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Comment by gibolt | Hacker News Reader

AI doesn't have to only try to win to be good. It has to give the perception of competition. Perhaps just scaling behind the scenes based on how the player is progressing

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I get frustrated with games that scale things with me. I want to be able to feel myself getting better, having my enemies scale with me on any axis really takes away from that feeling that I'm progressing.

I say this not because I think it's an especially noteworthy or important objection, but to echo GP's point, that it's very hard to find AI that suits everyone, and it's not just a matter of difficulty.

Exactly. I do want AI to scale with me, but by me selecting better AI when I get better. That's how I measure my progress: by having to select better AI. That makes my progress transparent.

And by having different AI at different difficulty levels, I think you actually can have AI that suits everyone. But I don't think most game companies like developing several separate versions of AI. They just want one that's superficially "good enough".

I recall seeing Sid Meier say in a talk that he liked to scale his AI to give players the sense of being on a knife's edge and then scaling it back near the end of a game to give a feeling of victory over impossible odds.

This always encourages a human strategy where the optimal behavior is to sandbag in whatever way the AI is measuring your progress, and then slingshot past them once the opportunity arises. Not to say that can't be fun for some people, but it's definitely not a silver bullet.

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