0024466: more between-game variation for the AI - DEV Arcen

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0024466	AI War 2	Suggestion		Feb 22, 2021 2:26 pm	Feb 22, 2021 2:26 pm

Reporter	tadrinth	Assigned To
Status	new	Resolution	open
Product Version	Beta 2.744 Scourge Industries, Inc

Summary	0024466: more between-game variation for the AI
Description	I think AIW2 needs more between-game variation for the AI, to create a more interesting strategic landscape. Right now, if you play Pure 10 vs Full Ensemble, your strategic decisions are a tradeoff between building a well-rounded fleet which can take all possible planets, and optimizing your tech investments to get the most out of your science given the ship lines available. And if there's enough ARSes available for you to get whatever ships you like, then the optimal tech investment is just whatever the best generally good tech is, which means there can't be to many options available I think a missing piece here is strategic variance on the AI's side. Not tactical variance, the Full Ensemble has that already with the wide variety of possible planets it can generate by picking different ship, guard post, and guardian pools to spawn from. The problem with that type of variance is that once you finish clearing a planet, any future planets are independent, and your strategy has to account equally for all possible future planets. AIWC solved this problem by having the AI pick a limited number of guardians and ships each game. If you ran into, say, Gravity Guardians, then you knew you'd be facing gravity guardians frequently for the whole game, and you might decide to get fewer melee ships and more sniper ships in response. That raises the skill cap since unlocks are more situational, and it adds replay value since things can be more different between games, even if you don't change the lobby options. AIW2 might want to solve this differently, and I don't know how easy it would be to adapt the current XML structure for ship groups to do something similar, but I do think there would be significant value in having more between-game variation on the AI side. There's absolutely a balance to be struck here; too much RNG on the AI's side might result in players restarting their campaigns rather than dealing with particular units being preferred by the AI. Things that dramatically shift the game should be reserved for AI Types or minor factions, things that are opt-in. Or, the player needs to be able to spend Hacking Points to counter especially bad RNG (like AIWC's design backup servers which let you ban an entire ship type for the AI). If I was going to implement this, I'd probably do it for guardians and dire guardians first and see how that felt (and I would have the various sub-factions pick differently, so that the sentinels might choose differently than the warden). And maybe scourge armories. See discord discussion: https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/242012213580136448/813475712887292004
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Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
Feb 22, 2021 2:26 pm	tadrinth	New Issue