12. Artificial Intelligence

General requirements

  • Three difficulty level: easy, normal, challenging
  • Moderate thinking time
  • Include elements of chance, but also predictable
  • Some central switches: peacefulness, ruthlessness (diplomacy), special affections (technology, navy, …)
  • Memorize past actions during a game (maybe also between games but then can be turned off)
  • Should communicate reasons for its actions

Minor Nations should

  • act defensively (never wage war, not even on other minor nations)
  • sell resources and buy consumer goods

12.1. Requirements

  • Should have optional a personal flavor for each grand nation, definable by some sort of sliders (peacefulness, greediness, …)
  • Should have aims/goals like assimilation in X years, war in Y years and act according to these goals but also redefine them from time to time
  • free parameters not determined by the goals are maximized for certain general criteria (money, military, industry)
  • Military AI: takes roles (defender, attacker) but never defends completely, always at least tries to counter-attack
  • Military AI: single provinces: rather defend (aggressive, cautious), rather attack(aggressive, cautious)
  • Declare War, Beg for Peace and then shortly after Declare Ware again without rebuilding phase – this should not happen!
  • As a inferior Nation an A.I should basically try to not attack meaningless but also not give in. Just concentrate on defending and surviving.

12.2. Rapid feedback

I would like to test AIs fully automatic against each other. This means that I can adjust parameters and then let them run against each other. Ideally I would also get online feedback from players playing against the AI, probably more detailed than just who won. Possible benefits:

  • Improve AI performance
  • Find optimal parameters (preferences) depending on country and starting value
  • Get fast feedback on new algorithms.