A few items involving AI behavior with scenario design.

[Abbott]

Play test!

Play test over and over again. Every play test will show you improvements that can be made, not only to troop deployments and activities but also tweaks to terrain.

Careful planning of terrain without “Loading the Map” too much is required to give the AI’s troops a fighting chance. You can channel an attack or defense with terrain many times. Be careful not to load the map and make this too obvious to the player’s.

When a battle is set to “Meeting Engagement” your troops, even if dug-in tend to get up and move. If you are not careful they will be fired on in open terrain and destroyed. If you have a scenario with several victory locations, spread about a bit, this same behavior will be exhibited when one location falls as troops move to re-capture the fallen objective.

When designing a battle many times the battle can be fought within your concept with the AI set to Attack and Defend even if the battle feels more like a Meeting Engagement. The battle can still be channeled towards offering two-player’s a Meeting Engagement even with the AI set to Attack/Defend for single player enjoyment.

Deployment zones also become very important in directing attacks as well as defense. Careful study of deployment zones during play testing is critical to a good “flow” of an AI battle. Tweaking zones ever so slightly will change the avenue of attack considerably sometimes.

Balance is also a very tough issue. Constant play testing will involve shifts and tweaks of Orders of Battle. Many times scenarios will change greatly through this process. I have found that “Targeting” a certain type of scenario works best for me IE: One player vs. the AI defending. One player vs. the AI attacking. Decide what target audience you are designing for and watch the AI’s behavior throughout your testing process.

Two player design, there is no substitute for feedback from other players with two player design as a scenario goal. A short e-mail received from another player, even if only a couple of sentences, has contained enough good suggestions for me to make several large changes in scenarios at times.

Victory locations also require much thought and testing. Sometimes an entire battle’s flow can be dictated with the number and placement of victory locations. Do not be afraid to experiment with the placement or number of flags as you play test. A rule of thumb here is “less is better”. I have found sometimes that grouping of VL’s can also be a benefit to the AI behaving itself, to a point.

Selecting the amount of forces is also a key issue in a scenario design. Try not to over do it. Many concepts of how you want the battle to display will be hard put to combine in the same scenario. Consider breaking the ideas you want to showcase down into a few smaller battles rather then one large battle.

This makes scenarios more appealing to many of today’s gamers with busier schedules. A smaller interesting battle after work provides enjoyable entertainment. Not to discount the enjoyment of large battles, just be careful how much you try to include at one time.

Another useful trick is to save your game often and use the surrender function to assess the AI’s behavior. Many important issues can be resolved in this manner.

Recap in order of importance.

1. Play test, you can not test too much!

2. Target audience. Decide “What” you are offering and stay with that concept.

3. The importance of well thought out and placed deployment zones can not be overstated.

4. Victory locations experiment during testing and watch the AI’s behavior

5. Balance, decide what type of battle you want to offer your audience and balance it accordingly.

6. Size, be careful not to include to much. Consider breaking some of your concepts down into several, smaller battle’s rather then one large battle.

[Agua]

Nice job. Hope this will help a lot of aspiring designers.

[Agua]

bump. Good info.