Quote:
Originally Posted by Japo
A chess AI can be as complicated as you want, depending on the moves in advance that you want to calculate, so much that Deep Blue was a dedicated supercomputer. Anyway you're right in part, but that only means that that the AI in MoM or Civ _would_ be good _if_ it took into account all those factors--but it doesn't.
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It really couldn't, not at the time. The complexity of the rules in MoM had to take into account personalities, separate spellbooks for different leader AIs, many distinct races with their various abilities and drawbacks, many buildings, heroes, all in a bewildering combination that goes far beyond chess or even the Civs. I remember reading through the spellbook and manual when MoM arrived for review and thinking, "AIs with completely different spellbooks? So many choices? This is strategic heaven for fantasy gaming!" Then I saw the other side of the coin when I observed as the AIs fumbled.
Each to their own, but I personally don't think the problem lies so much in poor AI in MoM as in designing a game whose strategic complexity meant the developers bit off far more than computers could chew back in the day. If they'd been able to release MoM as a realtime, pause-able game with the AI thinking while you considered your next move, that would have helped, but I still feel that they really needed far more processing power to get a lot more rule-crunching by the AI done in an appropriate amount of time.
(Parenthetically, Chris Crawford carefully kept the strategic complexity of his games down so the AI could handle everything competently, and he was touted for brilliant AI. What made his games fresh and interesting wasn't complexity, but a careful number of strategic elements that mimicked human emotion, and therefore, behavior.)