Design of Emergent and Adaptive Virtual Players in a War RTS Game
This addresses the issue of repetitive and unrealistic AI opponents in single-player war RTS games, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing adaptation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of predictable and non-adaptive virtual opponents in war Real Time Strategy games by proposing a method to automatically generate virtual players that adapt to human player skills, with preliminary results demonstrated on a custom-built game.
Basically, in (one-player) war Real Time Strategy (wRTS) games a human player controls, in real time, an army consisting of a number of soldiers and her aim is to destroy the opponent's assets where the opponent is a virtual (i.e., non-human player controlled) player that usually consists of a pre-programmed decision-making script. These scripts have usually associated some well-known problems (e.g., predictability, non-rationality, repetitive behaviors, and sensation of artificial stupidity among others). This paper describes a method for the automatic generation of virtual players that adapt to the player skills; this is done by building initially a model of the player behavior in real time during the game, and further evolving the virtual player via this model in-between two games. The paper also shows preliminary results obtained on a one player wRTS game constructed specifically for experimentation.