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.
Hard bots have actually been so much trouble, that literally the only way to make them hard at all is to make them cheat by allowing them to operate outside of the ruleset the player is bound by. It’s a humongous issue with every strategy game on the market.