A Look At the AI of Empire: Total War and F.E.A.R. 2 58
mr_sifter writes "The newly released Empire: Total War and F.E.A.R. 2 have both been praised for their excellent AI. In this feature, Bit-Tech talks to the developers behind these games about how they handled the challenges of creating Empire's armies of thousands of AI soldiers and F.E.A.R. 2's aggressive teams of military operatives. The discussion also talks about how game AI is 'smoke and mirrors' compared to research AI, and looks at the difficulty of improving the quality of game AI."
We talked about F.E.A.R. 2's engine and AI back in December as well.
No AI in ETW (Score:4, Insightful)
Hi, :-(.
i love the Total War Series. But the AI in ETW is a complete disappointment. I see no enhancement compared to MTW2. The opposite is true, there are so many AI bugs that battles agains the AI are close to pointless. I slaughtered enemys at the border of the battlefield, standing with theit back towards me. I micromanage my own units because grouping tends to produce strange results. Due to this, battles are a lot more point&click-work currently. I'm waiting for a patch
Sincerely yours, Martin
Re:The power of Cell (Score:2, Insightful)
For an NPC to decide on its next action, it will usually have to query the world for a tonne of information, and most of that information is conditional on a previous query result.
I'll believe him, but he's obviously talking about Bethesda games.
Elder Scrolls / Fallout NPCs have a hojillion options available to them. They can sleep, eat, pick up objects, converse with other characters (NPC or the PC), go home, go to work, go to the store, equip clothing and weapons, fight, run away et cetera. All this requires a lot of knowledge about the time of day, all of the objects and characters in the NPC's immediate environment, and some information about other locations in town.
In an FPS like FEAR the options are much more limited. Essentially an NPC can choose between fire, throw grenade, take cover and run away to regroup. All he needs to know is the location of his enemy/enemies, maybe the locations of his allies and the location of potential cover.
In an RTS not even every NPC needs AI; you only need one AI per computer-controlled faction. Their options aren't as limited as in an FPS, but they don't need that much dynamic information about the world either: the map is mostly static, only its own and its enemy's locations really change.
TL;DR: What works for Oblivion doesn't necessarily have to be useful to other games.
Re:No AI in ETW (Score:4, Insightful)
You know I don't think it's as bad as you make out. Sure I agree that it does do stupid things and I'm sure it will be better after a patch or two, but in the right situation (and really this is most battles I've played) it seems capable of good solid play. The problems I've seen tend to be where it tries to do something clever (like split its forces) and ends up weakening its position, but it hasn't happened very often and certainly isn't game breaking.
I dunno, I guess I tend to be a glass-half-full type of player when it comes to AI - I don't expect miracles and I'm willing to accept that there will be situations where it does something stupid. People who listen to computer game publishers' marketing and judge the AI against human intelligence are always going to be doomed to disappointment, but I'm happy enough with the Empire AI at the moment, in comparison with other games I've played.
Re:Fear 2's AI sucked. (Score:1, Insightful)
Fallout 3 made for a pretty bad first person shooter because it wasn't a first person shooter. It's an RPG.
VATS is an attempt to combine a real-time first-person combat system with a traditional turn-based RPG battle system. It succeeds at that pretty well I think. Of course, one of its strengths is that you can ignore it completely and only play the game in real time, as you did.
Re:Realistic AI, yay! (Score:3, Insightful)
"So when you hide behind cover 5 germans will chuck grenades at you so you have to run for other cover at which point another 5 will throw more meaning you have to run back to where you were assuming those grenades have blown up, all whilst dying repeatedly anyway because enemies kill you in only two or three shots on veteran. The fact they just plaster the area with 5 grenades often left me feeling little difference to the "hard mode" of old in many past games where the enemies were made harder by simply making them automatically aim at you and do rediculously high damage. The additional "intelligence" simply added nothing to the game."
Well in a real war if the enemy wanted to be a douche about it? Then yes they all could be chucking grenades at you. Especially if they're set on "hard". Seriously think long-range weapon. Pick as much of the enemy as you can and then mop up closer. Now i would say that AI is improving and thank God for that. For example your teammates in GRAW1 are a bunch of idiots. Occasionally handy but mostly dead because they wandered into the line of fire. Graw2 doesn't require as much micromanagement and hence your jobs easier and they're more useful.