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How to stop every single AI from becoming super-rich

#1
So, as I understand it, anything a player can do, AIs can do too. That's one of the principal motives of LT. The thing is, if AIs are just as powerful as the player, that means that to rise to power (IE, rule an empire), the player needs to be smater/stronger than the AIs.

For example, let's assume that the player is a miner. He mines some asteroids, buys himself a bigger mining ship, and mines some more. Mines some more, buys some mining drones, etc. Eventually, he owns a small mining company in the asteroid belt of a small system.

The thing is, if we assume that the AI is also able to do all of those actions (mine, buy bigger ships, buy drones, build stations), and we assume that some degree of history will be simulated before the player enters the game, then you would expect big corporations already in place. How is the player supposed to compete with that?

You might assume that the player will just mine, and then buy another ship, and eventually reach that same level. But if there is this nice, easy path for the player to climb into the glory of the interstellar 1%, the AIs will be able to see it too. That means that if every AI can become a rich CEO, why will there be any AIs left to do the dirty work? They will all have long since worked up from their humble poverty state into large ships.

I don't really have a solution to this. What do you all think? How can we let the player advance to a leader within a reasonable span of time and yet make sure that among the AI ranks, there are still enough followers for the leaders to lead?
Last edited by Keon on Sun Mar 02, 2014 9:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-Keon-

(I don't have any funny quotes to put here yet. Somebody say something funny.)
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Re: How to stop AIs from becoming super-rich

#4
There's one single aspect of gameplay where I expect to see an asymmetry between the player and NPCs; death.

Unless you're playing in hardcore/permadeath mode, you can keep respawning, or at least loading from an earlier save if you die. NPCs can't. I expect this will be sufficient for allowing the player to come out on top if they so wish and put enough effort into it.

That being said, I would love to be a small part of a much larger system and have many of the NPCs remain richer and more powerful than me.
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Re: How to stop AIs from becoming super-rich

#6
McDuff wrote:Why do we want the AIs to not become super rich?

What will you do when you're the richest player in the game after a couple of decahours of play? I really don't think a player should come close to "richest player in the universe" without putting in a huge amount of effort.
Richest player in the universe, no. "I have a few people under my command", yes.

Mount and Blade had something sort of like this. In battle, the player took 1/4 the damage of a normal unit, although that could be adjusted. I tried playing with this turned off, and pretty much a single headshot from a skilled archer could kill you. That was incredibly fun for me for a while, but it obviously wouldn't be fun for every single player.

It seems like the consensus is that the AI should be more powerful than the player, which I agree with. The problem is with having every AI more powerful than the player. Basically, if the player can move up in the world, so can the AI. And not just a few AIs, but a lot of AIs. It's perfectly fine if the major empires are more powerful than a player, but there needs to be a way that the player is able to advance somewhat faster/more often than Joey McMiner. Otherwise, it isn't hours of planning and work that moves you up in the world, it's just luck - getting a better load than Joey McMiner.

Edit: My title wasn't clear enough. I fully agree that some AI should be very powerful and rich. I don't think every AI should be able to reach that same destiny.
-Keon-

(I don't have any funny quotes to put here yet. Somebody say something funny.)
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Re: How to stop every single AI from becoming super-rich

#7
No, I think the consensus is that the AI has the exact same tools at its disposal. Not more powerful.

If you come up against a giant, centuries old megacorporation in straight combat, thine ass will be handed back to you on a silver platter. So don't do that. In general you'll most likely find the big corps are big because they trade rather than because they conquer, so you'll need them to provide you with work contracts for those important credits.

If you come across a new NPC, fresh out of the upload pod, after you've been upgrading your ship and have a couple of sweet new plasma cannons to try out, you'll easily win the fight. You just have to make sure he didn't have any friends who feel like taking out a contract on you for that, mind.

Everything is a procedural AI. The big mega factions and the little indie pilots and the sole miners and the freelancers and the pirates. They all started out like you. You might be bigger than them, you might be smaller than them. The point is its not designed that way, it happens, and you have to discover it every time you seed a new universe.
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Re: How to stop every single AI from becoming super-rich

#9
McDuff wrote:No, I think the consensus is that the AI has the exact same tools at its disposal. Not more powerful.

