A Look At the AI of Empire: Total War and F.E.A.R. 2

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.

Fear 2's AI sucked.

[n1hilist]

The AI in Fear 2 was terrible! Well, if it was good, I didn't notice because it was so god damned easy to play that it was more a case of "Hi, *slomo* bye." .. firefights were so short that if there was amazing AI under the hood, I completely missed it.

On the parts where I didn't use slowmo, again, nothing remarkable, and I'm not exactly an amazing FPS player either.

Re:No AI in ETW

[Delosian]

I agree with you completely. The French and Indian forces will stand with their backs to you after they are forced to retreat. You can either walk up to them and shoot them in the back and they won't do anything or you can shell their position and they'll just stand there and take it till they're all dead. At one stage the enemy attacked me with cannons and I don't mean with cannon balls. They walked up to my lines with the cannons while under heavy fire and tried to walk through my lines. I suspect that for some reason the retreat area for the AI was on the side I entered battle from. Not even Medieval 2 (which had plenty of AI bugs) was that stupid. Another example of stupid AI was when the Indians which outnumbered me 10:1 attacked my fort. They climbed over the walls and killed my guys on the wall but then they raced down to the middle of the fort where my general was and they just stood there. My general ended up killing them all and I won the game with a "close victory". Seriously, they had rifles and bladed weapons and were in arms length of my cavalry and they did nothing to try and kill them. Also what is with the fishing village vs. the shipyard? That's just dumb. I had to dismantle my Level 3 fishing village just to complete an objective which required a Level 1 Shipyard. It seems like they tried something new and failed badly. In general I cannot say I'm impressed. The Steam engine failed to install the first half dozen times with a different error message each time. I ended up getting the Steam installer off the net and installing that first and THEN installing the game. And what is with requiring an internet connection? My games computer is purposely off the grid so it doesn't get a virus and force me to format my hard drive and lose some of my game files (the ones I forget). What a waste of my time. Razor1911 has already hacked the game so you don't need to connect to the internet so if their insistence on this is a form of copy protection then it failed majorly because Razor1911 had the game hacked before it hit the shelves and online stores.