Comment by ddebernardy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddebernardy | Hacker News Reader

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Please... head over to Paradox Interactive and seek to join their team if you're bummed out to a point of thinking that. (And you're welcome to link to this comment in your application.)

Their audience is basically desperate for a better AI that does better strategic and tactical thinking rather than pathfinding, weighted decision trees, and a couple of high level heuristics.

Here's what I and I'd gather many others would want instead: for the AI to go through the dev game logs, and perhaps even end user game logs, and then learn from what humans are doing, so they behave more like them. And then re-inject that into the game so it's something of a challenge to play without needing to give the AI some serious bonuses while playing.

As things stand the AI is so bad you can start as a purposely broken one province nation and still turn into a major power. [0]

And if you're thinking "no, the AI will trash them and they won't find it fun," here's a thought: right now, the AI is so bad that the only way to have some fun is to give it insanely large bonuses. But much like in a game of Go, as a player I'd much rather get those boosts myself to overcome a much stronger AI opponent.

The same holds for other 4X games, like Civ.

Playing Chess or Go against a computer used to suck. It no longer does thanks to how much better AI got.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJhyZ-9ktpo

My understanding of the latest-gen Pdox games is that parts of the AI are shared at the level of the Clausewitz engine, and that Clausewitz in turn was developed for EU3, but designed as an extremely general engine for 2D games, not even just GSGs. So in some ways the HOI4 AI, for instance, is using techniques that might have worked great for EU3 (and, in my experience, worked fairly well in Victoria II, if you treat the economy separately), but are now unsuitable.

I'm interested as to whether they've improved the AI in Imperator - not that I'm going to buy it - as the Jomini sub-engine was supposed to streamline a lot of the "cruft" that had built up between 2007 and now.

As to your point RE: OPMs going on world conquests, I think that's part of Paradox's cross-franchise decision to move away from historicality and towards more "casual" gameplay (i.e., map painting), not just between EU3 - 4 but HOI3 - 4 as well; and ultimately has more to do with their balance choices for the player than the strength of the AI.

I do think that, as it stands, HOI4 and EU4 are at the same level as certain competitive games, where instead of trying to play historically, many players just wait for the next patch's balancing to over-correct in favour of some set of poor AI choices, and possibly for Reman's Paradox to explain it to them, and then exploit that to their advantage. Making the AI more competent, and removing the need for balancing and overcorrecting, would remove that perceived ability to exploit a broken enemy, and thus some of the desire from the playerbase for map-painting over historical accuracy.

> As to your point RE: OPMs going on world conquests, I think that's part of Paradox's cross-franchise decision to move away from historicality and towards more "casual" gameplay (i.e., map painting)

TBH I'm actually fine with that, so long as the AI can end up doing the same. I'm still waiting for an AI Ulm to vassalize large chunks of the HRE and become emperor.

The only Paradox game I've played is Stellaris, which has god-awful AI. Looks like it uses the Clausewitz engine, so perhaps that's the reason. But the AI empires are terrible at balancing their economies, and it doesn't take long for the player to completely outstrip them, even when giving the AIs advanced starts and bonuses. And then the military AI isn't very good, to the point that when it is outmatched by a stronger opponent, it basically sits and waits to be slaughtered.

The only remote challenge comes in the form of the endgame 'crisis' which is basically an empire that appears late in the game with huge armies and has no economy, just scripted reinforcements and possibly some scripted counters from other special AI entities. None of the regular AI empires will have advanced enough to even think about fighting it, so it mostly serves as a check to see if the player has played efficiently enough to that point to stop the threat, and marks a good point to end your game once you have.

The scripted events make for a somewhat interesting game, but if they could provide an AI that actually made the universe feel like a competition in the early and mid game, and like the other empires were a factor in the end game, it would bring the game to another whole level for me. Of course, they'd probably have to fix their general game balance as well, which an a whole other issue.

I'm not much of a chess player, but one thing I've wondered is whether the games against Chess AIs are interesting for good players. Do they feel exciting as though you were playing against a similarly skilled human player? And can you distinguish between an AI and a similarly skilled player very easily?

The thing with Chess (or Go) is that unless you've a club in your area or a skilled relative, you're playing alone against an AI or playing online.

It's of course much more exciting to play against skilled human players. In particular your parents or your childhood friends while growing up. But unless you're living in some large city you might not find many other offline options after you start beating all of them.

That leaves you with a choice between going "pro" to some degree or another, playing online against other people, and playing against an AI (online or not). I'm honestly at a loss to give you an unbiased view of which is most interesting, since I've seldom found the time to play Chess in the past decade or two. What I do know though is that no bot gives you good social interactions.

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