If you come up against a giant, centuries old megacorporation in straight combat, thine ass will be handed back to you on a silver platter. So don't do that. In general you'll most likely find the big corps are big because they trade rather than because they conquer, so you'll need them to provide you with work contracts for those important credits.

If you come across a new NPC, fresh out of the upload pod, after you've been upgrading your ship and have a couple of sweet new plasma cannons to try out, you'll easily win the fight. You just have to make sure he didn't have any friends who feel like taking out a contract on you for that, mind.

Everything is a procedural AI. The big mega factions and the little indie pilots and the sole miners and the freelancers and the pirates. They all started out like you. You might be bigger than them, you might be smaller than them. The point is its not designed that way, it happens, and you have to discover it every time you seed a new universe.
I get that. What I'm saying is that a game in which the player is completely the same as every other AI will not appeal to a large audience. Maybe it will to you, maybe it will to me, but let's be realistic here. Let's assume that the galaxy is in some sort of structure like feudalism. The kings will tend to stay kings, and if the player spawns as a peasant, they will stay a peasant, no matter what they do. That's not good. If we make the structure of the galaxy something where it is easy to progress, then the player, and all AIs, will easily become mega-powerful. That isn't what we want either.

I completely agree - if you go head to head with the powerful players in the world, you will loose. I don't think anybody denies that.
McDuff wrote: If you come across a new NPC, fresh out of the upload pod, after you've been upgrading your ship and have a couple of sweet new plasma cannons to try out, you'll easily win the fight. You just have to make sure he didn't have any friends who feel like taking out a contract on you for that, mind.
Okay, but that assumes you have progressed forward some. You've got some new plasma cannons - sweet! It's safe to assume that the AIs that spawned at around the same time as you also have stuff around the same level as plasma cannons. Give it more time, and let's assume you have a pretty big ship. Even if that NPC who you beat up earlier with that plasma cannon met you again, you'd still beat him. He'd have Plasma Cannons and you'd have 2 Plasma Cannons MkII. In fact, all the AIs that spawned around the time as you would also have something close to what you have - after all, they can make all the choices you have. They might be a bit slower, since you have that human brain and they don't, but overall, they would still beat that n00b you beat earlier.

This situation means there is an upward trend - AIs tend to get richer. Either this leads to:
  • Inflation - money is worth less
  • Growth - Everybody, after a few years, can afford their own capital ship.
  • Stagnation - There are only so many asteroids, and it's not like those megacorps are going to die anytime soon, so moving upwards in society becomes even harder each year, until it is practically impossible.
Now, for the majority of human history, we've been in stagnation, with some exceptions. Only a few slots for kings and nobles, and the rest of society was farmers and peasants. This is probably the most accurate, and if we were making a space politics simulator, I'd completly agree with you. But if we want a game, there needs to be some solution to this problem that isn't "screw the player" or "let everybody move up!"

Perhaps charging some sort of "AI Tax" that can be configured at worldgen; a certain amount of wealth is taken from each AI per year/day/second and redistributed back into the asteroids and planets. That way, AIs would still rise to power, but the player would have a slight advantage, that can be configured based on player preference/difficulty level.

Edit: just saw the poem. That's amazing.
-Keon-

(I don't have any funny quotes to put here yet. Somebody say something funny.)
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Re: How to stop every single AI from becoming super-rich

#10
Firstly, the stagnation is something I look forward to; mine away at asteroids till you can't get at any more, then make bounties to kill some of the ships of your neighbor, all the while you invade their claimed area. After a while, when everyone is a big power-player, you take your rag-tag team and force others under your banner, until you have either killed or own everyone in that system. Take your forces and attempt to purge the next system.
Second, if someone will always be at the top, then the hardest road is the most obvious; become a Pirate and pay for hit-man contracts with your loot. Every hit ordered against you would become another opportunity to gain more cash, more ships, and keep grinding away. If you keep taking down just the leaders of every faction with hired guns, you can cause the whole system to break down into hundreds of local disputes. Hire yourself a rag-tag group, claim small slivers of it at a time, then you have the system for yourself.

