1.3 Tactics & Strategy's

Tactics & Strategy's

The element of using tactics and strategy's in gaming AI is one of importance and vision in the role of emerging the player into a game, what I mean by this is by using the element of tactics and stratigy's in game, it brings a game realism to life by imitating real life situations. I have talked about tactics and strategy's in a previous post in the my blog, (Introduction to: NWC603COM – Using AI in Computer Games Assignment 1 - 5.1 Tactics & Strategy's) in this post I talk about how tactics and strategy's are used in today's games and the role they have, in this post I will be looking at how tactics and strategy's will apply to my game idea.

"Because of this design choice, level designers effectively fill the role of the high-level AI in real-time strategy games. Level designers:

• Are responsible for placing enemies strategically.
• Must balance the difficulty settings for each level.
• Implement scripts to handle special situations." (3)

Now the initial idea of strategy in AI is setting the AI a plan of action for or in game, now Champandard makes the first point in that strategy for AI is used for placing the enemy AI in a strategic position, now my game only has two AI zombie but they will be placed in a position where they can one, reach each point and then as soon as the player character enters room B, they can attack without any obstacle in its path. Now my game is not in the greatest detail when it comes to setting and changing the difficulty of the AI, the example used by Champandard is that of a game that has levels meaning the higher level you go the harder the AI is to kill.When the environment changes to that which  requires special situations, this could be when a member of the AI team gets kill in action, for example the leader of the team could get taken out so in that case another member of the team would need to step up and become the leader of the group. Again in my game this type of strategy is not used because the their are only two AI zombies working together. 

"In games like Halo and Killzone, paths are computed with a custom heuristic. This means that combat factors are included when selecting the best path:

• Is the actor moving through the cone of fire of a teammate?
• Is the actor exposed to the player’s weapons?"(4)

Now I have kept with Champandard because he gives a great view on tactics in AI gaming, the element of tactics will be applied in my game because the goal of the Zombie AI is to attack and kill the player character, the two zombies will work together and bet set a tactic to surround the player character to each side which disables him from escaping the scene. The quote also does say that tactics link in with heuristics because the AI used the best path, a common trial and error process to gain the best result and decides which direction the AI will head next. You could say that based on the current tactic of the AI was to get to a location without being detected by the player character but in order to do this the AI would need to use heuristics to find out which path would be the best and would work, other pathfinding options would be to find the least expensive route but this might not be the right move as it could lead in the AI being detected.

Its important to factor into my game that the element of tactics and strategy's wont play a massive role in the final outcome of my game but having the zombies use a strategy to surround the player character instead of both using the same path which could allow the player character to escape the situation I feel makes the scene that little more wild for the user playing and adds difficulty to the game without apply a higher damage rate required to kill one of the zombies.