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On downtime, I've been playing the new Fire Emblem, which has made me really wonder how the AI works on the simple 3DS hardware. This is a nice complimentary re

by danbolt 11y ago

On downtime, I've been playing the new Fire Emblem, which has made me really wonder how the AI works on the simple 3DS hardware. This is a nice complimentary read.

shuzchen 11y ago
While the AI problem of Fire Emblem isn't easy, it's likely a magnitude smaller than the Hero Academy on. IIRC, in Fire Emblem every character gets some small amount of actions per turn, whereas in Hero Academy you have a pool of action points that you can spend among all your characters. I mean there's some complexity beyond that simple description in FE (which hero moves first, their positioning and abilities can affect effectiveness of subsequent moves), but fundamentally the tree you must traverse is a lot wider and deeper with Hero Academy.
- AstralStorm 11y ago
  The problem of pool is not that bad for the search (range searches such as R trees work), but then you end up with a variant of packing problem to pick optimal options and order. That alone is NP-complete. But the real hard problem is evaluation of moves. Even for simple games encoding of positional and temporal advantage is hard. This is really important for things such as build and research orders. Once weights are known, you may use any number of asymptotically optimal scheduling algorithms.
cableshaft 11y ago
At least with the older 3DS Fire Emblem (and to be fair I didn't play it too much), it didn't seem particularly clever. Mostly just choosing which character is more vulnerable, moving into range (probably using a standard A* path algorithm), and attacking with their best option (plus some healing and a few stage specific things). Pretty standard A.I. from what I could tell. But my memory might not be that great, it was awhile ago that I played it. Is the new one significantly different from that? What stuck out for you as being particularly clever?
- danbolt 11y ago
  Hmm, I guess the way the enemies would line up for attack stances (being adjacent to one another to deal extra damage) caught my attention. That's probably the most notable feature I've seen in the game. At the same time, you've laid out how the game works quite plainly, and I've read enough about Pac-Man to know that video games can seem more clever than they seem!

by danbolt 11y ago

On downtime, I've been playing the new Fire Emblem, which has made me really wonder how the AI works on the simple 3DS hardware. This is a nice complimentary read.

shuzchen 11y ago

While the AI problem of Fire Emblem isn't easy, it's likely a magnitude smaller than the Hero Academy on. IIRC, in Fire Emblem every character gets some small amount of actions per turn, whereas in Hero Academy you have a pool of action points that you can spend among all your characters. I mean there's some complexity beyond that simple description in FE (which hero moves first, their positioning and abilities can affect effectiveness of subsequent moves), but fundamentally the tree you must traverse is a lot wider and deeper with Hero Academy.

AstralStorm 11y ago
The problem of pool is not that bad for the search (range searches such as R trees work), but then you end up with a variant of packing problem to pick optimal options and order. That alone is NP-complete. But the real hard problem is evaluation of moves. Even for simple games encoding of positional and temporal advantage is hard. This is really important for things such as build and research orders. Once weights are known, you may use any number of asymptotically optimal scheduling algorithms.

cableshaft 11y ago

At least with the older 3DS Fire Emblem (and to be fair I didn't play it too much), it didn't seem particularly clever. Mostly just choosing which character is more vulnerable, moving into range (probably using a standard A* path algorithm), and attacking with their best option (plus some healing and a few stage specific things). Pretty standard A.I. from what I could tell. But my memory might not be that great, it was awhile ago that I played it. Is the new one significantly different from that? What stuck out for you as being particularly clever?

danbolt 11y ago
Hmm, I guess the way the enemies would line up for attack stances (being adjacent to one another to deal extra damage) caught my attention. That's probably the most notable feature I've seen in the game. At the same time, you've laid out how the game works quite plainly, and I've read enough about Pac-Man to know that video games can seem more clever than they seem!