies.

[100thMonkey]

You clearly have focus your attention on the AI side of things more than I did. And, to cite Martha Stewart (something I don't do very often ): that's a good thing. The more people observe and analyze the AI behavior and its weaknesses, the more likely it is that it will be improved. And for a single player game, that's kind of important (it there was a smilie for euphemism, I would insert here ).

My focus has been more on the UI / UX side of things (even though, AI is definitely part of the UX). The reason I'd like to see those changes in fleet templates is the flexibility it would allow in fleet composition for the player (and, based on what you wrote, maybe for the AI too). And, just as importantly to me, to solve the retrofit problem when multi-designs for a hull/role are involved, both within fleets and outside of fleets. That was a nightmare with DW:U, and still is with DW2, even though fleet templates, despite their current limitations, can help a little (and just a little) if you're willing to do some contortions.