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Artificial Intelligence: And the lack thereof.
centersolace
Member Posts: 11,178 Arc User
Todays question of the day, is: Why are the enemies so dumb?
I know artificial intelligence is the hardest thing to program, and making it good is even harder. But right now, the enemies have a very small behavior pool to choose from, and as such feel rather samey. Even small, subtle differences between enemy races, types, and classes would go a long way to adding variety to the game.
For example: Why can't Jem'hadar bugs attempt to ram me in order to scare the bajeezus out of me, or upon sensing their impending doom? Why can't there be a special Orion ship that attempts to attack you at the speed of light then blows up if it fails to kill you? How come ships can't retreat when they feel out gunned? Certainly shouldn't happen all the time, but would be nice to be the one watching them run once and a while.
Why aren't groups of BoP's lining up on a singly shield, unloading on it, and then firing torps when the shield falls? Why don't all higher level enemies do that? Timing torps right is one of the first things you learn in the game.
Things like that would be awesome, and would add variety, difficulty, immersion, and awesomeness to a game that needs it. Sure it's a long time goal, but should definitely be one to be considered.
I know artificial intelligence is the hardest thing to program, and making it good is even harder. But right now, the enemies have a very small behavior pool to choose from, and as such feel rather samey. Even small, subtle differences between enemy races, types, and classes would go a long way to adding variety to the game.
For example: Why can't Jem'hadar bugs attempt to ram me in order to scare the bajeezus out of me, or upon sensing their impending doom? Why can't there be a special Orion ship that attempts to attack you at the speed of light then blows up if it fails to kill you? How come ships can't retreat when they feel out gunned? Certainly shouldn't happen all the time, but would be nice to be the one watching them run once and a while.
Why aren't groups of BoP's lining up on a singly shield, unloading on it, and then firing torps when the shield falls? Why don't all higher level enemies do that? Timing torps right is one of the first things you learn in the game.Things like that would be awesome, and would add variety, difficulty, immersion, and awesomeness to a game that needs it. Sure it's a long time goal, but should definitely be one to be considered.
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Of course, normal should still be 'easy mode' for those who'd want it, but elite should truly make someone sweat and work at it. Make us NEED a tank, make us NEED a healer, make us NEED sustained DPS, not just burst DPS to kill everything as quickly as possible.
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ANS: Because its a CRYPTIC Game, nuff said
CRYPTIC's idea of a SMART enemy is increasing its hit points to a Gazillion HP, while tossing you an invisble torp from hell that does 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% Damage.
Seriously, you would think they would take a page from games like FEAR, where the enemies adapt to your gameplay style and tries to out flank you or out smart you, but nooooooo - We get the Elite Borg Drone from HELL that shoots you with a single glob of energy that does 9,000 points of damage.
"It's over 9,000 THOUSAND !!!!" - Breaks the scout reader
Damage Sponges and OHKO's aren't necessarily bad, it's just their seems to be nothing but DS's and OHKO's. Why can't their be things that take your weapons, or individual weapons offline, and knockbacks and the like.
Also, Cryptic needs to take into account different player types when designing baddies.With the Jem'Hadar trying to ram you example, that wouldn't really be that effective against escorts and other smaller maneuverable ships, but for a Cruiser, that would be terrifying. Conversely, an enemy dedicated to roots, holds, or placates would barely effect a Cruiser captain, but would spell utter doom for an escort.
That sort of thing doesn't really exist in this game.
You want smarter enemies? PvP is your best bet.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
That may be all well and good, but I prefer not to fight things that insult my mother. :P
Terminator II and the whole "machines taking over the world!!!111" always made me laugh watching windows spam one blue screen after another.
In the end I am just glad I usually never crash in sto at all.
I don't think there ever will be even marginal solid AI - anywhere.
A friend told me about a fps'er where they had bots try to mimic behaviour, one would stalk you, another would try to camp but no matter how many types you program they will always be completely transparent.
To me it's basically a compliment to human cognition, showing you might be able to calcuate fast but well there is something else there too.
To build an AI that would be able to compete even on a small level, it would have to be self-aware and able to change its own program in 1/400 second.
Anyway it's a real interesting topic and some games have attempted to exceed "trial and error" gameplay in what they call dynamic gameplay if you ever played l4d or swat 4, where the npcs would not only change their tactics everytime you loaded the map but would also change depending on what you did.
It works a little but only as far as it just takes you longer to figure out the set paths.
