I played Endless Space for almost 300 hours.

And in my opinion the greatest weakness of this beautiful game was its AI.



As far as I know, development started as only multiplayer game and then they added single player mode as well, so it kinda always felt to me that AI was never top priority. And even though we have seen a lot of improvements over years, it never felt quite challenging.



Let me start saying that I played this game on every difficulty and the AI just behaves the same way. Higher difficulties only add an artificial gap between you and AI Factions by giving a lot of bonuses to AI Factions and penalties to the player, so basically after you close that gap and overcome the disadvantages, you basically got yourself a Newbie AI waiting to get erased from the Space. Not sure what could be done about this, just saying that I'm not really fond of this mechanic.



Another thing bothered me was that AI does really poor job handling their fleets. Every game, I see some AI faction knocking on my door with 30 fleets but most of them are just full of poorly designed ships and they consist of only a couple of ships. So what do I do? I put my Great Grand Armada in a strategical position, and the AI just attacks it and loses heavily. Giving my fleet tons of experience points, so they become even stronger, and also my commander gets like 20 levels in 5 turns or something. So my already really strong fleet turns into something like Deathstar, invincible.



Also I might say that AI spamming fleets in star systems is kinda annoying too, achieves nothing except lagging the game after 200 turns.



I don't think AI really understands diplomacy. I mean I've seen a lot of things like getting attacked by a peaceful race for no actual reason, unprovoked. And then after 100 turns, my trusted ally cancels our Alliance for no reason. I'm on other side of the Space, we've got mutual enemies and a good and long time deal going on, but for some reason they decide to cancel the Alliance.



Maybe there will be more things I would like to add in the future, I don't know, haven't played the game in the last 3 months. So I can't really recall bad memories about the game that well

Important topic rockmassif.



I think the economic AI was OK (albeit building a bit useless stuff.) However the combat / fleet ai could use work. The Diplomacy AI I think was very little active itself only proactive when approached by the player. I think fleet spams in general was a problem be it from AI or from player. Ofcourse balance has to be truck as too few fleets is no fun at all either.

I totally agree. AI is not a challenge after few games.



By the way, while we're all waiting for the ES2, it would be very nice if you guys would release one last minor patch to ES1 with small AI corrections. I think the bugs i'm about to point out are not so hard to fix, because few of them appeared after releasing addons. First of all- the faction that you're at war with always accepts to case fire without you having to give them even a single small planet or anything :P I'm almost sure this wasn't possible in previous versions of the game. This makes single player game extremely easier. And second thing is the possibility to exchange money 'per turn' with other AI factions... I believe it functions well in multiplayer, but in single player you can easily fool AI and wheedle lots of money for nothing in exchange :P This possibility should be deleted from single player IMHO.



I know, i know, it's ES2 topic, but those kind of small bugs are often essential for gameplay

Hey guys,



We know that AI has not been our strongest point so far, and in a strategy game we all know that a good AI is key. So we have formed and AI only team that includes 2 full time programmers, 1 AI designer and 1 associate producer just to work on that and nothing else. On top of these guys we will work with a bunch of external experts in the domain. Together we hope to be able to create a very solid AI engine, but as our work grows on that area we will reveal more. I hope you will appreciate all the effort we put there.



Cheers



ST

SpaceTroll wrote:
Hey guys,



We know that AI has not been our strongest point so far, and in a strategy game we all know that a good AI is key. So we have formed and AI only team that includes 2 full time programmers, 1 AI designer and 1 associate producer just to work on that and nothing else. On top of these guys we will work with a bunch of external experts in the domain. Together we hope to be able to create a very solid AI engine, but as our work grows on that area we will reveal more. I hope you will appreciate all the effort we put there.



Cheers



ST

This is great to hear! AI is consistently a weak point in most recently released 4x games so I'm glad to hear you'll be dedicating a lot of resources to it.

