Quote:
Original post by InnocuousFox
For the player, the difference is best illustrated by the following sentences:
* I beat the game by finding something stupid in the AI that the designers didn't account for.
* I beat the game by finding a strategy that took advantage of the AI's realistic response.
The first is solving a puzzle. The second is playing football. If you are creating a puzzle game, have at it. If you are trying to create a football simulation, then "bad AI" is disappointing.
Exploiting AI weaknesses, both "good" and "bad" ones, isn't necessarily trivial. Varying amounts of effort and skill are needed to
-recognize a weakness
-plan a way to exploit it
-execute the plan without screwing up
For example, in Advance Wars the player easily recognizes AI mistakes (relatively fun frustration-free learning), while applying known general mistake patterns to a specific map to predict enemy movements and make a plan tends to be challenging (quite fun: successive attempts tend to show encouraging improvements) and execution is easy unless one is distracted and makes a ruinous wrong move.
In other kinds of game, executing a good strategy might bear the most weight. For example, in a simple racing game AI "mistakes" are collapsed to a single obvious indicator (not going as fast as possible); good trajectories need to be practiced, but planning is very low level and it is combined in real time with difficult control.
Another example: punishing shoot'em up games where actual AI is nonexistent but the combination of all enemy behaviours needs to be exploited organically (fun because it can be complex or interesting), calling for the memorization of a long and shallow choreography of movements and shots (fun because there is constant progress, as long as one has the patience to try again) that requires very good timing to be successful (fun because it's thrilling).
So the football "puzzle" relies on the difficulty of figuring out corner cases and the accompanying aberrant strategies, while the football "simulation" relies on obvious realistic football strategy and can have either realtime play with the possibility to make mistakes or non-realtime play with very detailed orders and a sophisticated AI that makes small details matter.
