The Expeditions: Rome site has been updated with a new treat for the new year that is sure to please fans of the forthcoming THQ-Nordic game. The latest in a series of developer diaries has been published, this time exploring combat AI.
One of the most important takeaways from the diary is that AI shouldn’t always be playing at an optimal level, something that frustrates many players of other strategy titles. Here’s what the team had to say:
The most important rule when designing AI for games is that the enemies shouldn’t play optimally all the time, but rather they should behave in a way that creates fun gameplay. It’s very easy for us to make the AI never make any mistakes – never step on your caltrops, never walk into your fire, never shoot your shield with their archers, never provoke an attack of opportunity, never let themselves be flanked, etc. That won’t make for a fun game though: if you surround an archer with melee enemies, the smart play for the enemy might be to simply skip that archer’s turn, but that will just seem like a glitch. Having that enemy archer try to shoot you, only to get spectacularly skewered from three different sides is much more satisfying.
To this end, we have a “mistake probability” value baked into our AI, which is tied to our “AI Difficulty” slider in the options. On higher difficulties, AI will be much less likely to make mistakes, which can feel unsatisfying as certain tactics or skills become more about denying options to the AI rather than provoking and exploiting its mistakes, but does make the game significantly more challenging.
Check out the entire post by visiting the Expeditions: Rome official site.
