Borg AI Balancing

[Tryptic]

posted on December 15th, 2015, 2:52 pm

Last edited by Tryptic on December 16th, 2015, 2:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hey guys, I've run across an interesting problem while working on Tryptic's Mod. In AI vs AI games, the Borg AI has a significant advantage which is hard to negate. This isn't due to the strength of the Borg race being higher, or even their ship production. It's because the other AIs are too stupid to fight against big ships. They just fly their ships around randomly and attack multiple targets, and as a result they very rarely destroy the larger Borg vessels. In my 1v1 scenarios, the Borg wins every time.

The thing is, human players don't act this way. They focus fire and they know how to gauge their fleet size for the situation. So if I balance the Borg AI to be even against other races' AI, it will be weaker against humans than the other races. If I make it balanced against humans, it will be stronger vs other AI.

I've discovered a partial solution to this problem that I will be implementing in the future, but that's going to take a long time to complete. For this next release of Tryptic's Mod, I need to know what you guys prefer: Should I let the Borg AI be overpowered vs other AIs in order to be more fun for humans? Or should I let it be underpowered for humans who know what they're doing?

Or alternately, I could just make it a beast that produces tons of ships, for those group games against the AI that some people like. This would kinda break games against Random AI opponents since you might get Borg, but perhaps people are choosing their AI opponents most of the time anyway. Let me know what you guys think.

NOTE: this only applies to 1v1 AI games, it seems. In larger games, the number of ships on the field means that Borg ships die more normally.

posted on December 15th, 2015, 9:03 pm

hi
leave borg op, i thing in ai 1v1 it doesnt matter, and we may have more fun with it....

actualy bouth 2nd and 3th option if posible , i mean in pool table above : 2nd, and 3th.

make 2 separate releases like version A and B.

and forget the 1st choice....

posted on December 16th, 2015, 11:31 pm

hi
actualy bouth 2nd and 3th option if posible , i mean in pool table above : 2nd, and 3th.

make 2 separate releases like version A and B.

and forget the 1st choice....

Coming from a complete ignorance of how the AI works, would it be possible to add a fourth AI option? So the 'second choice' would be "AI: Merciless" and the 'ship producing beast mode' would be "AI:Undefeatable" or something like that.

posted on December 17th, 2015, 2:41 am

I'm afraid not. The AI uses the exact same file no matter what difficulty it is on. The difference is build cost and build time modifiers that the harder AIs get. Basically Hard and Merciless AI will never run out of resources so their ships are effectively free, while Medium AI can possibly run out because it's so bad at mining and Easy will be strangled by lack of resources shortly after starting.

I recommend always playing on Hard or Merciless and using the AI Build Time Handicap slider in the advanced menu to tune the difficulty of your opponent.

Now, I was going to share this on Friday but just a few days ago I figured out how to create multiple AI behaviors. It is possible to create an AI that randomly selects between several different behaviors at the beginning of the game. It is even possible to allow the Map Editor to determine which AI is used on that map. This is a very long and complicated process, so for the next version of Tryptic's Mod I'm going to just stick to one AI per race, but in the future I'm thinking I might release some different AI versions. So it seems I'm not done with the mod after all

posted on December 17th, 2015, 10:31 am

Please continuous ship building without node. Very slow create fleet.