Grimwulf
Arcane
Can't remember a single strategy game with good automated micro. When you let AI make decisions for you, it's usually because you don't care anymore.
Pretty much.Can't remember a single strategy game with good automated micro. When you let AI make decisions for you, it's usually because you don't care anymore.
Can anyone recommend games where you make meaningful decisions as opposed the to inconsequential ones? Im thinking a game like Age of Wonders which is warfare oriented.My recurring problem with 4x games is that they scale poorly. The early game often suffers from a lack of meaningful decisions to make, while the late game becomes bogged down in a morass of inconsequential decisions. This is because the range of available decisions never actually changes to reflect the scale of the player's empire.
Edit: Wut Damned Registrations said. Beat me to it.
Well, there are strategy games where the AI does specific aspects of micromanagement tolerably. Every so often, if the scope is narrow enough, the AI governor actually makes the right decisions and you allow him to do his thing, generally because you've restricted enough of his behaviors that it has become a linear algebra problem, probably to produce you more foods, or beakers, or hammers, without actually leaving it up to him to produce any units for you, because the AI can never into producing units.Can't remember a single strategy game with good automated micro. When you let AI make decisions for you, it's usually because you don't care anymore.
tolerably
I would say the decisions you make in a game of AI Wars are very meaningful.Can anyone recommend games where you make meaningful decisions as opposed the to inconsequential ones? Im thinking a game like Age of Wonders which is warfare oriented.My recurring problem with 4x games is that they scale poorly. The early game often suffers from a lack of meaningful decisions to make, while the late game becomes bogged down in a morass of inconsequential decisions. This is because the range of available decisions never actually changes to reflect the scale of the player's empire.
Edit: Wut Damned Registrations said. Beat me to it.
That's not quite true, since my definition of "tolerably" is "at least as good as I would do it". I expect a machine to be capable of doing better than me, but if it can at least do as well as I can, this is tolerable.Exactly what I said before. The moment you stop playing on the edge and become content with tolerably - you pretty much don't give a fuck.
That's more a problem of victory conditions than anything else. A way to limit the micro from getting too tedious, is to limit the empire size one's likely to have during a game. Of course the game size should be adjustable, too.Like it at the start of a 4X.
Once you get a 50+ pile city (or colony or whatever) sprawl, it just gets tedious - especially if you've essentially won the game already because the enemy have no idea how to team up to pose a threat to you and are just going through the motions of a military victory.
And then a related problem is that normally the AI is so retarded that you can never just let them automate those building etc tasks because it's highly likely they'll do something moronic and cause you to grasp defeat from the hands of victory
I think MMO3 is a bad example of "no micromanagement" game. What they did was automation instead of abstracting things. They gave tools to both micromanage every single thing and tons of AI helpers to automate the process...
What's the point of first detaily simulating something and then automating it? Why implement something the player can't use (unless the player accepts micromanagement hell)? It should be abstracted in my opinion.
Take a look at Majesty for example, you don't have an option to "manually move around a hero", no they move on themselves. What you as the player do is working on a higher level (giving incentives to the AI heroes and building infrastructure).
Don't give the player tools to automate boring parts of the game, don't implement these boring parts in the first place
DFhack features like workflow and autolabor that automate tedious and brainless tasks like making sure that there's always enough barrels or beds produced or reassigning your 50 idling dwarfes to low skill jobs that need to get done make it so much better though.Simulation vs abstraction. Dwarf Fortress wouldn't be the same if it was heavily abstracted (maybe it would be better, but not the same). If you want to play some heavily abstracted 4x games, try some 4x style boardgames.
Can anyone recommend games where you make meaningful decisions as opposed the to inconsequential ones? Im thinking a game like Age of Wonders which is warfare oriented.
I think most game devs just suck at strategy and that's why their automations blow. They just don't consider all the necessary things. Most people are terrible at explaining their own decision making processes if they aren't trained to deconstruct them in a specific field. Also they are afraid to push away dumb people who automate wrong.
The financial benefit of a functioning AI probably outweighs the time spent adding it unless you are stupid and can't design good AI.I guess that's because they're so busy trying to get their game to the market and don't have the time or manpower to play around with their systems until they know what's optimal.
The Guild?Can't remember a single strategy game with good automated micro. When you let AI make decisions for you, it's usually because you don't care anymore.
I can't say I recall the Guild having good AI automation. That's pretty much a textbook case of "do this for me because I don't care anymore", where you've blobbed the map and are focusing on making war, and are willing to tolerate having the industries you used to get to that point operating at relatively poor efficiency because your empire is now funded by war booty taken from the holdings of other dynasties rather than your native production.The Guild?
I think that was the concept behind "Drox Operative", although the 4X underlying it was fairly bare. As with all RPGs, you tend to quickly become OP and start causing mass destruction by accident. The Last Federation also has a similar scheme, where you are, again, one guy in the backdrop of a 4X.Make good AI for 4x micromanagement and it'd be a good backdrop for a sandboxxy RPG. Take a revamped MOO2 and have several AI's battling for Orion in the background, while yourself, a struggling privateer, explores the galactic neighborhood and does quests. The "simulation" running in the background would allow for dynamic wars and events to spice up the universe. The quests and character stats would help to balance the randomness of what hapens in the univers.
You make me think of something else. I bolded what did it. See, it's hard enough to do just a 4x, but to do a 4x AND an adventure/rpg space-sim elite-hybrid is a whole other ballgame. And this is before all of the cpu/memory/system constraints you must heed. Moire than likely compromise have ot be made to do both in the same executable.I think that was the concept behind "Drox Operative", although the 4X underlying it was fairly bare. As with all RPGs, you tend to quickly become OP and start causing mass destruction by accident. The Last Federation also has a similar scheme, where you are, again, one guy in the backdrop of a 4X.Make good AI for 4x micromanagement and it'd be a good backdrop for a sandboxxy RPG. Take a revamped MOO2 and have several AI's battling for Orion in the background, while yourself, a struggling privateer, explores the galactic neighborhood and does quests. The "simulation" running in the background would allow for dynamic wars and events to spice up the universe. The quests and character stats would help to balance the randomness of what hapens in the univers.
Make good AI for 4x micromanagement and it'd be a good backdrop for a sandboxxy RPG. Take a revamped MOO2 and have several AI's battling for Orion in the background, while yourself, a struggling privateer, explores the galactic neighborhood and does quests. The "simulation" running in the background would allow for dynamic wars and events to spice up the universe. The quests and character stats would help to balance the randomness of what hapens in the univers.
Why do I bring this up? Because adventure/rpg space games always seem to be static in nature. The wars, if there're any, are scripted or preplanned somehow. Nothing much happens which surprises you, at least, once the plot is done. It's not that interesting things can't emerge from AI's or non-scripted processes, but that game creators don't usually allow it or pursue it.
Game creators definitely can create interesting plots and events. Just seems they fail to create truly immersing worlds because they don't allow the cpu enough freedom. Part of this is because the AI is unappealing. If something isn't premade, it's usually uninteresting. This is the result of neglect and also just simply cpu's and memory might not be adaquate enough yet.
What are these? I can't recall any such game. Can you drop some examples?adventure/rpg space games