THUD: Relic, like all PC gaming companies DOES NOT think AI is important. This will change, however, when the industry "gets it" like its gotten it with graphics and physics these many years. Hell.. someday gameplay might actually figure in more prominently too.
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Our beloved Thudmeizer is both right and wrong, here.
He is right when he says that PC gaming companies DO NOT think that AI is important.
I have been playing Supreme Commander for a couple of days in Skirmish Mode. I thought that the Dark Crusade Plain Vanilla AI was some of the saddest AI that had ever seen, but the Supreme Commander AI is really horrible, some of the worst AI I have seen in a long time.
With Relic and Dark Crusade, you got lots of little pesky flaws, and a couple of huge flaws that bordered on gamebreaking.
But, with SupCom, you have AI allies that pump out lots of troops and buildings, but stop exploring once their distant builders are gone. In SupCom, you can see lots of instances where the AI stops tiering up or teching up as they call it. But worst of all, your AI ally will often build lots of troops and bots and tanks and stuff, and then just stand them in a line in their base for the whole game, and they never move again. They just stand there doing nothing while your bases are overrun and they just keep on standing. In fact, in my last game, the AI ally produced a handful of air units, lost them, and never produced any more, or none that I ever saw. I thought the DC AI was bad, but the SupCom AI has some HUGE gamebreaking flaws -- an AI that often just stands there and never moves for a whole two hours. Ugh!!
And, over at SupCom there's no ArkhanTheGreat and no Oddball Fanatical Thudmeizer there to make sure that the AI is going to be good someday a year from now. Relic has no idea how lucky they are that Thud and Arkhan chose to put their efforts and time into their game.
Thud is dead 'wrong' when he says, "This will change, however, when the industry "gets it" like its gotten it with graphics and physics these many years."
They are NOT going to get it ever, when it comes to the AI -- the trends just aren't going that way! Every RTS game that comes out the past couple of years seems to have a worse AI than the RTS before it. WA was worse than DoW, and DC was worse than WA, and SupCom is worse than DC, and that's the trend. And, there's lots of complaints about the SupCom campaign too, no depth. In fact, the way it's going now, in a few years, the 'industry' will be releasing games that have NO AI and no campaign and NO skirmish mode. They will expect you to play their RTS games online against other humans in order to experience 'intelligence' from the game. That's the way it seems to be going for real, if any of my recent observations have any merit or accuracy whatsoever. At some point, most games released won't even have an AI to speak of -- they will all be meant to be played online, and I suppose the vast majority of the gameplayers won't even complain about it when it happens.
I'm beginning to think that offline Skirmish Mode gameplayers who love a great AI and who actually play against the AI are a dying breed. We are dinosaurs, a dying race, who will probably someday go extinct. I tell you, it's getting to the point already where I find myself thinking that I'm just going to stop buying computer games and stop playing them altogether. As the AI gets worse and worse in each of these games that comes out, there's no more strategy in RTS to be found from offline Skirmish Mode gameplay. Only if Thud and Arkhan were to show up at the SupCom forums and throw their weight behind the AI there do I have any real hope that the SupCom AI is ever going to be any good in that game -- most of the players are already playing SupCom online, as that appears to be the only place where the gameplay is really good right now in that game. And, I have no desire to play a multiplayer online game, ever. It just doesn't interest me.
Oh well, gotta get off my soapbox, not that anyone cares what I have to say anyway!
