Empire: Total War, Goal Oriented AI

Gamasutra featured a massive interview with Creative Assembly's Kieran Brigden that covered entire aspects of game development in a studio like Creative Assembly and publisher relations. One of the more interesting factoids said in the interview was how AI was modeled in Empire: Total War. According to them:

Certainly that's typified most in our AI system. We moved from a state-by-state AI system, which was like a chess game -- do A then B then C -- over to a goal-oriented action planner, which was essentially a very new kind of academic technique. It's a constant list of priorities versus resources available. Those priorities are shifted like Post-It notes on somebody's desk: "The number one thing I must do today is this." Depending how increasingly important those tasks become, they move up and down the queue. Then, the resources are allocated to identify those tasks.

What that means is you get reactive gameplay. It makes a massive difference. In something like Rome, for example, the AI will say, "I have to break down the door or storm the wall to get into the city." That is state A. To get to state B, where it's fighting in the city, "I have to achieve that." But if you can interrupt it anywhere along that path, it never reaches the next state. It just keeps trying to get there.

Now, you say, "All right, I'm going to outflank the enemy and go around the back, and he's charging me down the center." Then, suddenly the AI goes, "My general is in danger." So, "protect the general" goes from priority six to priority one. Then, all of the resources are moved around doing that, and then the battle's taking on a very different dynamic.

It's that ebb and flow that makes it really interesting. To be honest, it makes it really cool. It's techniques like that, I think, CA does really well. I'm proud to be a part of that.

Very interesting. I hope this means a more fluid and exciting battle engine. The previous Total War games had average AI. I don't expect the new AI to be able to besat a chess champion, just able to battle well enough to make interesting and challenging battles.

Empire: Total War is set for a 3rd March 2009 release.

Read the entire interview here