Oct 7, 2010 22:01 GMT  ·  By

The Creative Assembly is working on a new Total War video game, marking the return to the Shogunate era of Japanese history, and one of the most important elements of the design that the development team is working on is the creation of an Artificial Intelligence that can compete with the tactics employed by the player.

Mike Simpson, who is the creative director working on Shogun 2 at The Creative Assembly, commented that, “In the last almost 20 years that I've been working on games, it hasn't really progressed very much. We still really do the same kind of AI that we did back in the eighties. They're obviously a lot more sophisticated and use more processing power, but it's not really proper AI. Dumbness-avoidance is probably a better way of looking at it rather than artificial intelligence; we do a lot of dumbness avoidance.”

He added, “We're still struggling to come up with a better AI behaviour for a particular encounter. For example, things like 'kiting' the AI, that's always a tricky one, where players drag enemies out of formation and then deal with them one at a time.”

The most recent releases in the Total War series, Empire and Napoleon, have been thoroughly criticized by fans and some reviewers for the fact that the A.I. was incapable of making simple tactical choices that seem obvious to a human gamer.

The new Shogun game might take on the same historical period as the one put out ten years ago but the changes will be significant.

Players will not be able to engage in naval battles close to the coast of Japan, opening up another layer of strategy.

Hero units will now also appear on the battlefield and the strategic map will have more uses for agents.

Shogun 2: Total War is set to be released in early 2011 exclusively for the PC.