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Lead the German, American, or Korean civilization to glory as you match wits against two cunning AI opponents. The demo includes three of the fifteen epochs (Renaissance, Imperial, and Enlightenment) and two game types (Conquest and Territory Control). Weather conditions are likely to change with the seasons.
Demo requires the previous installation of DirectX9 from Microsoft.
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AI: A Most Difficult Puzzle
Remember the Rubik's Cube? Looked simple enough, yet when you got to that top row, that damn top row, only a few of us really got that one done without cheating (using the mastery book or peeling off the stickers and strategically replacing them). I won't say how I did it. ;)
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In Empire Earth II you'll mastermind your civilizations rise to power through 12,000 years of human history. The span of the game is divided into 15 epochs that span from the dawn of man into the near future. As you advance through the epochs, new and improved units and structures become available. Each month we'll unveil three epochs in this newsletter. This month's featured epochs are:
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Renaissance
1300 AD - 1500 AD
The use of gunpowder in military weapons and the common use of crossbows brought about the downfall of the feudal system - a commoner now could kill a knight with very little economic investment. As social structure began to evolve, so too did science and philosophy.
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Imperial
1500 AD - 1650 AD
The difference between applied and theoretical science begins to make itself evident as inventions like the worm gear appear just as people are searching the stars with telescopes. Advances in gunpowder weapons bring cannons to the battlefield and wars become more offensive and bloody. An extensive period of aggressive colonialism characterizes this epoch.
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Enlightenment
1650 AD - 1800 AD
The Enlightenment represents the period of time when rigid social structures finally fell apart – when education and a merit system began to decide class hierarchy. Republican forms of government began to replace monarchies, sometimes violently. More advances in naval technologies gave rise to mercantilism and facilitated the rise of capitalism.
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Empire Earth II includes over 350 unique units and structures - 33% more than the original game. This month's featured units are:
The Halberdier
The Halberdier uses his versatile halberd to adapt to a range of combat situations. RPS bonus against light mounted and light artillery.
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The Field Gun
The Field Gun is a highly mobile piece of light artillery. RPS bonus against Heavy Mounted and Light Infantry.
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The Regular
is disciplined in field tactics and the use of the rifled musket. RPS bonus against light mounted and light artillery.
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Hello, The Mad Doctor here, Creative Director on Empire Earth II, just checking in with you about a favorite subject of mine: Artificial Intelligence, a.k.a. AI. You see, creating great AI in games is a lot like solving the Rubik's Cube: seems like a simple enough job at first (just move the troops where they're needed), but it gets more and more complex as you progress through it. Thus, we find ourselves at the forefront of AI advancement in order to sate the insatiable appetite of today's savvy audience. So listen up, because today I want to tell you about the thinking behind the AI in Empire Earth II, some of the essentials for delivering exceptional AI in games.
Now, here's the daunting task before me: take this highly anticipated gem of an epic game, and starting from scratch with a brand new engine, improve it (and by that I mean really improve it) - conceive, create and implement innovative, advanced, non-cheating AI.
Problems & Solutions
There are several categories of problems that all RTS games need to solve (and here's where I get geeky and technical!). Some of them are:
- Path Planning. This is simply moving units from point A to point B. But as most AI programmers will tell you, it's a very tough problem, especially if you want to do it efficiently. Path Planning can eat up all of your precious CPU if you're not careful! The key is this: you put all the obstacles (mountains, trees, buildings) down on the map and break down the open, pathable space into the biggest convex regions you can. Then you can just step from one convex region to the next and search for a path using what's called a "Search algorithm". Sounds easy? It's not! (For details, see the link provided at the end of this article).
- Troop Allocation. In any RTS game, you have a certain number of troops available, and a certain number of tasks for them to accomplish. Tasks include things like "Attack the enemy base", "Defend your base", "Gather resources". Each task has a priority, and each unit in the game has some appropriateness for every type of task. There're always more tasks than guys to accomplish them, and the number of combinations of troop matchings to tasks is huge, so giving weights to the matchings and pruning the possible matches to a reasonable subset is where you have to get clever.
- Map Analysis. So, how do you come up with the tasks in the first place? How do you weigh the importance (and risk) of each task? You need to analyze the map, and this involves a lot of Computer Vision techniques (grassfire transformation, connected region extraction, Hough transforms, convex hull extraction, really, really, really geeky stuff!). Even building walls around a base is a tough problem for an AI --- notice that few, if any, other games ever have the AI build walls around their base! Ours does. :)
Additionally, in Empire Earth II, we had to come up with AI solutions for a number of other major design innovations that created hurdles for the AI design and implementation. These include seizing territories, changing resources, complex diplomacy and gigantic maps, in addition to all the traditional RTS AI problems. Six to eight person years of coding went into solving the AI problems, and decades of AI experience informed the architecture.
An AI for all Occasions
So how smart is smart? When it all comes down to it, folks want to play against a smart AI opponent - yet, everybody wants to win, right? So how do you ride the line between satisfying players needs for a good old fashioned kick ass game with a formidable opponent, while allowing them a fair opportunity to win the game in good fashion? First, each player can choose a skill level (from 1-5) and each AI can be set to a difficulty level (also 1-5). In addition, each player has the ability to start at a different epoch, and you can have up to 9 AI opponents, so you can pretty much handicap the game as you like. In Empire Earth II, it's our hope that you can't tell when you're playing against a real person, and when you're playing against the AI. A lot of effort and smarts went into creating this AI, and I can say without any hesitation that it is the best AI ever seen in an RTS game.
For details on some of the types of algorithms involved, as well as some of my AI background, see:
http://www.maddocsoftware.com/company/ai_specialization.asp.
Until Next Time,
Ian Davis, Ph.D. "The Mad Doctor"
CEO & Founder, Mad Doc™ Software
Creative Director, Empire Earth® II
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Legal: © 2005 Sierra Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. Empire Earth, Sierra and the Sierra logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Sierra Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Vivendi Universal Games and the Vivendi Universal Games logo are trademarks of Vivendi Universal Games, Inc. Mad Doc Software, Mad Doc®, the Mad Doc flask, and the Mad Doc logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Mad Doc Software, LLC. All rights reserved. Portions of this software are included under license. © 2005 Mad Doc Software, LLC. GameSpy and the "Powered by GameSpy" design are trademarks of GameSpy Industries, Inc. The NVIDIA logo and "The Way It's Meant to be Played" logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The ratings icon is a registered trademark of the Entertainment Software Association. Pentium and the Intel Inside logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. For additional legal credits, click here.
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