A Look At the AI of Empire: Total War and F.E.A.R. 2

mr_sifter writes "The newly released Empire: Total War and F.E.A.R. 2 have both been praised for their excellent AI. In this feature, Bit-Tech talks to the developers behind these games about how they handled the challenges of creating Empire's armies of thousands of AI soldiers and F.E.A.R. 2's aggressive teams of military operatives. The discussion also talks about how game AI is 'smoke and mirrors' compared to research AI, and looks at the difficulty of improving the quality of game AI." We talked about F.E.A.R. 2's engine and AI back in December as well.

Comments

A human like AI...

[RuBLed]

it gives you the impression that itâ(TM)s a real human character wanting to kill you and survive...

I would revel at the day when the AI is more human like which would tremble upon sighting my avatar, run to the ends of the map at the sound of my bullets, curse me, and log out.

No AI in ETW

[mseeger]

Hi,
i love the Total War Series. But the AI in ETW is a complete disappointment. I see no enhancement compared to MTW2. The opposite is true, there are so many AI bugs that battles agains the AI are close to pointless. I slaughtered enemys at the border of the battlefield, standing with theit back towards me. I micromanage my own units because grouping tends to produce strange results. Due to this, battles are a lot more point&click-work currently. I'm waiting for a patch :-(.
Sincerely yours, Martin

Re:No AI in ETW

[mike2R]

But the AI in ETW is a complete disappointment. I see no enhancement compared to MTW2. The opposite is true, there are so many AI bugs that battles agains the AI are close to pointless.

You know I don't think it's as bad as you make out. Sure I agree that it does do stupid things and I'm sure it will be better after a patch or two, but in the right situation (and really this is most battles I've played) it seems capable of good solid play. The problems I've seen tend to be where it tries to do something clever (like split its forces) and ends up weakening its position, but it hasn't happened very often and certainly isn't game breaking.

I dunno, I guess I tend to be a glass-half-full type of player when it comes to AI - I don't expect miracles and I'm willing to accept that there will be situations where it does something stupid. People who listen to computer game publishers' marketing and judge the AI against human intelligence are always going to be doomed to disappointment, but I'm happy enough with the Empire AI at the moment, in comparison with other games I've played.

Fear 2's AI sucked.

[n1hilist]

The AI in Fear 2 was terrible! Well, if it was good, I didn't notice because it was so god damned easy to play that it was more a case of "Hi, *slomo* bye." .. firefights were so short that if there was amazing AI under the hood, I completely missed it.

On the parts where I didn't use slowmo, again, nothing remarkable, and I'm not exactly an amazing FPS player either.

Re:Realistic AI, yay!

[Crumplecorn]

I've always thought that a never ending march towards smarter AI would go something like this:

The Past:
No real AI. Enemies know where you are at all times, and simply make a beeline for you. To the player, the enemies seems to always know where you are and make a beeline for you.

The Present:
The enemies are no longer allowed to know where you are. Instead, simple AI makes basic decisions about how to act when you walk right in front of it. To the player, the enemies seem stupid.

The Future:
The AI now has advanced heuristics which allow it to take prompts from the environment and knowledge of your probable goals to judge your probable location by using 50% of your CPU power, and use advanced physics engines and inverse kinematics to take a realistic route to get to you, using the other 50% of your CPU power. To the player, the enemies seems to always know where you are and make a beeline for you.