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I have a long-standing policy on not critiquing games I review until the review is published. I do this in deference to the publishers and am not changing. However, I’m playing Crown of Glory and World War II: The First Blitzkrieg for review and questions raised about AI on forums and news groups have made me think why such games may not play out historically. Here are some thoughts:

The AI, dumb as it is tactically, will never be as stupid as the Third Alliance in 1805 or the Allied High Command in 1940. Its side’s strengths and weaknesses will be known to it and will allow a more rational concentration of force and effort. We won’t see a General Mack squandering time and resource at Ulm nor will the units of four armies just sit around as in 1940.

Perhaps more importantly, the AI won’t be overawed when the player is Napoleon, Lee or the Wehrmacht. The AI has no psyche, no emotional baggage so it won’t be mesmerized by previous experiences or propaganda. Designers may attempt to imitate doctrinal fallacies but it won’t throw away what advantages or capabilities it might have.

Therefore, players should not expect a replay of history. Dumb as AIs are, they won’t be paralyzed like the Austrians or Gamelin. Players will win eventually win but they will do so only by doing something new with historical parameters, assuming the game has those parameters.

ORIGINAL: Bismarck

The AI, dumb as it is tactically, will never be as stupid as the Third Alliance in 1805 or the Allied High Command in 1940.

LOL [:)] Very true; I'm just mentally listing the games that sentence could apply to, there are more than a few !

You can be surprised sometimes, though. I've being playing the HPS Gettysburg recently, and (despite the generally deserved reputation Tiller's stuff has for poor AI) been getting almost spookily historical results surprisingly frequently. How much that is down to particular scripting, I don't know.

When you say the "AI, dumb as it is tactically. . .," are you referring to Crown of Glory, or the First Blitzkrieg, or AI in general?

Mr. Cobb (calling those we don't know familiar just 'cuz we're on the Internet has always struck me as rude):

Thanks for this post. It got in a few sentences to the heart of my beef with the usual criticisms you hear about A.I. in any game, CoG or otherwise.

If an A.I. did what Mack did near Ulm, we would whip it from pillar to post, yet nothing could be more historical.

I want CoG to have a decent A.I. (will CST quitting time NEVER come ) but, ultimately, I'm gonna be a lot older before a good A.I. is the sine qua non of a great game. That place, I believe, at least for the near-term, belongs to a strong MP suite.

Thanks again,

Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)

Great Post! AI will never mimick the human mind no matter how great the programmer, we are all a product of our individual environments, therefore we all react to things differently. So the best games will always come when facing skilled human enemies.

In general at this point. Can't say about CoG specifically yet.

ORIGINAL: ioticus

When you say the "AI, dumb as it is tactically. . .," are you referring to Crown of Glory, or the First Blitzkrieg, or AI in general?

Don't start this again. His first two sentences were:

I have a long-standing policy on not critiquing games I review until the review is published. I do this in deference to the publishers and am not changing.

Meaning that the rest of the post was talking about strategy games in general, being applicable to CoG in that the outcome of the game is up to the player and not History itself (see GGWaW).

I saw Bruce Geryk basically condemn HOI2 because of this very thing. His problem was that the outcome of the game could vary wildly from what history showed us. To me this isn't a bad thing. While I like GGWaW for trying, it is still possible to get a wacked-out outcome, even if it's because of a single unit that has sci-fi type stats because of a flawed research system [;)]

ORIGINAL: Bismarck

The AI, dumb as it is tactically, will never be as stupid as the Third Alliance in 1805 or the Allied High Command in 1940.

No. But I might.

ORIGINAL: SlapBone

ORIGINAL: ioticus

When you say the "AI, dumb as it is tactically. . .," are you referring to Crown of Glory, or the First Blitzkrieg, or AI in general?

Don't start this again. His first two sentences were:

Start what?

A few threads down there is two pages discussing something that Bismarck said that was taken out of context. This was from another forum.

Anyway, no worries. [:)]

I'm not sure I want a strict replay of history. Given the current state of AI development, to make an AI behave historically would mean severe gameplay constraints that limit course of action...in other words, a boring, predictable game. That said, I prefer that the AI behave in a reasonably historical fashion as determined by the time period of the game....Austira had certain national interests and objectives in this period so there better be a really good reason why they're invading Scotland.

That said, AI's won't really be good until they're programmed to behave in a self-interested way yet with a degree of randomess and unpredictability within that self-interested framework. And who knows, one man's unpredictability might be another man's advance on Ulm.

Historical plausibility is all I ask. Not historical rigidity.

I don't want them to always come at me "in the same old style."

I think that a creative programer could emulate "styles" of AI play that would mimic a human commander. I remember Sid Meier's Gettysburg-one could choose which type of generalship the AI would emulate. I think too many wargames are subjected to an all-over type of AI play.

Another creative example is SSG's area coding of the AI into areas that the AI can be made to see as hot spots. If a creative programer wished to portray a France that is blind to a German Schliffen Plan, the hot spots would remain the Maginot, with only a bleeding off of forces to the North.

I guess it comes down to being creative in game design, something that seems to be a bit rare(present company excluded).