Thanks Tormy-!

Geez, I even posted in that thread    I gotta do less skimming/talking and more reading/listening!

*off to Wiki to get a quick idea of what the heck 'data drive' means and how it relates to 'hard-coded'*

I have never said it should make perfect decisions, I have said that with for your method to work, auto-resolve has to give realistic results. That's it, if you have two sets:

1) The results produced by auto-resolve

2) The real combat results

There has to be a good overlap between those two sets for the AI to be able to make a good decision using your idea. If there's not enough overlap, it doesn't matter how many times you auto-resolve, instead of one bad result, you will have thousands, which is equally useless.

And from all the auto-resolves I can remember now in games that have tactical combat, there's not enough overlap when a human is involved.

How they can be auto-resolves a good measure of anything if they don't represent what happens in reality more or less???

About a better solution, no idea, if I had it I would be rich

You really don't have any idea how AI works. If you are a human, you see two armies, you process a lot of information before deciding if fighting or retreating: you see the forces balance, how the units counter each other, the spells you know the other guy has or likes to use, how past matches resulted, the global vision taking into account economy,... Humans are very good at processing parallel information like that, while computers aren't.

The AI is the same, it needs to get some information before been able to decide if retreat or fight. And if you give it wrong information to make a decision, then the decision usually won't be good.

Imagine that the AI is not very good in tactical play, so against an average player, it loses nearly always with an equal number of forces (doesn't flank well, use spells well, whatever). But in auto-resolve, two even forces will result normally in a close win or defeat, because the AI is playing with itself. So, with an even number of forces, the AI engages nearly always and loses nearly always against a human player, do you think that's good? Fun? Useful? The problem is that the AI is basing his decision in some information that doesn't represent what will probably happen, so it fails.

Let's see if I can explain the same with another example: chess. Imagine you have to write an AI that bets money on white or black wins.

First, you calculate which side has a bigger % of winning the game, running an algorithm over the chess board. For example, you can add the pieces values (queen 9, rook 5, bishop 3,...), and the color with a bigger value has more possibilities of winning. Your AI can bet based on that information.

But when the AI bet, even if you didn't realize, it used another factor for determining who wins or loses: it assumed that the skill of the players didn't affect the chance of winning or losing, it assumed both of them were equally skilled.

But if apart from the board state, you know you have an average player on one side and a Grand Master on the other one, your AI can also use that info to make a far more accurate bet, because unless the game is very one-sided, player skill has a lot of importance determining who wins or loses the game. If you don't use that information, you can't expect your AI to bet well most of the time.

Industry is part of military strength. I can't count the number of games where the enemy AI thought it was doing well in a war against me, because it had a slightly bigger army, despite me having a huge advantage in production that would very quickly give me the advantage. While such an advantage obviously can be neutralized with a quick enough assault, I've never seen an AI actually aim to do so.

On diplomacy:

Ask for peace when you're being beaten.
Extort from someone you can beat rather than declaring war straight away.

A lot of the time AI doesn't seem to have any sense of impending doom and will attack a faction with a much stronger army. 

Yeah, that's so true. 

In Civ4 at least when an AI is way in the lead they are his servants, when the player's in the lead he gets ganged up on. 

That's actually one of my biggest gripes: In a FFA-type game like that when the AI is programmed to treat the human player completely differently.

It depends what difficultly level you play it on... I'm pretty sure it treats the player differently at monarch and upwards. Just look at the relations grid, there are a lot of penalties for human players with AIs that are non-existent between AIs. Tech trading also, they trade around their techs a lot more freely.

Also, the auto-resolve argument above, VicenteC is right. If the AI's autoresolve data about a battle is bad, it doesn't matter how good the strategic AI is, it'll still try to fight battles it can't win.

The solution to this is to either:

- Make the tactical battle AI excellent enough that it will beat a player half the time with an even match, which is properly reflected in the auto-resolve results. This is the best, but I believe somewhat unrealistic, solution.
or
- Give the AI units bonuses to the same effect [worst solution]
or 
- Use a fuzzy logic system which feeds past results into its logic so that the AI eventually learns how good a player is at tactical battles, and factors this advantage [or disadvantage if you're really bad at them] into its strategic calculations. So the AI would no longer believe it could win a battle with even forces. This is my favourite solution.