I have found the AI is either overly or underlie aggressive. In a previous game the Horatio basically let me burn and pillage my way to an expansion victory just because we had good trade relations and they never made contact with any other race. Then in the game I'm currently playing the Cravers threw all off their fleets at me and are now being wiped out by pirates.

This forum could use an ignore button.

There are a few... Concerning things.

Such as diplomacy, the feel of sameness between races, combat, and general balancing.

But the dev team has been awful quiet, hopefully this means they are working on these issues, and will have the balls to postpone general release (to me August is not very far away)



Plus we have no idea what patche and fixes are on the way. It's entirely possible the spit and polish is being done as we speak

So enough of the way too heated discussion. Pointing out flaws again and again is fine, but let's be civil, eh?

Currently almost done with my first game on ES, can say I'm enjoying it. I'm not going to comment on the senseless arguing that's been going on, but I'd like to get back on the original topic.



Yes the diplomatic tree is very much useless besides being able to acquire much needed happiness buildings. I'm playing as the Hissho and while I realize they aren't much for silly politics anyways, I'm dominating quite easily. While the other races started off much quicker than I did and I had the lowest score for the first 30 turns, that quickly changed when the Cravers got angry at me, so I got angry also. I killed them off no problem, and then have proceeded to slash my way through the other races. So even from my limited experience, I was not expecting to win my first game (playing on normal) so easily.

Funny how this thread is about diplomacy and you guys just wanna swing your edicks around.

Admiral_Tolwyn wrote:
Funny how this thread is about diplomacy and you guys just wanna swing your edicks around.

I was gonna comment about that, but you beat me to it, and you know, this is one of the two trolls I've found so far, and it's on a diplomacy thread, haha!

I have faith that they will will fix the diplomacy in the game, its an alpha and this sort of thing gets fixed during the beta phase,



I think we can all agree, as long as its not as bad as SoaSE's diplomacy then i can live with it, they even released a micro expansion named "diplomacy" and its possibly the worse game mechanic i have ever seen.

Yea its kinda broken atm, but I find it a bit funny as well. You can somewhat tell wich AI realy hates your guts before you actualy do anything. >.>

I've played many strategic games and I must say they usually are either too complicated and hard to use or too simple and don't work.

Yeah, I think we can all agree that the diplomacy is broken and it's broken in a number of ways. As has been said the mood swings that the AI goes through are just insane and far too changeable to represent a realistic experience for the player. I don't think it helps that defeated empires still appear on the diplomacy screen when they should have disappeared. It might be that the different levels of relationship don't work properly either. It's difficult to understand sometimes why the AI won't accept an offer when all you're given as feedback is that you have the wrong relationship status with them. :-/

The team is working on fixing the issues with Diplomacy and improving it. This has been stated several times already but I thought I could repeat it yet again in case someone missed it.

Good to know diplomacy is being worked on - even though I had no real doubt about that. Personally, as I am still learning the game and playing normal at most, I tend to just ignore diplomatic relations except if I can get a peace treaty in to buy me time with warfare research and ship building.

4x_Fan wrote:
Currently the game lacks multiple features of even a semi-serious 4x game, and has holes / dupes the size of a planet to drive through. This isn't a Zynga / OS release, either.

At the moment it plays better than any 4X I've played in a long while.



That's with the broken AI.



You've got to sort your anger issues out, and calm down. Seriously.



btw. "frak" makes you look stupid, IMO. Wouldn't have said anything had you not bolded it.

4x_Fan wrote:


As stated: cut the crap. Diplomacy is currently borked, and we're looking to the next few patches. You know, after they try and get the AI to stop abusing free dust...

Agreed and waiting... It's stupid how it currently works.

I'm actually curious about the planned implementation details of the AI. I do recall reading another post where someone asked that exact question, and was wondering if anyone could point me towards any dev responses. I haven't found any yet.

When i try to do diplomacy nothing comes up no deals or nothing and i have plenty of command points XD

Sunshard wrote:
I'm actually curious about the planned implementation details of the AI. I do recall reading another post where someone asked that exact question, and was wondering if anyone could point me towards any dev responses. I haven't found any yet.

The most interesting dev quote I've ever seen regarding Ai is:

ThorTillas wrote:
Hi there,



As long as I need to work, I cannot read all your posts… and unfortunately writing an answer takes me so much time that you guys are able to add 3 or 4 more posts before I’m done...

But this thread seems to be “the one” I need to follow it as long as a large part of my job at Amplitude is about AI development.



Will the AI cheat ?

-> Short answer : no.

In fact, the AIs will not gathered any information that a player cannot get and it will not be able to do actions that the player cannot perform.

But, depending on difficulty level, it will get some “Bonus” or “Malus” to his “Food/Industry/Science/Money” production.

The AIs have some difficulty to “always” make the right decisions in terms of system improvements or ship design creation. By giving them some production bonus, we allow them to make some little mistakes from time to time.



Did you use any neural network, genetic algorithms or any other research based algorithms?

-> Short answer : no

We don’t use Neural network or genetic algorithms. They are clearly difficult to canalize and are not applicable for our problems. But some other games have already used them. “Black and White” use a neural network as one part of the Creature AI and as far as I remember, “Creatures” use some genetic algorithms.



But it does not mean that we don’t use any architecture or concept from the research or previous games.

The large part of our architecture is based on automated agents. Like “Divide and Conquer”, we have split the whole AI in smaller parts named agents. Each agent is able to handle a specific task like the population repartition, choose a building to build, a ship design creation, the right tax rate to set, etc. The decision algorithm is based on input settings and world observation. The agent can change the world in his responsibility’s limits and send suggestions to other agents in order to get some help, change some other agents settings, etc.

When all the agents have done their jobs, several managers analyze the world and choose the agent’s settings for the next AI run.



Will the AI have personalities?

-> Short answer : yes

We build a personality settings in Endless Space. Each faction has its own personality and we can add some more, based on victory goals or the game’s current state.

Personality will not change the way the AI will choose a building or move his fleet, but change which building to privilege, how many ships to keep in defense when attacking, how diplomacy will impact on the attitude toward the other empire, etc.

So, yes, AIs will not react the same way to an aggressive colonization or a scout destruction depending on his personality.

But algorithms behind the scene are the same, it is more a matter of perception of the world than a complete behavior change. Which means that a Craver will still check its fleet’s power before attacking even when its “attack modifier” is very high and/or its “defense modifier” very low.





That said. I hope those explanations were clear and answered a part of your questions...



Cheers,

Florian (and Adrien who double-checked this over my shoulder ^^)

Maybe you haven't seen that one, so far?

ComradePaddock wrote:
When i try to do diplomacy nothing comes up no deals or nothing and i have plenty of command points XD

Remember that you have to research the available deals (on the left part of the tech tree)

Also deep breath this is still an alpha build things are far from complete. I find myself accidently clicking on planets around uncolonized stars which just zooms into them rather then show their stats like it does in a colonized system.

Thanks Nosferatiel. I missed the keynote on agent-based architecture. :P



I assume by canalize they meant errr....thread?