AI Issues?

[bmisc53]

Just completed my first AD game. Just uploaded the 1.02 patch and starting the 2nd.

A few observations from the first game (played Allied side):

1) I noticed the Japanese hardly garrisoned key areas including the Philipines, SE Asia, and the home Islands. There were a few naval battles, but most of the carriers were busy in ground support in China. I was able to walk into most of these areas and easily invade Japan in early '45. Anyone else notice this? Also, anyone notice the Japanese always love to invade Fiji?

2) From the earliest version of SC, the Allied side can empty out the UK and the Axis will never invade. Is this a flaw in the AI or some inherent limitation?

Otherwise a great game.

[Hubert Cater]

Hi Bmisc53,

1) Do you happen to have any saved turns for when the AI left these areas open?

I'd be happy to take a look and make some adjustments.

2) For an open UK this is a bit more of a complicated answer. While the AI does play with FoW much like a human player, it does have some advantages in scripting where I could actually tell it to invade if it knew the UK was completely empty.

But in the few areas where I have this in place for other similar type opportunities in game, if it is painfully obvious it is taking advantage of this knowledge the usual criticism is that the AI is cheating. So for this one particular example, an open UK, I had to use a more careful approach.

My initial approach was to have the German AI risk an invasion of the UK every once in a while. However since this is such a high risk option, even for a human player, if it does not go well the game is more or less over at that point for the Axis AI as it is not likely to have an effective invasion of the USSR and things just quickly spiral out of control from there.

The criticism when this happened was that the AI was once again quite poor and so the decision was then made to have the AI more or less avoid taking any high risk options and play more historically and for the longest drawn out war that is likely possible.

Of course, there is still some variation in how the AI plays but once this approach was settled upon I simply decided to script in an invasion of the UK once the USSR has been defeated. In essence it can still happen but it is now a much less risky decision and only undertaken when the right conditions present themselves.

That being said, in the future one thing under consideration is to have a few different settings for the AI beyond just difficulty settings and this would include perhaps something like "Historical" and "Variable". This way the AI approach will be known by the player at campaign selection time and therefore less likely to be criticized for taking chances as they would be more or less expected

Hope this helps,

Hubert