To create an actual AI would be quite brilliant actually, we talking nobel prize or whatever
Come to think of it, I haven't seen any enemies utilize evasive maneuvers well as of recent. Mogais used to fly off incredibly fast when they use it. I don't see them do that anymore.
And since we're fighting enemy ships in asteroid fields all the time, why not have them use the asteroids for cover? They 'sometimes' do it out of pure coincidence, but not often enough.
you forgot the .99% there.
99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999.99%<---see that's correct.
I'm not saying anything that advanced. :P I just want some random events and simple behavioral mechanics to liven up the combat a bit. If your game is going to be about killing things, you might as well make it interesting. :P
Let's open it up a bit, what sort of actions/behaviors would you like to see enemies being capable of?
Looks like somebody forgot how they were Pre S6. Nary a shield rotation to be seen.
Also, everyone had a fit over the D'deridex Defenders that had a hull regen power.
A Mogai escort lobs off a few torpedoes and then pops off either an Attack Pattern Alpha or Emergency power to engines or some such.
I would love to come up on a Mogai and have the thing unexpectedly target my weapon systems, while sending over boarding parties.
You get what I'm saying. Every Romulan thinks the same and uses the exact same tactics, as does every other enemy. Make varients. Force me to guess what my adversary is going to throw at me and make me adapt.
But the idea of enemy ships timing their torpedo onslaughts, retreating when heavily damaged and (I wished this had happened a long time ago) RAMMING YOU ala Odessey style. Very very good ideas as well. Here's to hoping.
"An artist's growth depends upon accurate feedback." ~Data
I do remember, I was overjoyed when enemies gained the ability to use their console powers. But with this, i'm just asking for a little more.
Oh yes, a very good idea! And one I forgot to put in the OP. I was thinking of something similar. I also think it would be cool to see enemies with different weapon load outs, like seeing a BoP with Harg'peghs or however you spell it (Too lazy to go to the wiki, it's 1:00 a.m. shut your face) rather than having the same weapons all the time.
Because there was no training or precident for that. You run the whole game with the only thing you know being 'keep shooting till the shooting stops,' that works forever, then suddenly it doesn't, thats all rather confusing. That glitch is why I started coming to the boards, because my four beam arrays couldn't kill that thing and I didn't know what else I was even capable of doing. If they jacked up the AI, they might need to do things like have a genuinely useful tutorial, have power descriptions that explain what they truly do and when and how to use them, actually send people through Starfleet Academy as it were. And if enemies started running stuff like chained tac-team or EPTS, how's a solo player supposed to overcome that if a player doesn't even know they CAN stack their attack buffs, that chaining is even possible, or hasn't yet unlocked FOMM or SNB? And god help them if they're an engineer.
A lot of the game would have to be significantly altered if the enemies started being smarter. New tutorials, tweaked leveling structure, mission redesigns, and so on. Plus powers would need to be adjusted or else more abilities would become completely useless. Look at pointless most kinetic weapons have become now that the AI rebalances its shields 5 times a second. Without adjustments, the learning curve to do much of anything would get steeper and require out-of-game resources to advance. Not exactly new/casual-player-friendly. Not that its great now, but people can at least pick it up and mostly entertain themselves with minimal understanding.
Note:
Not DEFENDING the HP sponges full of annoyance-attacks and OHKOs, but pointing out that any upgrades would require more than just AI enhancements to not simply trade one irritation for another.
Pretty much this^^^
Did a few elites last night, the first ones since S7 update. My build has not changed, yet spheres were one shotting me through 100% Hull and Shields!! :eek: :rolleyes:
Even my friends in there Odyies were getting the same treatment.....
That takes no skill on the devs part and cannot be defended against by the player, which renders elite stfs worthless. I wont be doing anymore until they are fixed.....
Answer: Because many players are just as dumb.
When's the last time you ran a PUG STF? Watched a rainbow boat try to do... anything, in a Borg Red Alert? Played in a PvP match against anything other than a pre-made of experienced players?
This is a F2P MMO, and one without a strong end-game progression at that. Those factors will tend to attract players that don't spend every waking moment min-maxing their builds. Add in the high cost of respeccing, and they're even less encouraged to experiment and fine-tune their strategies, equipment and skills.
Have you see the complaints on the PvE forum lately about the Borg "upgrades" that came with S7? As far as I've been able to tell, the only thing that changed was firing arcs and their Kinetic Cutting Beam (I think it lasts longer is all - not totally sure, though). Despite those being the only changes, there are players crying that it's the end of the world.
