The AI in the campaign is not behaving as the developers intended.
The authors of the global strategy game Total War Warhammer 3 have released a new development diary and talked about the problems they encountered while working on artificial intelligence.
They explained that in order to effectively allocate and spend resources, AI relies heavily on a number of beliefs about the current state of the game world.
The authors gave several examples of such installations (assumptions):
- The cheapest unit that can be hired anywhere in the faction.
- The strongest unit that can be hired anywhere
- The most economical unit (best price-to-durability ratio)
- The estimated number of turns required to reach the place of hire of the strongest/cheapest unit
The developers found that any errors in the construction of these "assumptions" lead to a "catastrophic failure in many of our artificial intelligence systems."
For example, if the AI believes that a unit is free and provides some significant increase in strength, it will not allocate resources to purchase units — it mistakenly believes that it can equip its armies with powerful units for free, and therefore will use this option, which will cause a "cascade of failures."
Recent weeks of investigation have shown that most of Total War Warhammer 3's internal systems were "not ready for failures in actions that seemed like they couldn't fail." This cascading effect led to a variety of problems: the AI could not correctly change positions, the attack in the campaign failed, recruitment failed, the siege failed, and so on.
The developers have already been able to identify and eliminate the main causes of failures, but work is still ongoing. In this regard, it was decided to postpone the publication of materials about the Tides of Torment DLC — fixing the game is a priority.
