Jesus Christ, fix your AI

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Plus the campaign AI in Bannerlord is pretty decent.
No it´s not, it´s barebones.

It´s not a decent decision to siege a castle/settlement on the other end of the world map only because it´s the weakest (the AI also shouldn´t even know this), that´s not smart in any way. I mean, if they even reach their destination before they run out of food or didn´t switch targets each 1-2 minutes.

But if you think this is decent then we can´t expect anymore I guess.
 
You´re right, there is no real AI yet. But you really need examples why the Bannerlord AI is especially bad? You never played the game?

Like trying to siege settlement A, halfway there they change direction to settlement B but then again back to settlement A. Of course then they run out of food and disband the army? AI not really able to use the ladders? AI not really able to defend the gate when the gate get´s destroyed? One mounted unit is enough so that all 40 archers turn around and try to shoot him instead of the 50 infatary dudes in front of them?

That´s all what we can expect?
This.

Plus the campaign AI in Bannerlord is pretty decent. It still needs some work but I do not find It awful as people state.

I think the big thing is when players see the AI do something that is inexplicable under the logic they use while playing Bannerlord.

For example: if a player owns a town, carefully nurturing it up to 7500 prosperity, fully upgraded, etc. the moment the alert comes in that it is under siege, they will abandon almost anything to make sure the town stays safe. They will almost certainly not continue on their way to raid a 400 hearth flax village or ponderously labor away building that fourth trebuchet for a castle siege. Those two behaviors are dumb in a way that is immediately identifiable as unnatural.

Could there be someone that silly? Damned straight. I'd bet good money some of the people posting in this thread have a story or two about their hubris or unwarranted faith in their garrison. But those stories would be exceptional -- most of the time, we save our town.

The AI doesn't need to be playing 4th dimensional chess, but it needs to act credibly human, at least most of the time.
 
I think the big thing is when players see the AI do something that is inexplicable under the logic they use while playing Bannerlord.

For example: if a player owns a town, carefully nurturing it up to 7500 prosperity, fully upgraded, etc. the moment the alert comes in that it is under siege, they will abandon almost anything to make sure the town stays safe. They will almost certainly not continue on their way to raid a 400 hearth flax village or ponderously labor away building that fourth trebuchet for a castle siege. Those two behaviors are dumb in a way that is immediately identifiable as unnatural.

Could there be someone that silly? Damned straight. I'd bet good money some of the people posting in this thread have a story or two about their hubris or unwarranted faith in their garrison. But those stories would be exceptional -- most of the time, we save our town.

The AI doesn't need to be playing 4th dimensional chess, but it needs to act credibly human, at least most of the time.

AI priorizes a lot defending settlements now and the behavior you are describing is not usual, at least not in my campaigns.
 
So where the hell are people getting their high standards from? Because it ain't other games...
Sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? Did you really compare the OpenAI FIVE Dota player to game AI logic? Because they are not even related. Game's AI logic is not even anything related to Neural Networks or training. It's just a set of rules that should be get triggered under certain conditions. And fixing this is possible. Especially campaign AI is fairly easy to fix or test. By fairly easy, I'm comparing it to other, relatively complex AI systems.
But apparently no one from Testing team bothered the play the game and witness the snowballing and instability for a playtime longer than 2 days. Now since they are all reported, they fixed the snowballing issue ( well at least they had, not sure what happened with the last update I haven't played for a while ) but some instability is definitely still there.

Like OP explained, there is no "faction" feeling on AI at the moment. All other lords go to the brothel, drinks wine while your most strategic points are getting raped by your powerful and even by less powerful enemies. Same goes for armies, they don't have a proper agenda on their mind, they are just wandering around. It's possible that lords don't care about the faction's territories but even ruler doesn't give jack about those at the moment. I'm assuming this is somehow a downside of personalizm of lord clans. They don't care if a property gets ruined by someone since that castle/city is not theirs. But that's obviously wrong because it's faction's property and they are in that function. If they want to go that path they have to change the game to Mount&Blade:CityStateLord. And even in that case your relationship should go down if you refuse to help your friends. They should implement a negative effect for such cases so that AI can be less reckless.
Or they can boost it with having proper system. Like
  • Call to arms by ruler: As in the missions, you have to give up some parts of your soldiers for until call to arms is finished. If you decline your relationship will impacted by a faction
  • Ask for help: Asking the ruler to redirect the faction's resources onto your location.
  • Tasks: In moment of war, ruler should be able to assign you to certain locations. Like: Go wait at XX - or just go and defend this place. If you fail to do that within the time limits, your relationship will be impacted.
These are just the things I come up within seconds. I bet there are more ways to improve it. AI can definitely need more work on it. Bannerlord is promised to be better and more depth compared to Warband but Warband had more "faction" like sense in it's AI.

