I figured out that it's the best forum for making suggestions, so here it goes.

When your teammate gets booted or surrender and you get AI instead, sometimes this AI would help you a lot by doing a certain thing, like attacking region X or something like that. However, when you look at AI's orders, you can only usually start thinking about surrendering, since they are mostly just illogical (i.e. deploying 7 armies to a region, while the other region is bordering a region of enemy with 9 already deployed armies there).

What is my suggestion? Well, I thought that players who remained in the game with AI in the team could send him advices. It could look like, umm, you do orders like it'd have been your own orders and then send to AI or to other teammates to accept.

Why? Well, it's always annoying to have to surrender, when AI appears in your team, and in like 89% cases the game ends with surrender.

Awaiting your feedback,
C.

Has been suggested multiple times before.

Practical issues:

- The AI *should* be weaker than an average human, otherwise people would not feel nearly as hesitant about getting booted.
- Who gets to control the AI in a 3 (vs 3) player game? What if the two remaining humans disagree?
- The exact way in which to give orders / suggestions to the AI causes some problems. For one, how would you do this. Secondly, how detailed would those orders be (just entering all orders, giving you complete control, would effectively mean there is no AI playing; this is undesirable since it means one player controls two armies, see also the very first point).

Apologies if this sounds blunt; it's only meant to be succinct. Both to save you from having to read a wall of text and me from having to write it (I'm going to bed now :p ). Just reply if you want to discuss this further though!

I have to admit that I didn't use "search" option. *Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.* However, if I already started this topic, I'll continue here.

Also thanks for responding to my topic! Let me answer...

|>>>The AI should be weaker than an average human, otherwise people would not feel nearly as hesitant about getting booted.<<

Yes, but on the other hand, I am not talking about strengthening AI, but rather about allowing remaining members of team to control it even a little bit. When you play a normal game, you often exchange advices with teammates, tell them "hey, look, you could attack region X and then Y!".
And with AI... It's impossible. And it's unfair for the rest of team.

|>>>Who gets to control the AI in a 3 (vs 3) player game? What if the two remaining humans disagree?<<

Basically, I thought that both of players could control AI (i.e. sending commands on chat of team). If they disagree, AI does his own orders, simple as that. In this way disagreement of players works negatively for the team's performance - which is natural and reflects the real life very well. Also it teaches some cooperation.

As about your last point - of course, AI is AI. I thought that the orders could be sent by typing in commands like "attack region X", "attack region Y", and the AI would choose the amount of soldiers and the time of attack, etc. As I said above, I am not talking about strengthening AI or taking a complete control over him, because - like you mentioned - that would miss the point of AI.

I am merely suggesting introducing a feature called "advising AI", something that you do usually with your teammates in games. Just so the game is less unfair for those guys, who were in the team with booted/surrendering guy. As we all know, boots and surrenders are, well, mostly disliked and don't really depend on the rest of the team.

I hope I didn't get you all bored with my wall of text :)

How about being able to dictate one order to the AI? It would still be weak to have AI, but you'd have a mechanism to make them not entirely useless. Could equally be say 1 army allocation order, and one attack/move order.

The AI would then just need to recalculate after your 1 adjustment. Feels doable.

And what if an order is impossible? Let's say, your AI starts with 1 territory with 1 army, and has an income of 5, and you want him to attack 7 different territories.

what be able to put ai in attack mode(which Means it attacks opponents) defense mode (which means it defends against opponets) and normal mode (it is in normal)

Caroline, first things first: I completely understand your desire to be able to do this. This whole post is NOT intended as "let me explain why it's a bad idea", what I
m trying to do is "let me explain why this is much more difficult to implement than you probably expect".

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|> As about your last point - of course, AI is AI. I thought that the orders could be sent by typing in commands like "attack region X", "attack region Y", and the AI would choose the amount of soldiers and the time of attack, etc.

During a turn I see an attack coming out of the fog, attacking a territory I can't reach, but bordering on my AI team mate. The attack fails, but did kill one of the (neutral) defenders.
In such a case I love throwing a nice big attack onto that territory as my first order next turn, to surprise the opponent (unless something else is more important or I really can't spare the armies of course). However, even with your idea, I still can't tell the AI to do that; it would attack with two armies (since there's only one defender) and quite possibly get wiped out later in the turn by the (pleasantly surprised opponent). Also, it's quite crucial for that order to happen as soon as possible. If I can't specify that, it's better not to give the hint at all.
Also when attacking an opponent's territory, the AI will simply attack with twice as many armies as there are defenders. But that's *before* reinforcements happen; one of the weaknesses of the current AI is that you can let it do a suicide attack by reinforcing a territory you know it is going to attack.
Also, keeping track of conflicting or reconsidered orders from multiple team mates is not extremely complex, but there's a lot of corner cases which you need to think about, solve and test. And what to think of maps with non-unique territory names? Or long, easily misspelled names? (And, Moros also has a very good point.)

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Iron, the current AI is pretty good at offence, but not nearly as good at defence (doubly so when the opponent *know* its weaknesses). So basically, normal mode is the same as offence mode and defence mode means it will do quite a bit worse than if you'd just leave it in offence mode.

The idea *could* work, but not with the current AI (which I still think is a brilliant piece of coding considering it's a one-man, part-time job!!).

How about providing an AI API, with which players could write their own AI to play for them when they surrender/get booted. You could even create AI vs AI games in which you pit your AI against your opponents! :D

I'm dreaming, I know. Let me dream.

Huruey, I don't mind letting you dream, but seriously man, how about waking up and reading, oh I dunno, [this](http://blog.warlight.net/index.php/2011/04/warlight-as-a-candidate-to-the-google-ai-challenge/)? :D

I wonder about the following:

On team games, one of the settings, where booted or surrendered players become AI, a choice be given to allow AI to be completely controlled directly by the remaining human teammate(s). If there are more than one, the control could blindly alternate between them each turn.

@RvW

:O! AMAZING.

|> On team games, one of the settings, where booted or surrendered players become AI, a choice be given to allow AI to be completely controlled directly by the remaining human teammate(s). If there are more than one, the control could blindly alternate between them each turn.

I still don't really like that idea (mainly because I feel there should be a penalty to losing a team mate; you are of course fully entitled to disagree with me on this!), but I do have to admit it would solve a lot of practical problems; it might be reasonably feasible to implement.

Or maybe we could just make a substitution mode when a player is booted as an option. In this mode, another player controls the booted player. Something like

Substitution Mode: Enabled/Disabled

Tolni, I'm not sure what's the difference between your suggestion and hangblague's suggestion is...?

"I still don't really like that idea (mainly because I feel there should be a penalty to losing a team mate; you are of course fully entitled to disagree with me on this!), but I do have to admit it would solve a lot of practical problems; it might be reasonably feasible to implement."


I think Fizzer's statement that he believes that booting should never be a *viable positive option* putting much agrees with you there..

Fair enough. But it may be modest enough just to make this an optional setting for particular games. Just like the option of having booted players turn into AI is different and stronger than the optional setting of that army just turning neutral.

Turning AI is stronger than just disappearing, of course. But what Perrin refers to is that both options are clearly worse than *keeping the player*.
If you'd allow another player to take over, there would be cases where booting your team mate will make the team as a whole stronger (the "viable positive option"); *that* is what shouldn't happen.