Hello,



will it be possible in the future to use custom races as AI opponents?



Have a nice day

Often thought about the same thing



the only problem, if I am not mistaken, is that each faction needs it's own personality, which is a long and complex set of instructions and guidelines that the AI uses to play a faction effectively. This is kind of annoying, since going through and making a new personality is a long process. and it needs to be done right, with all of the faction's traits taken into account. Otherwise, I find the AI simply falls flat when its trying to play a custom faction.



I'm no AI expert, but maybe it could be done if some generic personalities were made and were automatically assigned to custom factions?

You should be able to edit the AI Race Template and it should be straightforward. I haven't bothered with it myself, because the Bonuses the AI gets for difficulty make up for the AIs Racial Designs. So it many senses, you don't need to.

AI work is hard. Most gamers don't want to play against an opponent that is hard to beat. Looking at the posts, many people find the Endless Space AI on beginner/normal to be hard, even as bad as it is. The investment into AI research and development would then be something that is not rewarded or wanted by the players. The majority of their customers don't want it, so they would be throwing money and time into something that won't help sales. It doesn't make economic sense. Multiplayer is where you are "supposed" to go for that sort of challenge.

I disagree with that "the majority of the customers don't want it"... It probably is more like: "they don't want it badly enough, that they wouldn't by it anyways".

It's almost always a resource and motivation issue and not that it would be impossible to make the AI good.



Take the board game: "Arimaa" for example.

The inventor was disappointed that computers nowadays dominate at chess and wanted to design a game that is easy to understand for humans but very hard to make a good AI for.

He offered a 10,000 $ for whoever can write an AI for it that beats the Top 3 humans.



While this hasn't been achieved, a lot of programmers got motivated and tried.



Look at the games ladder:

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/topRatedPlayers.cgi



While the players at the very top still are Human, one of them being the inventor itself, it's crowded with a lot of good AIs. I guess those would dominate about every average player very, very badly.



Maybe a similar approach could be used for 4x-games aswell. Provide an API of the AI and offer some reward for the most successfull one. Programmers love challenges like that!



Unfortunately the gaming-industry is more interested in churning out new games instead of improving existing ones. This isn't as profitable. Unless it has a monthly fee like World of WarCraft or so.



I mean ES AI has gone a long way of improvement since the early stages. But of course it's still miles away from what theoretically is possible. And I don't think that we can expect any leaps in the future.

they may be able to make improvements in another expansion.

Hello,



I get your point Stealth_Hawk, maybe it will be possible to link AI personality to trait selection; for example:

create a opponent who has "the main trait" (I'm sorry, but don't know how it's named in the english version) like Ameboe will affect the way this new AI use diplomacy, build queque, etc..

while you can select a different aspect and different sub-traits; it's quite funny to think about an AI who act like Cravers, but has Horatio appearance and it's naturally pessimistic.

I know this is just a speculation because I'm not a programmer nor an AI expert: it can be really easy to implement as nearly impossible.



Thank you anyway for your reply, have a nice game

To EviloMMi: In the English version, the choices that are representative of each of the standard factions are called Affinities, and everything else is called a trait.

Who knows, maybe one day it'll become a candidate on G2G; I mean, that's how the Amoeba and Automatons got their start, and it already exists for the AI with the standard factions anyway.

thuvian wrote:
AI work is hard. Most gamers don't want to play against an opponent that is hard to beat. Looking at the posts, many people find the Endless Space AI on beginner/normal to be hard, even as bad as it is.

Indeed : http://steamcommunity.com/app/208140/discussions/0/864947834993845685/#p1

Though, if I'm not mistaken, in ES, on Normal, the AI has advantages already, and also the difficulties have been changed since that topic was created?

thuvian wrote:
AI work is hard. Most gamers don't want to play against an opponent that is hard to beat. Looking at the posts, many people find the Endless Space AI on beginner/normal to be hard, even as bad as it is. The investment into AI research and development would then be something that is not rewarded or wanted by the players. The majority of their customers don't want it, so they would be throwing money and time into something that won't help sales. It doesn't make economic sense. Multiplayer is where you are "supposed" to go for that sort of challenge.

well a lot of players havn't played this game for a long enough time to understand how you really pick a faction and play them right. you have to admit this game has a fairly steep learning curve for beginners.

Making a custom AI is hard, but I have done it.....it just isn't really a good player, but it can play.



I based my faction mods off some guys Sectoids mod, even the AI can play it, but I don't think either of us made it work really 'that' well.



It does work however.