a veteran RTS game designer and his response was very heart breaking, he just told me that Game AI was good enough and that "people" wouldn't care about a better AI
This makes me sad.. most RTS games have such terrible AI it often pains me to play them (and I love RTS games). Yeah yeah everything is moving towards online multiplayer, but I can't be the only person who would pay extra for a good single player experience, because often I really dislike the multiplayer experience and despite that I'm playing a lot of online games at the moment (Path of Exile, World of Tanks, League of Legends...), I usually prefer to play single player games and for this good AI is very important to me.
I love playing humans but same as you sometimes I want to take things my pace and it's a very different game from the kind of AI I want to be playing. And some of my friends hate playing humans, the games are too fast paced and they hate the shit-talk you sometimes get.
I remember reading THQ lamenting the decline in RTSes, as I watched RTSes from the two remaining greats move from base building to quick mini-troop production games. The trouble that people like THQ and Blizzard don't seem to realise is that though the sales of this game do great and people are playing lots of online matches, it's the next one that'll suffer the decline in sales as casuals abandon the increasingly online optimized experience.
I want hordes that aren't totally retarded so that each game is different. They need to start making horde modes that are actually varied and interesting, unlike the predictable drivel that DoW2 and SC2 were. The AI in those games was stupid, predictable and broken. It started fun as you raced to build your base in time, but after a few games it wasn't fun at all. You could set a stopwatch by when the computer would try and rush you.
I didn't work on DoW2 but I worked on CoH. The core AI engine was similar. CoH added features to improve group pathfinding and pathfinding for when terrain changed, etc. I don't remember all of the details since this was 5 or 6 years ago.
But the fundamental problem with AI is not building the AI. The problem is tuning the AI. You end up with a terribly tuned game if you give designers too many knobs or if your knobs look like a helicopter cockpit.
AI War is an excellent game and the AI does some surprisingly smart things sometimes (not to mention that you can have tens of thousands of units in a game).
But AI War is also a very different gameplay experience to most other RTS games, so while its a good game in its own right and does have good AI, it may leave you disappointed if you're looking for a more traditional experience.
Not to mention that its an insanely hard game but I guess that's the price you pay for "good" AI!
This makes me sad.. most RTS games have such terrible AI it often pains me to play them (and I love RTS games). Yeah yeah everything is moving towards online multiplayer, but I can't be the only person who would pay extra for a good single player experience, because often I really dislike the multiplayer experience and despite that I'm playing a lot of online games at the moment (Path of Exile, World of Tanks, League of Legends...), I usually prefer to play single player games and for this good AI is very important to me.