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Difficult AI Players?

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  • #1

    Difficult AI Players?

    I've been eyeing up SMAC for a bit now, but have a concern that the AI players might be pushovers, or at the very least, predictable and simple.

    I suppose I am looking forward to playing the game for a long time to come always knowing that I will face a challenge (sometimes too difficult of one!) when playing against the computer players.

    Does SMAC support this type of hope?

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  • #2
    I guess that depends on how avid a player you are. At some levels of the game the AI is pretty inept in order to give new players a shot. As for me, I'm definitely am not the best SMAC player and haven't been able to play at the higher levels, but my experience has been that the AI is better at some things than others. One thing that seems to come up a lot is that the AI is weak in the areas of unit design and certain tactical situations. If you're, you can always tweak the AI a bit to make the game more challenging if you want.
    "Beauty is not in the face...Beauty is a light in the heart." - Kahlil Gibran
    "The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves" - Victor Hugo
    "It is noble to be good; it is still nobler to teach others to be good -- and less trouble." - Mark Twain

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    • #3
      The AI is very bad. You can tweak the files, but that will not really solve the problem. It's true that you will lose more often in certain situations because the AI will be able to produce so much more than you, but in most cases you will still win simply because the programing is not as good as you would like it to be.

      The programmers have done some good things with the AI. For example, the AI will analyze your forces and produce units that will do well against your units, but over all the AI can not think humanlike and does not know things that it needs to know to play like a human.

      Yang is the best AI of the original 7 factions. He can produce a large military plus terraform and use supply crawlers. Santiago can beat you because she likes to send large waves at you and her troops are tough, but she really can't win the game because she never builds infrastructure or terraforms. Miriam can win if she gets her momentum style going. If she wins it will be in the first 100 years. The wimps can not win. They just wait to be conquered. Well, Lal sometimes does well, but only in a blue moon.

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      • #4
        Concensus is that toggling accelerated start makes for a more competitive AI (every faction gets an SP, and starts with a handful of bases)

        Kinjiru's Static Gambit is also worth considering (either from 2101, or after an accelerated start, just hit turn complete 30 to 50 times, then climb out of these depths against a vastly superior six factions.

        I'm in the middle of just such a game (note, if you do it in accelerated start you'll need to play the first turn 'cos you have absolutely no workers allocated to anything, and your bases might disband for want of mutrients)

        If you set your forum browse window to the last year, there are some great threads about how to tweak the .txt to get a more competitive AI. And the generally accepted best mod is known as SNAC, from Shining1.

        Alexander also produced some neat stuff.

        The best, of course, is multiplayer by e-mail or shared drive (try xdrive.com) with other real intelligence. Slower, but a lot of fun.

        Googlie

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