This is not related to the human species' capabilities. OP is not asking for Skynet. Please refrain using arguments like "It's bad but all games are bad. We, humans, are just bad at AI ?‍♂️ "
 
No it´s not, it´s barebones.

It´s not a decent decision to siege a castle/settlement on the other end of the world map only because it´s the weakest (the AI also shouldn´t even know this), that´s not smart in any way. I mean, if they even reach their destination before they run out of food or didn´t switch targets each 1-2 minutes.

But if you think this is decent then we can´t expect anymore I guess.

It has been improved but yes, It is still happening sometimes. On the other hand, AI is attacking closer settlements much more often now. If you find this behavior, just open a thread about It and add screens, videos or savegames. I have been doing It and Mexxico has been fixing most of the issues that have been reported.
 
AI priorizes a lot defending settlements now and the behavior you are describing is not usual, at least not in my campaigns.

I'm literally watching the Southern Imperials raid a (my bad cotton, not flax) 400 hearth village instead of defending Lyracon, right now.
 
I often wonder where people get their standards for A.I from. Every game forum its "fix your A.i," or "A.I is so dumb". I have yet to see a single game ever which had an impressive A.I (minus that bot that beat a top DOTA team - but that took years to develop and was still very very limited).

My point is A.I is just not very good yet; we as a species have not developed A.I that can compete with humans on any game which has more then 6-10 moving parts.

"Good AI" is AI that makes use of the game mechanics logically and does things that make sense. This is perfectly feasible in most games. The problem isn't that we don't have enough tech, or that computers aren't fast enough, or that it's too hard, but rather that most games are designed around player enjoyment and the ability to exploit mechanics.

Having looked through the warband AI code multiple times, the problem (beside the fact that its code structure is horrible) is that there are loads of systems that don't really connect to each other. Faction diplomacy and deciding whether to retreat from an encounter might as well be part of different games. This wouldn't usually be an issue, but in warband they're handled by different code loops and don't "communicate". So lords go on campaign to raid a village while their capital is being sieged. Or you have a situation where 20 lords with 80 men each are all running away from a single lord with 120 men.

Games like Rome Total War and even Just Cause 3 have good AI despite it being relatively simple. They set up the game mechanics to affect a small number of variables, so that the AI can be programmed to do things like "increase health" or "quietly retreat from enemy" and it's relatively easy for the AI to work out which mechanics to use to achieve this. Rome total war's AI bugs out a lot, but its basic functionality is still miles ahead of bannerlord, because when it works it makes a lot of sense why it's doing what it's doing.
 
I also like the TT Warhammer 2 campaing AI, sure it can be abused, every AI can be abused.

But I just play "normal" without any cheese tactics. And the AI acts reasonable in 9/10 cases. They try to make peace / non aggression pact when they are weaker, they declare war when they think they are stronger. They try to retreat if they are facing a stronger army. The do "surprise" attacks.

They don´t attack anything at the other end of the world. They try to defend their cities. It just makes sense for me. And it just feels right for me.

And what does the Bannerlord AI does when already fighting against two factions and beeing on the loosing side? Declare another war...

I wouldn´t play Warhammer 2 if the AI would be doing the stuff the Bannerlord AI does.
 
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I'm literally watching the Southern Imperials raid a (my bad cotton, not flax) 400 hearth village instead of defending Lyracon, right now.

Well, as I said before, just open a thread about It and upload a savegame and if It is an AI issue, It will be probably fixed.

In my current campaign I am playing as Vlandia vassal and Derther has given me the Kranirog Castle. It has been sieged more than 5 times and I really did not care at all about It, but AI has defend It all the times successfuly.
 
My point is A.I is just not very good yet; we as a species have not developed A.I that can compete with humans on any game which has more then 6-10 moving parts.

AlphaZero would like to have a word on 32 moving parts ??? jk ily

A quick google yielded MuZero. Very impressive stuff. But I’m just being facetious.
 
You do realize the game didn't just turn out like this on it's own, somebody had to code it all in to for the AI to be annoying and stupid all the time.
They need to be told how annoying and stupid it is until they figure out how to fix it.
That's literally what he's doing, albeit in a somewhat aggressive manner, but still. He was even quite detailed about his grievances too.

