Black & White 2
Feb. 23rd, 2006 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dryfterBlack & White 2 initially attracted me, as it appeared to have the elements of the early Settlers-type games.. ie. you lay out elements of a town, and autonomous people go about their lives building and living within it. B&W pushes itself as having strong AI, for the people and your giant creature that wanders the land doing your bidding when it feels like it.
The AI for the creature does seem passable, but the AI for your settlers is rather poor. They can complain that they are starving, yet have loads of fields full of crops that are just crying out to be harvested. However, their AI is of genius levels compared to the enemy AI.
Christ.. could it be any worse? It's almost embarrassing playing against it. It's like putting an experienced {Go,Poker,Chess} player up against a six year old who just had the rules rapidly explained to them 5 minutes ago. No, I take that back. It's worse - at least a six year old would learn.
An example: The enemy sends out groups of soldiers to attack you. It always seems to send these out towards your main city, which you've learnt to leave well defended. The enemy ignores other towns you capture or create. In one scenario I captured a town that was sitting next door to the enemy capital city. Not only did the enemy not send out reinforcements to defend the town, but after I captured it, the enemy was sending soldiers *past it* on the way to my capital. Some hurriedly built battlements and a retinue of my archers later, and those soldiers would happily walk along the outside of the wall under the rain of arrows.
OK, so I realise that it's a bit much to expect the enemy AI to realise that I've created a road of death, but surely it wasn't too much to expect the AI to have tried re-taking the town when I first captured it, instead of continuuing to march straight past it en route to my capital. (Where it always camped the solders in the same spots, and of course I'd placed towers full of archers next to those spots..)
*sigh*
Now, F.E.A.R., that had good enemy AI. It can be done. (And I'd guess that writing AI for a FPS is harder than for a RTS strategy game. Squid?)
The AI for the creature does seem passable, but the AI for your settlers is rather poor. They can complain that they are starving, yet have loads of fields full of crops that are just crying out to be harvested. However, their AI is of genius levels compared to the enemy AI.
Christ.. could it be any worse? It's almost embarrassing playing against it. It's like putting an experienced {Go,Poker,Chess} player up against a six year old who just had the rules rapidly explained to them 5 minutes ago. No, I take that back. It's worse - at least a six year old would learn.
An example: The enemy sends out groups of soldiers to attack you. It always seems to send these out towards your main city, which you've learnt to leave well defended. The enemy ignores other towns you capture or create. In one scenario I captured a town that was sitting next door to the enemy capital city. Not only did the enemy not send out reinforcements to defend the town, but after I captured it, the enemy was sending soldiers *past it* on the way to my capital. Some hurriedly built battlements and a retinue of my archers later, and those soldiers would happily walk along the outside of the wall under the rain of arrows.
OK, so I realise that it's a bit much to expect the enemy AI to realise that I've created a road of death, but surely it wasn't too much to expect the AI to have tried re-taking the town when I first captured it, instead of continuuing to march straight past it en route to my capital. (Where it always camped the solders in the same spots, and of course I'd placed towers full of archers next to those spots..)
*sigh*
Now, F.E.A.R., that had good enemy AI. It can be done. (And I'd guess that writing AI for a FPS is harder than for a RTS strategy game. Squid?)
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 04:43 pm (UTC)*Wags finger*. Told you so!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 04:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 04:49 pm (UTC)None of which excuses crap RTS AI, especially in a game that sells itself on its AI.
Which of course serves you right for giving money to Leinfellner - I'm sure I have warned you about that in the past.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 04:53 pm (UTC)Yes, but after where BlueByte went with Settlers V, I had hopes, and a friend mentioned BW2 was fun.
Meh.. When's Oblivion coming out already?
And Crysis looks cool, but is ETA december.
Crap weather prevents me from exercising my other hobbies, but if I stay indoors this much I'll end up signing up to a MMORPG by accident if I'm not careful. Must..resist..
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 04:58 pm (UTC)Oh, and never trust that friend again.
It might be worth shooting them now.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:02 pm (UTC)Dates are being bandied about between March 20 and March 26; someone on oblivionites said March 28 last week.
In any case, we're looking at about a month from now. Which is why I'm so primed to do these upgrades... an FX-6600 is calling my name, solely for playing Oblivion. (Well, the speed increase in Doom3 will be nice, too.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:06 pm (UTC)Next year...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:49 pm (UTC)Oh, no.. hmm.. got a URL for the beta?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:55 pm (UTC)No idea if they're still taking applications though. Worth a try I guess.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-26 05:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:03 pm (UTC)Thinking about it now, I'm guessing that the main differences are:
* RTS AI needs to look further ahead into the future, and has more variables to consider.
* RTS games have lots of units moving around, vs one in FPS.
But on the other hand, the FPS AI has to be able to react very quickly, a lot happens in a short time, and it has to make guesses (eg. "i heard gunshots from over there, but which window did they come through?" or "should we go and investigate, or hide and try to ambush the player?"). Whereas a RTS AI has more concentrete information to work with.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:24 pm (UTC)If you think about how you think about AI, then deliberately work it all out in such detail that a Von Neumann machine can understand it...
Then realise that your inital thoughts were probably only about 10-30% of the actual number of things you ened to consider :*)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 05:00 pm (UTC)Not really, though I can see a few scenarios where you could really up the complexity of an FPS' AI to get close.
The oversimplified explanation: lots more potential states in an RTS. In an FPS, your monsters are going to do the usual: stand, guard, patrol, hunt, and you have to figure out when to switch between them (if at all). In even the simplest RTS, which B&W certainly isn't, there are lots of folks doing things that have nothing to do with combat-- e.g., harvesting that grain. HarvestGrain is a different state, and requires different AI. Sure, you can abstract everything-- but the more you abstract, the more generic your AI ends up looking. (This is the main beef I have-- to this day-- with Knights and Merchants. Which doesn't stop me from still playing it obsessively.)
From the sound of it-- not having played B&W, just reading your description-- it sounds like someone may have flipped a switch somewhere-- probably in a single line of code-- that confused two different AI states, one of which moves defensively, the other of which moves in a direct line (the latter of which, of course, would not be a combat routine, for that very reason).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-23 10:18 pm (UTC)