[quote]
Again how many games did it take you before the AI needed twice as many ships
as you have to win? I doubt anyone was able to wipe the galaxy with the
AI in their first few games. I know I sure as heck couldn't. It took me
several games to understand the underlying mechanics well enough to
have a shot in heck of making the AI look silly.
[\quote]

There's no doubt that AI programming is pretty tricky and we shouldn't expect a real intelligence any time soon. Still, we can expect that the person who designs the AI (Brad) has a much stronger understanding of the game that a totally novice player. Thus the Ai shouldn't be compared to someone a first-time who doesn't even know all the rules. As players describe their strategies, they can be incorporated into the AI. My post above was an attempt to describe a fairly simple offensive fleet management strategy that is none the less dangerous.



I agree with you on most of these items. People are going to be better at most of these spatial task than we can expect an AI to be. However, calculating the relative strength is a sore point for me. The AI seems to go by the military graph, which is extremely misleading. There's no particular reason why an AI can't predict fairly precisely (through simulation) the outcome of any particular battle. Simulating battles between it's own designs and the enemies designs should also give the AI an excellent idea of how the two militaries actually stack up. Going by the military graph is a really bad idea because it can't take into account the pairwise interactions, such as when the player has designed ships specifically to counter the AI.

okay.



it's spelled 'intelligent'.



this phrase is a bit awkward. i'd suggest "sometimes just one ship as an escort" or "somtimes the escort is just one ship."



you should use "too" here. "to" is a preposition, whereas "too" is an adverb and would correctly modify the meaning of "stupid" to "excessively stupid".



the expression is "crush them like a bug." and it's spelled "irrational."



you should say "more smart" or "smarter," but "more smarter" is redundant and improper.



i think you meant "babbling," which means to speak excessively. it's an odd choice of words, since i think your intent was say Brad's claims were exaggerated. a more direct way to have said it would have been "I see that was an exaggeration," or you could use the idiom "he was just blowing smoke."

Am dissapointed with DA[/quote]



i'm not sure if it was a type-o or a genuine spelling error, but it should be "why," and you should end the sentence with a question mark. also, even when asking a rhetorical question, you should switch the verb and subject. it should read, "Why can't Stardock make a special button to change all the AIs' aggression levels?" also, when you say "It is true," it's unclear what "it" is.

overall, your English isn't bad. and frankly, there are plenty of native speakers who abuse the language more than you.

there are a few more pervasive habits, though, that I'd like to point out. You often neglect to use a pronoun when you could, and while that's not a bad as some other mistakes, it can be confusing or awkward for a native speaker to hear and understand. it's much better sounding to say "I am so disappointed," and with a lot of other verbs it's also very important, since most english verbs don't have unique conjugations for each subject.

also, you should use articles (the, a, an) in front nouns when you're talking about a specific one. for example, saying "AI is stupid" makes it sound like the statement is about all AI in all games and other programs. saying "the AI is stupid" makes is clear and obvious that you mean the AI in the game.

also, please don't mind the fact that i don't capitalize. it's an aesthetic choice i make as a creative writer. it's very brave of you to welcome help, and i'm glad to offer what i can.

still, i don't agree with you assessment of the AI entirely. it still has flaws, but it's still a lot stronger than the AI in most other games i've seen.

I don't think the time to simulate battles is that impractical. I find it hard to believe that simulating a typical fleet engagement, striped of all graphics, would take more than a few milliseconds. One this ancient computer I'm using right now, for instance, simulating 10,000 random dice rolls takes half a millisecond, and that's not even in an efficient language like C. If we assume an extremely luxurious 5 milliseconds per simulation, and gave each computer player half a second of CPU time, that's 100 battles it could simulate. Since battles in DA are more predictable than they were in DL, you could probably have stripped-down version that runs in well under half a millisecond but is still a very good predictor. Heck, I'm very tempted to code it up in C myself just to see how fast it could possibly be.

