Wednesday, August 18, 2010

So here is an interesting problem.....

I just finished my work on the Scrin Army, it's pretty much where I want it to be (minus the required weapon balancing and the like) so I decided to turn the game on and see how the AI fairs with my changes.  

This was my major worrying point while I was doing all this work, that the AI wasn't going to be able to do anything with what I was giving it and just run around in circles chasing it's own tail.

The result?  Oh dear......  So in my new design I gave the Assimilator a new ability.  The Assimilator is the Scrin's Engineer unit, but I wanted it to stand out a bit more, give it some new functionality as it were.  So I gave it the ability to turn itself into a biological powerplant for a short ammount of time.  The result?  It works great as a player.  Unfortunatly the AI can't seem to understand the point, and all it does is make a ton of these guys and turn them into powerplants while trying to get them to go capture a Tiberium Spike or something.  

Yea, that's not very good.  So I took the ability out, and the AI is working great.  I'm not sure if it's using my upgrades or not, it appears to use at least 1 of them, so that's pretty cool. 

But that leads to an interesting point/problem.  Whats better, making the game simply from the point of view of the real people who are going to play it, or designing the game around the idea that the AI does have to actually work?  What's more important?  Tell me your thoughts.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i think a workable ai is important cez not everyone can do vs matches on the internet

Anonymous said...

I also agree that working ai is important because some people dont have the time or the ability to play games over the internet, and hell some people just love to comp stomp.

azuza001 said...

I tend to agree with you guys on this, myself the only internet connection that I have is through tethering on my phone which is not fast enough for playing games. So I've been working on the Scrin AI the last few days and have finally gotten it to work (mostly).

I say mostly simply because it now uses our new Scrin Upgrade System without any issues but it doesn't really use the new units to their full potential.

Still, it works, and it's tough. I've watched a few games (CPU vrs CPU) with Scrin using the new AI and they are defeatable, but I've seen some things that I never thought i'd see in a CNC game. For example, I watched the Scrin launch a 2 point attack at the enemy, sending it's main force up the middle at the NOD base. NOD's forces were just strong enough to be a match for the Scrin units, but while Scrin was doing that it was using Shock Troopers with their blink packs to go all the way around and come into the enemy base from behind, catching the NOD army inbetween two lines of fire. NOD fell apart at that point, and it was a win for the Scrin. I've also watched some pitched battles between all 3 forces that was a dead even game until GDI ion cannoned NOD, giving Scrin the chance they needed to move in and win.

So the long and short of it is I am dedicated to making the AI work. I may not be able to get the system to use all of the new abilities, but if it at least puts up a hell of a fight then we're golden right?

teamwindom00 said...

AI is a bit more important...
sure, u can face worthy enemies, but controling them is also fun,...if the AI is not able to catch up...there is just no point to it...thats my opinion