Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it's not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision tree based AI? Are any under development? I know AI can be resource intensive, but it seems that at least turn based games could employ it.

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[–] Maalus@lemmy.world -5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

APM actually does jack shit. You can spam a button fast and you'll get 400 APM and get rolled by someone who does 40. EAPM is where it is at. Which is effective APM. How many actions you can do that move you closer to victory. Instead of just spamming two buttons on repeat (which is what a lot of Starcraft players do)

There used to be AI's integrated into Starcraft 2 and later actually playing the game (like a player would) online. You can put restrictions on eAPM for these bots. You can force them to make human mistakes - delaying upgrades. They can get pretty well aproximated to human skill. The main issue with it is they suck at context. They can't really "remember" stuff happening. Picked up a dropship and it flew away from my FOV? It's gone. Oh shit a dropship came from the exact same spot! Oh good it flew away, which means it can't hurt me no more.

There are also tournaments in SC2 for unlimited AIs - where they play the game without any caps. The only thing that matters is who wrote a more efficient bot. Machine learning isn't reallly used there, more likely a decision tree. Those do exactly what you are describing. Playing against those as a human is pointless and would get someone who introduced them as a difficulty instantly fired.

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Makes sense. But it seems pedantic to make the distinction between APM and EAPM.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

This is reddit. Gotta ignore someone's post to make a pointless correction that they already addressed but much more aggressively.

The alternative is, Erastil forbid, a conversation.