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Huh. You know, I wonder. The API provided to AI scripts must have enough info for limited strategies, but I've never seen what's what. You have. What are th

by b112 4mo ago

Huh. You know, I wonder. The API provided to AI scripts must have enough info for limited strategies, but I've never seen what's what. You have. What are the possibilities for just giving Claude that each turn. Yes, insane over kill, but in a couple of years Claude level AI will run locally on laptops...

egeozcan 4mo ago
I'm really not sure about the timelines, but I can easily speak to the state of things for today: LLMs are very wasteful and slow for real-time decisions. The "thinking" ones have no chance and if you disable thinking, they really struggle with querying the context with the right calls. For the once in a moonshot scenarios that they have enough context and ample time to react, they are great! Developing AI scripts, however? They are crazy good! I try to re-balance the game to give a little edge to the humans, then it takes a single iteration for your not-even-sota LLM to destroy me. I mean I'm not the fastest RTS player but for the lack of skill, I have the advantage of being the designer of the game :) About the RA2 AI scripts: You can react to enemy faction, composition etc. but it's impossible to program it to pull back its tesla tanks when they are under threat from a bunch of rocketeers. Those things are hard-coded in the game engine. I think the only exception was the DeeZire mod which patched the game exe, if I'm not hallucinating.
- scottmf 4mo ago
  I recently tried playing OpenRA with GPT-5. Didn’t have enough time to put into it properly, but the solution I reached would plan future actions in batches based on game state, including decisions to make based on conditions/thresholds being met. Maybe something like Gemini Flash would do a much better job.
  - egeozcan 4mo ago
    IMHO, this is a very good idea. I suppose it would help a lot with the macro, but again, "decisions to make based on conditions/thresholds being met" is the definition of the good old AI script :)
bigstrat2003 4mo ago
Even if it worked, it most likely wouldn't be fun. Game devs have talked about the fine line one walks with AI in strategy games: your goal is to challenge the player, not to beat him. It's not impossible to make AI which can beat the player, but that wouldn't actually be fun to play against. So the challenge becomes trying to create something which will hit the sweet spot of challenging but beatable for most people.
- mmooss 4mo ago
  I think the issue is less winning and losing, and more feeling and seeming real. Game AI opponents do absurd things that break the immersion; suddenly, you realize you're just playing a dumb game on a machine. I suspect LLMs might be able to do that better. Even their hallucinations are less frequent and more convincing, very generally speaking, than game AIs IME.

by b112 4mo ago

egeozcan 4mo ago

I'm really not sure about the timelines, but I can easily speak to the state of things for today: LLMs are very wasteful and slow for real-time decisions. The "thinking" ones have no chance and if you disable thinking, they really struggle with querying the context with the right calls. For the once in a moonshot scenarios that they have enough context and ample time to react, they are great! Developing AI scripts, however? They are crazy good! I try to re-balance the game to give a little edge to the humans, then it takes a single iteration for your not-even-sota LLM to destroy me. I mean I'm not the fastest RTS player but for the lack of skill, I have the advantage of being the designer of the game :) About the RA2 AI scripts: You can react to enemy faction, composition etc. but it's impossible to program it to pull back its tesla tanks when they are under threat from a bunch of rocketeers. Those things are hard-coded in the game engine. I think the only exception was the DeeZire mod which patched the game exe, if I'm not hallucinating.

scottmf 4mo ago
I recently tried playing OpenRA with GPT-5. Didn’t have enough time to put into it properly, but the solution I reached would plan future actions in batches based on game state, including decisions to make based on conditions/thresholds being met. Maybe something like Gemini Flash would do a much better job.
- egeozcan 4mo ago
  IMHO, this is a very good idea. I suppose it would help a lot with the macro, but again, "decisions to make based on conditions/thresholds being met" is the definition of the good old AI script :)

bigstrat2003 4mo ago

Even if it worked, it most likely wouldn't be fun. Game devs have talked about the fine line one walks with AI in strategy games: your goal is to challenge the player, not to beat him. It's not impossible to make AI which can beat the player, but that wouldn't actually be fun to play against. So the challenge becomes trying to create something which will hit the sweet spot of challenging but beatable for most people.

mmooss 4mo ago
I think the issue is less winning and losing, and more feeling and seeming real. Game AI opponents do absurd things that break the immersion; suddenly, you realize you're just playing a dumb game on a machine. I suspect LLMs might be able to do that better. Even their hallucinations are less frequent and more convincing, very generally speaking, than game AIs IME.