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.
Im pretty sure we could make AI in games smarter and/or better than humans for a long time. They are just not fun to play against. You need to have AI that you can win against. What i think should be happening instead of neural networks is the ai should gamble a bit more . The good example is eu4 where on hard difficulty ai will not attack you until its sure it can win… which makes it more predictable than normal ai beacuse you can reasonably guess whetewer it will attack you and try to outmanouver it. Wheras on normal sometimes it will just attack you if there is a reasonable ( or sometimes even unreasonable ) chance to win which makes normal sometimes( very very very very rarely ) harder difficulty. Now hard difficulty is stil generaly ( 99,9% of time ) much harder due to ai cheats but what i said is a thing. Total war Warhammer 3 could use that in particular to spice things up. Currently attacking army will always attack and defending will defend which makes attacking more advantagous , and the army will always wait for reinforcment . They could for example make it so depending on the army composition ( or even just rng ) the defending army will sometimes attack ( for example when there are only melee combatants ) so that you dont have time to deal damage with mage . Or the opposite. Make it so the attacking army will just stay still and protect the artilery and bombard you with canons it it has lots of artilery . Like you know just some basic strategies so the fights arent always so similar at the begining.