Skip to Content
 

Artificial Intelligence

2 replies [Last post]
Mon, 10/03/2005 - 19:25
Anonymous

Hello everyone,

Building upon my "feasibility of mechanics in Excel" post, I had another burning question pop into my mind last night while I was browsing the forums...seeing that I will have a large amount of countries, and my friends are only going to be interested in playing the major ones, and at most only 6 of them, how can I effectively represent the other nations?

I really want to design an effective "artificial intelligence" to practically run (with a little assistance) all the other left over countries. I've racked my brain for answers and I can't think of any workable and realistic way to do it, besides setting a standard national mindset for a country and having everything automated for it, such as resource selling through an Excel spreadsheet or the like...

Im not sure how to do it and it is most probably too difficult, I want to post my game on a website I'll eventually make and hopefully create an effective PBEM game and maybe then all the nations will be filled but this is out of my scope. I want my game to be complex but I want to keep it to myself and my friends, instead of having the responsibility to run the whole thing every 1 or 2 days.

If anyone has any ideas, I would greatly appreciate them!

Cheers,

StormRaptor :-)

Top
Tue, 10/04/2005 - 11:01
#1
Challengers
Offline
Joined: 12/31/1969
Artificial Intelligence

StormRaptor,

Here are my thoughts on the matter. If you begin with a simple premise, and if you can get it to work, you can probably build on it as you see necessary.
The premise I propose is that your artificially intelligent non-playing characters, AI-NPCs for short, need have only four basic attributes.
I leave it to you to decide which attributes are important for your game but, for the sake of this discussion, I will use Aggression, Industry, Technology and Honor.

For each AI-NPC that you need, roll 4d6 (preferably color-coded to each attribute). This will define this leader's personality and outlook. We'll call it the profile.

You'll need to create charts that correlate each profile with each computable outcome. A computable outcome is either an absolute value or a probability. Absolute values can be raw materials produced per turn, goods sold per turn or armies produced per tun. Probability values can be used to determine if the AI-NPC attacks a neighboring territory on a given turn, if it agrees to a non-aggression pact or if it will spend money on a particular research project.

Here are a few ideas that might show what I'm proposing:

Aggression=1, Industry=4, Technology=4, Honor =6 This is a peace-loving leader. His country has many skilled workers and specialists.
Production is above average and the high quality exports fetch a good price at the market. This leader most likely will be a great ally (agrees to pacts very readily).

Aggression=6, Industry=2, Technology=2, Honor =1 This is a tyrant! His country is so poor, it can't produce anything of value. Fortunately for the rest of the world, his poorly-trained guerillas don't pose much of a threat; they're mostly a nuisance. Treaties are not something this leader values.

I don't think you need to put too fine a point on the correlations, unless you just want more variety. There are 1,296 profiles with 4d6. So you could use a 50/50 range for the profiles and then use the actual values for micromanagement. In other words, a roll of 1, 2 or 3 is part of one set (LOW) and 4, 5 or 6 is part of another set (HIGH). Now, you have only 16 profiles, but you still have all six values to fine tune specific events.

If this interests you at all, I can send you an excel spreadsheet and / or some formulas that I have used to implement this simple AI-NPC.

Mitch

Top
Tue, 10/04/2005 - 12:46
#2
larienna
larienna's picture
Offline
Joined: 07/28/2008
Artificial Intelligence

In "bells of war", the neutral countries does the following partern.

If our country has not been attacked
...do nothing
else
...at begining of turn produce troop indefinately.
...if we have lost a territory
......attack to get territory back.
...or
......defend the rest of the territory.

Generally, the neutral countries are controled by a player who play all of them separately. Generally, it is the weakest player that control them ( to give him something to do ).

Top
Syndicate content


forum | by Dr. Radut