On Mon, 25 Mar 2013, Onno Meyer wrote:
Agreed, with several caveats: You have to integrate the lessons from the different AIs into one. How? Having different AIs fight and learn against each other puts you at the mercy of the artificial scoring rules of the wargame. Will the special conditions of the most recent wars hide universal truths? If an AI had to learn from recent US Army experience, would it be any good against a 'peer competitor'? Once you reach a reasonably high skill, will real mission data improve the program, or just confirm what it already knew?
A less canonical but IMHO more realistic approach to the tactics skill would be to require specialisations for different types of foes with different equipement, training and tactics (for quick and dirty you can use TL as specialisation, or you can add the opponents tactics specialisation to the description of armies of your world) or alternativly use some style familiarity mechanism.
I would assume, that at some point the amount of learning required to increase your abilities would increase by much, though that is not represented by GURPS rules. It also would be hard to come up with a skill level, where this should start, because there does not really seem to be a consensus, which skill level should map to which real life abilities.
Another problem is that what's good for the goose is good for the gander -- if I want sensor ops skill programs to see through stealth, but not tactics skill programms to out-think human player characters, what can I do? And if the program makes it possible to see a stealthy battlesuit with a helmet-mounted sensor of another battlesuit, what does that do to the stealth-vs-sensors race in grav tanks?
Computers are AFAIK better in chess, where you play the board, then in poker, where you play the opponent. I think it works with suspension of disbelief to state, that in some setups AIs get the upper hand and in others humans. And that there are "meta"tactics, to force the opponent in a situation, where you have the advantage.
So essentially you have tactics (AI on humand) versus tactics (human on AI) that get assymetric situaational modifers. This gives you some wiggleroom for slapping penalities on AIs. It works even better, if in your setting combat AIs are built to fight other AIs and using them on humans is an exceptional case, that happens to hardly anyone but pcs, because then the AIs have to default from their tactics (AI on AI) skill.
_______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
