Games have to be fun which means that the goal of the AI is to gracefully lose to the human player after making him exert some effort.
The problem is that most RTS games stand no chance against me or any other half-descent player, unless they are cheating. And when they cheat, the game is very much brute force vs strategy.
I’ve been playing “Ultimate general: Gettysburg”, which was touted as having put a lot off effort into AI, and which paid off—when I play it on the highest difficulty settings, I can still win convincingly, but it does feel like I am playing an incompitant human, rather than an artificial stupidity. Its far more enjoyable to play.
The problem is that most RTS games stand no chance against me or any other half-descent player
Sure. Consider that the game has to run on your sucky home computer (or, forbid, a console), most likely without a GPU. The strategy/tactics/behaviour code has to share the CPU cycles with a large variety of things including the uninteresting but vital functions like pathfinding and it has to make its decisions within the tick time which is a fraction of second. AND many players prefer the AI to be a pushover, anyway.
Of course, the GPU is also running the graphics, but the computer doesn’t need to play well enough to beat world champions—I’m pretty sure that Alpha Go running on one CPU+GPU could play at a strong amateur level.
The problem is that most RTS games stand no chance against me or any other half-descent player, unless they are cheating. And when they cheat, the game is very much brute force vs strategy.
I’ve been playing “Ultimate general: Gettysburg”, which was touted as having put a lot off effort into AI, and which paid off—when I play it on the highest difficulty settings, I can still win convincingly, but it does feel like I am playing an incompitant human, rather than an artificial stupidity. Its far more enjoyable to play.
Sure. Consider that the game has to run on your sucky home computer (or, forbid, a console), most likely without a GPU. The strategy/tactics/behaviour code has to share the CPU cycles with a large variety of things including the uninteresting but vital functions like pathfinding and it has to make its decisions within the tick time which is a fraction of second. AND many players prefer the AI to be a pushover, anyway.
I think gaming machines generally do have GPUs…
Of course, the GPU is also running the graphics, but the computer doesn’t need to play well enough to beat world champions—I’m pretty sure that Alpha Go running on one CPU+GPU could play at a strong amateur level.
Of course, but mass-market games like Starcraft are designed to perform decently on the run-of-the-mill machines with integrated graphics.