In this topic I'm going to elaborate my sincere recommendation on implementing an atwar AI. Hope you enjoy!
What do I mean by AI?
Artificial Intelligence forms a crucial part of strategy games, it's enough to think about Total War saga, Civilization series, or any Paradox Interactive games (...) and the list goes on. The core idea here is to add a robot that can play like a player and you can interact with them like if they were real players (send alliance, declare war or peace, etc.). I guess I don't have to go further into this.
Would it be useful at all?
First of all, this is a great opportunity to create a tutorial bot for new players, or a more advanced bot for tougher studying of game mechanisms. On the other hand, the gameplay will become much more colorful because, for instance, you'd be able to fill a 40 player game, even when there is only 13 players in the room (the rest 27 would be AI then).
This thing can be pushed insanely high, actually
By making an AI we basically open up a gate to host 200 player games with 180 AI, which easily allows us to play every country on world map without any neutrals, which is indeed chaotic, but it would be immerse and fun (if the engine could handle it).
Is it beneficial/helpful in the current state of the game?
It would be extremely helpful obviously, just think about scenario games for a second. Have you ever waited 2 hours on 16/18 scenario map and when you finally filled, someone lost connection or trolled the game and you had to remake the whole party? AI is critically beneficial at this point: imagine if you could start the game at 16/18 by ease, since the 2 remaining sides are controlled by the AI, so do the countries that are left over by players.
"Yes, but this is too complicated"
No, it's not. Like I mentioned before, rewise your experiences of other strategy games. Can you mention 3 without an AI, excluding atwar? (I personally can't) It may sound impossible or very complex, I know right. However, many greater games have done it so when Dave is done with cleaning up the code, it's a green way stuff in my opinion.
"It's too hard to make it work"
This is just false. If you are reading this with an IT job or proper IT skills, you most probably know that calling this project impossible is pure nonsense. The AI has to know the basic controls of the game, it must be able to locate cities and enemy units, enemies themselves as well, allies and peace relations, then it should also exploit well the strategy it has "chosen", it must have a manage function to locate its own units as well, reinforce and use money occasionally, therefore it will need a lot of randoms and settings, on top of that it requires to follow the game rules and its goal, react to players' diplomacy accordingly too, and last but not least, adaptability to the map's extraordinary situations. (this could be a 80 page long documentation including calculus, weighting, pipelines and machine learning, which i won't explain to the naysayers right now, please forgive me)
I'm looking forward to your opinions on this one, since it's really important feature and could potentially make the game much better and most importantly, up-to-date (in my point of view).
This is not a new idea... building an AI has been on my list for 2 years already. However I do believe having an AI play mode would be important for atWar.
I can build the AI, that's not even the hard part. The hard part is figuring out how to integrate the damn thing within atWar's code. It's a puzzle I haven't had the time or mental energy to tackle yet, but someday I will.
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All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer,
but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
--Sun Tzu