Following on from last week's update, Godus programmer's Richard & Ryan delve deeper in to the artificial intelligence and warband pathfinding currently being tweaked during the current development sprint and there’s also a round up from Producer Anthony

Commander AI

Richard has found time to go through just what the Commander AI is, in a bit more detail than before.

"Something we haven't talked much about is the “Commander AI” - this is the enemy god, the entity plotting and conniving to bring your fledgling society to its knees. Because of its huge scope, the Commander AI is something we'll be evolving and iterating on quite frequently as we proceed with our combat work. For now, however, let's talk about how the AI will want to start a game."


Commander AI - Before

"Citadels (the new name for military settlements) are key to combat. Having bigger citadels means you can have bigger warbands and more of them, giving you a substantial combat advantage. To make large citadels though, you need a lot of free space. As such, the AI will do its best to quickly clear rocks and trees and flatten land."

"Like you though, the AI has limited belief, so it has has to constantly weigh up whether it's more cost-effective for it to sculpt a piece of land, spending belief now to gain much more belief from any abodes built on it in the long-term. Or if it should instead use that belief on god powers, to try to cripple you in the early game."

"Nothing's as simple as it seems though. Experienced Godus players will be considering a lot of things as they sculpt. Will this sculpt make it easier for enemy warbands to get in attack range of my citadel? Or will it isolate my builders, preventing them from making more abodes? These are the sort of pitfalls that it's really easy for the AI to fall into, particularly in an extremely malleable world such as that of Godus, where the environment can be changed not only by the AI, but by the player as well."


Commander AI - After

"Our ultimate aim is to provide the player with an AI which is highly flexible and capable of providing both an enjoyable experience for new players and challenging & exciting gameplay for Godus veterans, over a long period of time. Getting the AI to this stage has been really enjoyable, so I'm looking forward to having more to tell and show you as we progress."

Pathfinding AI

Programming coder, Ryan spills the beans on the warband pathfinding found within the game.

"Pathfinding already exists in Godus and the followers often find themselves navigating through the world thanks to the pre-existing system. For combat, we’ve had to slightly redesign that system to allow for warbands to move in groups as they navigate across the maps on the player or the enemies command."



"Like a real army, the warbands move in formations by keeping together as they move across the maps and bunching together to traverse obstacles such as rocks, abodes and the terrain. Therefore, players will get an understanding that the warband should be considered one unit but that each of the members of that unit are individual soldiers following a single command."

Anthony's Sprint Review

“This sprint allowed us to fix some critical issues in the warbands pathfinding system. They can now stay in formation most of the time when moving on the map which is clearly the kind of result we wanted to achieve."

"The objective now is to make them move naturally and react dynamically to any change in the map (sculpting or AI actions). As one of the fundamentals actions in Combat, we’ll make sure to spend as much time as necessary on warbands movements: fun is clearly not an option when it comes to this kind of mechanics.”

Next Time

Next time we'll be looking at giving you a unique insight into our next development sprint!

As an added bonus, Annah has updated the combat art we previously released to reflect the progress made on the archer models.

Thanks
22cans