> What benefit would your machine learning AI bring to a RTS game?

Currently if I understand correctly, the traditional approach is to define a bunch of actions and figure out a realistic way to choose what action to perform, tuning a state machine carefully to make sure the character is realistic as well as beatable. I can imagine this takes a lot of work.

I think a huge benefit of machine learning could be to change the nature of the interface that the character designer has access to: instead of designing the character's internal states, probably relying on collaboration with a programmer, a designer could be tuning reward functions, which more naturally express the character's relationship with its environment.

In other words, the designer can now treat the character states as a black-box model, and instead worry directly about its input-output behavioural relationship, something I think an artist might have better intuition for compared to dealing with explicit state machines.

Being able to do design by means of tuning rewards and actions could help decouple design from programming, which I think would be hugely beneficial for industry.

> Currently if I understand correctly, the traditional approach is to define a bunch of actions and figure out a realistic way to choose what action to perform, tuning a state machine carefully to make sure the character is realistic as well as beatable. I can imagine this takes a lot of work.

The aim is not to produce a realistic response, but fun. It's much, much easier to produce a response that isn't fun than to produce one that is, and this is the problem. Often a complex, systemic AI needs much more tuning to be fun than a simpler, more authored AI. Fun is an emotional response so it's hard to define systemically.

> In other words, the designer can now treat the character states as a black-box model, and instead worry directly about its input-output behavioural relationship, something I think an artist might have better intuition for compared to dealing with explicit state machines.

Game designers are not the same as graphic designers or artists, they work exclusively in logic. Flow charts, decision trees and giant spreadsheets are standard tools of the trade.

However, there's certainly scope for being able to take the game designer's logic to a higher, more abstract level. Being able to remove some of the micro-management would be useful. I'm not sure that machine learning helps there though, it seems more of a planning problem.

As a big fan of Age of Empires series I have to disagree, after a while the game (even in hardest mode) becomes predictable and after that the solo mode game is pretty much done. That doesn't happens on a LAN party because humans evolve their strategies as their opponents gets better and that increases the life cycle of the game in orders of magnitude. Which would be a very important economical incentive for an on-line game.

The thing is some research has to be done for this and the game industry is not very healthy to support research.