Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it's not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision tree based AI? Are any under development? I know AI can be resource intensive, but it seems that at least turn based games could employ it.

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[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Yeah, but it's not like an LLM or nueralnet thing. The kind of AI used for video games doesn't need all that to feel smarter/harder.

Making a bot harder is actually easier than making it easier. It's super straightforward to make one that always wins and is perfect. It's more involved making a bot that doesn't always take the best path or the most efficient way of completing the thing. I, personally, could make a Rocket League bot that plays the game better than any human since it's all just math, and the computer is a calculator. I don't think I would be able to make one a human player could actually beat though.

L4D has a mechanic like what the OP wants. It's just not very good (IMO it overcorrects way too hard in both directions). Every time you win or lose or this happens too much, and this happens too little, it keeps track of that and then just adjusts things to change it up. Like if you sprint through one stage without resistance, the next stage will have more infected to deal with. They even gave it a name: the AI Director.

The alien in Alien Isolation is like that; but it is better done.