Of course, both scenarios depend on you being able to re-spawn, as well as the challenge of the AI being able to do the same, but the infrastructures will always be in place, the demand for materials will sky-rocket, making piracy and militaristic action not always the main-course for the AI. This would yield multiple factions trying to do the same as yourself, but alliances will always carve out sides. Just make sure to carve out the right side, while denying the AI the chance to undermine you the way you undermined those already in place.

Then again, this all assumes that there will be a place for factions. Most likely, mining and militaristic actions will be the best course to build a fleet, leaving nothing else to do than just beating up other fleets. We might be other-thinking the game, some. :P
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Re: How to stop every single AI from becoming super-rich

#11
I think if you're aiming for a wide audience who want to be handed victory on a plate, you should code a modern military shooter. Call it something like Campaign Of Honour: Fighter Warrior.

Don't underestimate the percentage of people who enjoy No Win State games or games with slow, challenging gameplay that doesn't guide you by the hand towards Boss Of Everything mode.

Would you believe Civilisation was a "commercial" game? Sim City? Anno? The original Elite or Privateer? The x series?

Don't be bringing "it's uncommercial nobody will buy it if you make it hard to get all the shinies" to criticise a game that's already got a fully funded kickstarter under its belt. The evidence suggests a lot of people do, in fact, quite want this sort of game.

Don't worry, the AI will not be coded so as to immediately screw you up. You will be able to advance. But you won't be handed a gun with a chainsaw bayonet and pointed at an endless supply of cheap enemies either. If that means you won't like the game, you should probably not buy it.
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Re: How to stop every single AI from becoming super-rich

#12
If NPCs die, they must born too. This way there's always some NPCs, that have had more less to achieve things than you, and the opposite.
Because we don't want to make only the player immortal in the world, and it wouldn't be fun, if there was a time limit per save, what if we say, that NPCs are all immortal too?
In space, no one will hear you scream. #262626
I've never played a space sim. Ever.
Vos estis tan limes.
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Re: How to stop every single AI from becoming super-rich

#13
Raph Koster has described how MMORPGs rapidly demonstrate the Pareto effect in which most of the wealth in the game is owned by a very small percentage of the player characters.

This is basically a function of how power systems are organized. Hierarchical organizations naturally move power upward (and over time try to concentrate it there), but even flatter consensus-oriented organizations tend to move power to the relatively small number of charismatic individuals. Every participant doesn't become super-rich because everyone can't be... but those who become super-rich first tend to stay that way.

Given this natural concentration-effect of organizations (assuming that NPCs in LT are humanoid and not physiologically and psychologically alien), there are a couple of ways to go if you believe that busting up this long-term Pareto effect is a desirable goal.

One is to impose an immediate and artificial cap on how much one character can acquire relative to others. This is tempting because it's easy to conceptualize and (in theory) easy to apply, but it has the severe drawback of discouraging the productive and creative effort that allows an organization -- and individuals -- to prosper in the first place. Why expend effort to do better if succeeding means it's just going to be taken away from you by fiat? This is why multiplayer game economies tend to grow quickly then stagnate: it's not possible to create new kinds of things, so they devolve into perfect competition systems where there's no way for newcomers to dislodge the first-comers who have massive productive scale on their side.

The other approach is to look for ways to enable as many participants as possible in the process of imagining and producing new forms of wealth. If one person does really well making Widget A, then their continuing to make Widget A will not allow them to remain at the top of the pyramid as long as others are free to make Widget B and Widget C (etc.) that are perceived as being better than Widget A. Under this model, there's still a Pareto effect where some get really rich, but the benefit is that those who do are more frequently replaced. This process generates more wealth for all participants over time, but again, not everyone can become "super-rich" at the same time.

I would like to see both of these approaches (and maybe others) emerge naturally for different civilizations in Limit Theory. What I wouldn't like to see is either one imposed from on high by a programmer. That would create a sameness among civs that would, I think, be a lot less fun.
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Re: How to stop every single AI from becoming super-rich

#14
You all seem to think I hate Limit Theory and wish it was some dumbed down military shooter that handheld me through the entirety of the game.