To address one point from the original post, though... Jem'Hadar WILL suicide-ram you. It doesn't seem to happen very frequently, but I've had it happen to me personally. And while it was a pretty neat "Oh TRIBBLE!" moment, I could see players getting extremely ticked if they ALL tried it. After all, there's no real counter other than firing Brace For Impact and praying their crazy NPC damage scaling doesn't obliterate you.
For starters you missed the point of this entire thread, since the OP is referring to game mechanics over the stupidity of players. I do agree with you in regards to the "noobs" that play this game, and if they were to improve the AI, rest assure many of them would disappear or be forced to get educated.
Regarding Jem'Hadar suicide tactics, I've never experienced it - but then again they tend to die by my hands faster than a poor man going through his lottery winnings. If the tactic does exist, it will be neat to see.
You sir, are the first to encounter this
Any who. Are you telling me there's NO npc's that use ANY different tactics/abilities? IE: During raids (or fleet actions here), there are no 'boss' style ships/add style NPC's that require certain tactics from a group of players to defeat? There's no team-work required to beat these 'end game' missions? Is every baddie in the game just a bunch of hit points and phasers?
You nailed it - same snake different skin, thats all
Miranda vs an armada of KDF cruisers & dreadnoughts - Guess who comes out on top?
Improvements are purely cosmetic, with the occasional bone tossed in there for good measure, mainly in the form of a new Grindfest area, or lockbox OP vessel or something of the sort.
/siskofacepalm.
Sad.
Ground Combat: The ground combat is pretty much run up to mob, sit there button bashing your phasers and whatever kit toys you have and the first one to loose all their health loses. Not saying the Ground combat and the AI for it needs to be revamped to like call of duty standards or anything, but some simple "duck and cover" (both for player and mob) would go a really long way to actually make the ground combat worth doing and enjoyable.
Space Combat: We have ramming speed for an ability, we've seen Jem'hedar do a kamikaze run into a galaxy class ship in DS9. Klingons love to cloak get the shot lined up just right and then decloak and start letting loose all weapons, where is that tactic? And I'm sorry but the Borg are these big bad guys that have the ability to adapt pretty quickly in about every aspect, so why are Borg cubes still pretty much just sitting there letting you pound on them while they shoot you? There's also 3 basic ship interiors, where are the borg beaming onto your ship and you having to switch to bridge view after a battle here and there to repel borg intruders? For the ships that only have a bridge they could just beam onto just the bridge.
that's the kind of dynamic AI that really needs to be looked at more so then just giving enemies the ability to use boff abilities.
Ahem. May I direct you to PvP, especially Ker'rat? I assure you, you'll come across at least one BoP that will ambush you and attempt to overwhelm a shield facing and chew on the hull. Probably while you're trying to farm the Borg NPCs for item drops.
You want a challenge? Do PvP. Go to Ker'rat. Get into the queues, public or private. There isn't an NPC program in existence that can do better than a human at the helm, especially if that human knows what they're doing.
Otherwise, get used to hull-munching NPCs and dull-witted, predictable behavior from said NPCs.
I'm sorry, but do you really want to face something like that?
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swarm-how-the-berkeley-overmind-won-the-2010-starcraft-ai-competition/
STO has enough players who are overwhelmed by the Plasma Torpspread and Tractor beam from the Deridex. And you want a better A.I.?
Read this. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swarm-how-the-berkeley-overmind-won-the-2010-starcraft-ai-competition/
STO is a much more simple game than Starcraft. A team of 5 AI's build for STO would annihilate 100% of all PVP premade teams. Because compared to a SC Pro'Gamer even members from Sad Pantas, TSI etc are amateurs ;-)
I think no ones want something like that in STO xD But I would love to have more NSC who use Boff Powers like the Deridex.
A Tac Cube with Tac Team, TSS, EPTS would be harder but not more fun. BUT a Tac Cube with Tractor Beam followed by BO1 and HY 1 would be very interesting xD Or spheres who know how to proper use Evasive Maneuver and Eject Warp plasma. Or probes in KASE with TBR
Or random spawns in KASE instead of probes who don't shoot back. Switch between a probe and Borg Negh'Var/BoP/Vesta, spheres etc xD
And more complex scripts means more possibility's for bugs. And finding/fixing bugs gets more time consuming.
Perhaps we should try to get a question about improving NSC behavior in the next Ask Cryptic.
Give an NPC the attributes (hull,shields,skills) you want.
Give an NPC the rules, when to use it and on whom.
etc.
I think this could be a great addition. Seems like I remember a few episodes where an out gunned enemy retreated only to return with a fleet of baddies.