SpaceTroll wrote:
Hey guys,



We know that AI has not been our strongest point so far, and in a strategy game we all know that a good AI is key. So we have formed and AI only team that includes 2 full time programmers, 1 AI designer and 1 associate producer just to work on that and nothing else. On top of these guys we will work with a bunch of external experts in the domain. Together we hope to be able to create a very solid AI engine, but as our work grows on that area we will reveal more. I hope you will appreciate all the effort we put there.



Cheers



ST

Thanks for taking your time to inform us! Great news.

Now I have even higher expectations

Thanks for letting us know SpaceTroll. I like playing mixed AI/human games so my friends and I can take on the world, but it's not as fun if the world isn't really fighting back.

SpaceTroll wrote:
Hey guys,



We know that AI has not been our strongest point so far, and in a strategy game we all know that a good AI is key. So we have formed and AI only team that includes 2 full time programmers, 1 AI designer and 1 associate producer just to work on that and nothing else. On top of these guys we will work with a bunch of external experts in the domain. Together we hope to be able to create a very solid AI engine, but as our work grows on that area we will reveal more. I hope you will appreciate all the effort we put there.



Cheers



ST

YES!!! thank you!!!

@SpaceTroll



Thanks for info, great to hear! I'm looking forward to see the results!

Spacetroll, Amplitude is awesome. I'm so glad that you recognized this as a weakness and took steps to address it.



When I played ES, I rapidly realized that it was trivial to exploit the diplomatic AI. I ended up winning my games by never waging war and taking every resource, tech, and speck of dust from the AI players diplomatically, winning science victories. It worked even on the highest difficulty.

Good to see that it is being worked on. But AI is a hard topic and two programmers is a rather small team. So we will have to see what the results will be.

I was always thinking that for a small gaming company trying to air their first product competeing against triple-A titles having only a limited budget Amplitude did an awesome job.



Yes. The AI was predicatble and weak but it was good enough to provide a challenge until you figured out stuff. After that I managed to amuse myself with scenarios and self created "missions" which didnt make the AI my main opponent but my ambitions were the enemy.



AI coding is probably a very resource-intensive area. I dont have any first hand experience but I play enough games and am confronted with enough AIs in order to see different layers which vary by magnitudes. Its good to hear that Amplitude is stocking up their team to include 2 full-time designers responsible for the AI.

This is seriously exciting

I'll throw in my two cents in saying that yes, AI needs a lot of work, and I'm glad you are trying to address it. I'm worried that EvilDM is right and two people will not be enough, so I hope the experts you are consulting can really help you out.



All that said, I believe many ES1 players are also hoping to see not only better AI, but also AI with more personality. Sophons should value anything that gets them better research, Horatio should be disdainful of any non-Horatio, etc. And ideally, of course, we'd have a "randomize personalities" option that swaps them around.

I suppose the team he mentioned is meant to think the architecture. In which case four specialists is pretty solid.

SpaceTroll wrote:
Hey guys,



We know that AI has not been our strongest point so far, and in a strategy game we all know that a good AI is key. So we have formed and AI only team that includes 2 full time programmers, 1 AI designer and 1 associate producer just to work on that and nothing else. On top of these guys we will work with a bunch of external experts in the domain. Together we hope to be able to create a very solid AI engine, but as our work grows on that area we will reveal more. I hope you will appreciate all the effort we put there.



Cheers



ST

Very good news.

I think AI can be achieved via cloud assisted system that rips off player play style historical data very much like that seen in Driverta thing in Froza games in xbox one, packets of some human players play style and settings be downloaded to player systems as special game AI tweak for that set game, so each new game would be different

Hi all - just wanted to say that I'm actively stalking this thread but that I'm unlikely to intervene very often at this point as we're still in a very intense R&D phase. We are listening though - so watch what you say

wilbefast wrote:
Hi all - just wanted to say that I'm actively stalking this thread but that I'm unlikely to intervene very often at this point as we're still in a very intense R&D phase. We are listening though - so watch what you say

I am personally not too concerned with AI as I am with having a good engine, good UI and having a great feel to the game when I plan to be playing with friends.

I would like to ask if the improved AI will be exclusive to ES2 or will it be also improved in ES1 and EL?