I assure you, this is not the case. I want LT to be the best game it can be, and I certainly want the same sort of ruthless cutthroat world you love.

Let's talk about other games. Probably the most prominent example is EVE Online. After all, you can certainly say that it is an economy that manages to work and yet has tons of people all working against each other. The difference is that NPCs in that game are basically spouts of money. The Sisters of Eve don't need to get money from somewhere. It just appears - POOF - in their hands, ready to be traded to human missiongoers. In LT, money isn't going to work that way. (In fact, that's a good question. Do the various empires of LT print their own currencies? Is there inflation? Currency exchanges?)

The thing is, working your way up to a Jump Freighter or any other capital in EVE very very hard. It often requires the cooperation of an entire faction. Players work for months to work up to the point where they can fly one of these. Call me a wuss or a wimp or whatever, I don't care. The fact is, most people will expect to be able to play a single player game for 100 hours or so and be making visible progress. Not king-of-the-world, certainly, but some progress. Yeah. I said it. "OMG go back to cod of honor; battlefighter, keon, screw u"

When we look at other trading sims, the AI has mostly been passive. Sure, they will move around and trade and stuff, but there isn't the same sort of ruthless market PVP that you see in EVE. And if the AI in LT is as good as it looks, we can expect to see that here.

Now, here's a thought that didn't occur to me before. In order to keep everybody from becoming super rich, what EVE does is have a money sink. That sink is warfare, piracy, and ganking. "Don't fly what you can't afford to loose", as they say. Somehow, LT needs a moneysink too. And, yes, destruction will play a role in this. That's a sink on player and AI. I wonder if something like that would work in LT.

Another possible way is to just code the AI to be slightly dumber. Make it make less optimal decisions. That could also work, I suppose.

I need sleep, thanks for giving me something to think about.
Behemoth wrote:If NPCs die, they must born too. This way there's always some NPCs, that have had more less to achieve things than you, and the opposite.
Because we don't want to make only the player immortal in the world, and it wouldn't be fun, if there was a time limit per save, what if we say, that NPCs are all immortal too?
Can you clarify a bit? I don't really get what you mean. Maybe I'm too tired.
McDuff wrote:I think if you're aiming for a wide audience who want to be handed victory on a plate, you should code a modern military shooter. Call it something like Campaign Of Honour: Fighter Warrior.

Don't underestimate the percentage of people who enjoy No Win State games or games with slow, challenging gameplay that doesn't guide you by the hand towards Boss Of Everything mode.

Would you believe Civilisation was a "commercial" game? Sim City? Anno? The original Elite or Privateer? The x series?

Don't be bringing "it's uncommercial nobody will buy it if you make it hard to get all the shinies" to criticise a game that's already got a fully funded kickstarter under its belt. The evidence suggests a lot of people do, in fact, quite want this sort of game.

Don't worry, the AI will not be coded so as to immediately screw you up. You will be able to advance. But you won't be handed a gun with a chainsaw bayonet and pointed at an endless supply of cheap enemies either. If that means you won't like the game, you should probably not buy it.
I assure you, I am not some avatar of evil trying to corrupt LT into the typical blergh we see in gaming these days. I'm simply stating a problem with the game that might arise. And an interesting one. I can't remember a strategy game where the AI was too good for players. And, no, I don't want a chainsaw bayonet.


Edit: That's a really great read, Flatfingers. Thanks for pointing that to me. It's interesting to think about this game as being a singleplayer MMO.
-Keon-

(I don't have any funny quotes to put here yet. Somebody say something funny.)
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Re: How to stop every single AI from becoming super-rich

#15
Remember that each individual AI doesn't exist in a vacuum. They'll all be racing to mine in the same fields, and fighting with the same pirates, who fight with the same vigilantes and cops, who fight with the same terrorists, etc.

There should probably be a few safeguards to as to not make the game too easy for anyone (player or AI), but Josh has said that AI actors think not only of themselves in their mental equation for success, but also of other AI actors and the player, and how should be used or avoided.
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