Has anyone done any work on strategy game AI? Know anywhere I can get hints, tips, advice? I''m specifically looking for Civilization or Master of Orion type AI... Thx! -------------------- Just waiting for the mothership...

Are we talking about path-finding or strategic decision making?
There's lot's of stuff on path-finding(especially A* methods)

But if you are looking for strategic decision making, you might want to check out
Steve Woodcock's AI Site
Look under Software Solutions. You should be looking at
Influence mapping. There's an Influence Mapping thread
An AI must weight the map according to positive and negative values about the value of different terrains and resources.
Is that what you are looking for?

ZoomBoy
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Edited by - ZoomBoy on August 15, 2000 6:04:32 AM

quote: Original post by ZoomBoy

Are we talking about path-finding or strategic decision making?
There's lot's of stuff on path-finding(especially A* methods)

But if you are looking for strategic decision making, you might want to check out
Steve Woodcock's AI Site
Look under Software Solutions. You should be looking at
Influence mapping. There's an Influence Mapping thread
An AI must weight the map according to positive and negative values about the value of different terrains and resources.
Is that what you are looking for?

I'm definitely looking for info regarding strategic decision making. I'm trying to figure out how an empire would choose what to build, where to build it, and when to build it. I'm also interested in getting the AI to recognize fronts and interact with them in a militarily interesting way. The influence mapping material looks promising for this.

Thanks for the reply (I was beginning to think I'd asked either too simple or too complicated a question )




--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

Edited by - Wavinator on August 16, 2000 10:45:41 PM

Me and another guy collaborated to test a concept that might be of use to you. Its just a basic Map AI. It covers how to get the AI to understand map hotspots in a reasonable way. So far it doesn''t have any influence maps or such, its just for figuring out ''necks'' and other strategic locations on a civ-type map. It can also help produce a graph of the map for use in making long-range pathfinding much more efficient, like waypoints put in by hand can (I think, we haven''t tested that idea yet). There is also a crude demo you can play around with if this is the sort of thing you''re looking for.

I uses A*. I wanted to use B* and S* too, but then they all were linked to *C, which was complicated. So I used A*, which also uses *C but to a limited way...

quote: Original post by Wavinator

Has anyone done any work on strategy game AI? Know anywhere I can get hints, tips, advice? I''m specifically looking for Civilization or Master of Orion type AI... Thx!

--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

One bit of research I found very helpful while developing the AI for Enemy Nations (a RTS with similar needs as Civ and MoO) was the Goal-Directed Behavior approaches espoused by Subsumptive Architecture. You can do a web search, and find a number of papers and tutorials very easily. The goal direction, can be assisted by expert knowledge (ie. a human game player who knows that must be done to win the game) in setting the goals. This can form then a template that an AI Player can follow and deviate from when appropriate.

The Influence Map discussion that others have mentioned that can be found on the Game AI Page is also worth reviewing. I found that a form of IM was useful in laying out where the best place was to build a particular type of building. IM was also useful in identifying weaknesses in opposing forces attacks and defenses.

Finally, consider that A* (and its brethern search algorithms) can be used for more than just pathfinding. These algorithms (A* in particular) are good at finding an Optimum path through a problem space. That problem space does not always have to represent terrain (as in pathfinding). It can represent other things (such as goals).

Hope this helps.

Eric

I assume you''ve read this : Empire Games?