Whining and mad players > "iT's eA" zombies
Most of what they are whinging about is easy to get around, within the game. Do not join a kingdom until you have been around all the cities, clearing out the gang leaders men. This will up your relationships with all the kingdom you want to joins major lords. Then marry the leader of the kingdoms child. Once you join the Kingdom attack every bandit in sight, upping your influence. Once you have enough influence, the next time your kingdom starts a war, create an army and take a city. You are almost guaranteed to be given the city, and then hit the surrounding castles, you should be given two or three of these as well, due to your popularity. This will up your amount of influence, and should make getting other decisions through easier. Though as other have stated, diplomacy is still under work.
 
Come on, making a better AI for lords on the campaign map should be prety easy. For example.
Fix for lords doing nothing -> make queue with potential things to do and set priorities depending on various factors(current political situation, lord personality, lord current situation like army not full, pockets not full, not enough food for army) , sort and execute. If anything of importance happens add one more thing to the queue and update priorities. And keep doing the thing at the top. Remove and execute if it still makes sense. Top should be stuff like king orders or not dieing from hunger.
Improve upon this basic thing. At least they will do something and there will be a reason for their actions.
This primitive model will never be as poor as havin them leave siege to chase bandits ! So the current AI (in warband too) is crap.
And the problem is not that there's no recipe for success like marry the kings daughter and such the problem is how unrealistic it feels to see the AI
being so stupid.
 
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Most of what they are whinging about is easy to get around, within the game. Do not join a kingdom until you have been around all the cities, clearing out the gang leaders men. This will up your relationships with all the kingdom you want to joins major lords. Then marry the leader of the kingdoms child. Once you join the Kingdom attack every bandit in sight, upping your influence. Once you have enough influence, the next time your kingdom starts a war, create an army and take a city. You are almost guaranteed to be given the city, and then hit the surrounding castles, you should be given two or three of these as well, due to your popularity. This will up your amount of influence, and should make getting other decisions through easier. Though as other have stated, diplomacy is still under work.
So there is one way we have to play this sandbox games? Cool!

It´s also not about that this game is too hard, it´s not. It just doesn´t feel right because of all those stupid AI decisions.

Also it´s not whining when we say the AI is stupid, it´s just a fact.
 
So there is one way we have to play this sandbox games? Cool!

It´s also not about that this game is too hard, it´s not. It just doesn´t feel right because of all those stupid AI decisions.

Also it´s not whining when we say the AI is stupid, it´s just a fact.
Most of that should be worked out over time, however this game is supposed to be dynasty based. That means planning for the long term will always be beneficial to the player. Those who rush will miss out on many of the rewards of playing a slower game. From missing out on certain quests to getting the cities and castles that you want.

As to the game being a sandbox, I would say no it is not. It is an open world game, a true sandbox game would have no storyline. There are still options away from the storyline and one is to rush the game.
 
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As to the game being a sandbox, I would say no it is not. It is an open world game, a true sandbox game would have no storyline. There are still options away from the storyline and one is to rush the game.
You should speak with TW about that this game isn´t a sandbox game, from their Steam page description:

Singleplayer Sandbox Campaign
Play the game the way you want to play it! Plot your own path to power in a dynamic sandbox adventure where no two playthroughs are the same.

But to be fair, they also claim that only some perks don´t work:

Singleplayer Features: Several planned single player features may be missing or incomplete. These include but are not limited to: full game controller support, some skill and perk effects, crafting, some aspects of sieges, and clan, army and kingdom management.


BTW, that was also the case when the game was released and like no perk worked but until today it´s not some perks it´s most of the perks.

186b73.jpg
 
You should speak with TW about that this game isn´t a sandbox game, from their Steam page description:



But to be fair, they also claim that only some perks don´t work:




BTW, that was also the case when the game was released and like no perk worked but until today it´s not some perks it´s most of the perks.

186b73.jpg
They can call it what they want, it's still an open world game :grin: There is not enough freedom in quests for it to be a sandbox :wink:
 
Kenshi has quests and they're actually pretty linear, but they're unrepeatable, only exist in places where they make sense, and aren't the core feature of the game.

Either way the term "sandbox" is just an arbitrary descriptor that doesn't have a clear definition. Arguing whether bannerlord is a sandbox or not is kind of pointless.
 
Kenshi has quests and they're actually pretty linear, but they're unrepeatable, only exist in places where they make sense, and aren't the core feature of the game.

I´ve 250+ hours in Kenshi and never encountered a single quest with a goal? How to I get them? Or you mean the events in the world that can happen? Those aren´t classic quests in my opinion.

But whatever, we shouldn´t compare this awesome game with a game like Bannerlord anyway :smile: .
 
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