What AI Support Will There Be For Long Games?

[CheshireGray]

I reinstalled AVWW yesterday, and played through a few games of it, (I play it as though it's a roguelike, if I die, I lose and create a new world.) and I got to thinking about AIW2, and a question came up in my mind;

How well will the AI be able to learn from player behavior and it's failed attacks, especially as time goes on?

Personally, I am a huge fan of long games, massive attacks, huge waves and enormous sieges, etc. I have a save I boot up on AIWC every once in a while which is currently on hour 150 or so, max galaxy size, increased unit caps, etc. I am hoping AIW2 will allow for unusually long games like this, but I also hope the AI will try different tactics over time as it realizes things aren't working. It'd be much more immersive.

[yasawatse]

I'm all for an AI that PUNISHES EVERY MISTAKE and or questionable choice... but its not a simple matter to code am emergent learning AI. stretch goal?

[BadgerBadger]

One thing that could be done is to for each wave the AI sends, have the AI analyze your defenses to get a sense of what kind of ships will do the most damage, then send those ships. For example, if you have a lot of defenses that are good against Capital Ships/golems but not as many to target swarming ships, then it will send lots of small ships. If the AI can do things like that then it will be adapting to your defenses and trying new strategies as your defense changes. However, it won't require anything fancy.

From an implementation point of view, the "defense analyzer" could consist of calculating "Number of weapon systems * counter_type * shot_speed" of turrets/ships on the target planet for each counter_type in KDL_VanillaWeaponTypes.xml, then use that as a weight when selecting ships for the next wave (this would complicate the simple logic currently in KDL_AITypes.xml).

I'm not sure how the AI currently chooses the target for a wave, but that code could also be tuned to select weak planets.