AI War 2:AI Mechanisms
The Original AI War
The AI for the original AI War was described in a series of articles that wound up making the front page of reddit, hacker news, slashdot, and various other sites back in 2009. It was an entirely novel approach to AI in strategy games, and basically the most immediately distinctive thing in the game. Heck, it's even right there in the title!
Hey, That Evolved!
What is less apparent is that the AI in the first AI War was continually revised and expanded after those articles were written. AI War Classic was in active post-launch development on and off through 2014, and Keith LaMothe in particular added a variety of other kinds of AIs on top of what Chris McElligott Park originally wrote about.
A lot of what was added was more "traditional AI" that used things like decision trees to augment the emergent flocking behaviors.
Other pieces that were added were... kind of a hybrid of approaches. These were things added by both Chris and Keith to say something like "override the general flocking behavior in these specific conditions" to make things more intelligent. We also added in various rules like "if you're a single ship going to attack a planet, don't go in unless there are buddies there with you that would make your death meaningful, or even make you win."
This sort of "wait at the wormhole to a planet before attacking" was something you could easily notice, and you'd have a "threat meter" in the galaxy showing how many ships were doing that sort of thing. When Chris wrote the original articles about the emergent AI, none of this existed yet. But these bits were actually just adding more layers of emergence, based on more inputs and more decisions that could happen based on those inputs (an input here being the recognition that "I shouldn't go in alone."
Ultimately, however, there was a wall that was hit where the AI just couldn't get any better. So when it came time to design the sequel's AI structure, Keith and Chris had some very specific ideas and goals. And then Badger came along and added some huge other layers on top of that.