Now, I don't know how much CPU time each AI thread actually gets per turn in DA, but a couple of thousand reasonably accurate battle simulations per second would be a pretty good basis for evaluating your chances in a few engagements.

Chess AI's can take a long time because they are trying to evaluate so many board positions many moves ahead. Such an approach is totally infeasible for GC2, so Brad must be using some heuristics. It's hard to know for certain, but my sense looking from the outside is that using some simulation results in these heuristics would not be CPU-crushingly expensive.

Whelp I'll tell ya what. You go right ahead and code the C yourself to simulate the complex battle system including all the possible ship combinations along with fleet compositions and get back to us. Feel free to work from known items such as current tech level along with economic potential. I seem to remember (and I'm sure it is still up) that someone coded one and posted it on the forums as a combat simulator.

Right now the AI does a pretty good job of doing this which is all your thousands of simulations will show. It can design ships. I'm not disputing that. All I'm merely attempting to point out is there is a lot more involved in intelligently creating fleets and moving them around a board in an effective manner. That is what would take 4 weeks to accomplish for the same reason it can take a chess AI an hour to move a single piece.

Its just a bunch of random numbers applied to a fairly simple ruleset, so I don't see why it wouldn't.

Me i just know that the pirates hate me and kick my economy's butt . I was playing on challenging and aside from the pirates which left me bankrupt the kyrnn sent spys to tap my industry needless to say they wiped the floor with me. Besides in time every game can become better with fixes more ideas and more improvements .

Hmm I don't know wonder what the developers have to say about this issue? Or would they comment? Best to ask them when they get into the chat room or email them. If something is wrong then hopefully they will fix it tweak it or something.

Well, I am playing the latest version of DL.

I have DA at home for me begging to be installed.

I started complaining about this when I was deciding whether or not to purchase DA. One of the factors that was influencing my decision was whether or not they fixed civilizations responding to Culture wars. They just let themselves die rather than declaring war. the - entry in the relations tab that you are refering to is ridiculous. When you destroy a pesky scout ship, the civ goes to war with you immediately. When you spam influence starbases around one of their planets and steal an entire planet, they don't even seem to mind much. That is absurd. When testing this, I did not have even 1/2 of the military rating that they had and they still didn't attack. Placing influence star bases near a planet should be a hostile action in the Ai's eyes. If the AI does take steps against culture influence, it is not one that is even noticeable, even when culture is completely erradicating its civilization. Without an appropriate response to culture attacks, Galciv2 should not have any peaceful races, as they are just effortlessly flipped by culture starbases, placing other civilizations at an insurmountable disadvantage.

I posted on the forums, asking if DA fixed the ai's reaction to influence starbases. people told me it did not. Without reacting to culture, the game really is not a deep stradegy game of Diplomacy, influence, and culture, it is just a military operation. Just kill the guy that is not alligned with you. (Which is still quite strategic, obviously, but nowhere near as deep as it could be if the AI defended itself against culture attacks.

I bought DA anyway, hoping that it will be someday fixed.

I wish I could find the posts you are refering to. Other people have told me the same thing, but my searches for "Frogboy" aren't showing me any of his comments about culture.

Hopefully they will improve it sometime. In my opinion, an influence starbase should never be very near a planet without its owner becoming alarmed/angry. At present, he doesn't even notice.

Right here:

https://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=357&aid=143914#1125596

There are countries who would go to war with other countries just for destroying some bothersome ship, plane, building, or even single citizen, but if a country just spams them with KFC's, Micky D's, and Hollywood tripe, they just sit passively by and do nothing. Go figure!!!

You seemed to have missed the "and steal a whole planet" part. It's one thing to spam your culture at someone, it's another thing for the citizens of a foreign country to decide they like it so much they secede from their own nation and join yours. The nation they secede from should NOT respond well to this, and apparently in future AI updates it will be regarded appropriately by the AI.