bobele
Smash Rookie
I have trained some of my amiibos again and again to learn how to trigger a behavior I want. I have a Yoshi resetted and trained more than 15 times and here is what I have learned:
amiibos do not imitate your Playstyle. They do not reproduce your moves or combos. The way you play does not have a direct impact on the behavior of an amiibo. It does passively influence it, as you will see later. amiibos most probably have some sort of „digital evolution“ I will explain later.
amiibos do not store anything close to complex AI. When you google, you find that there are 256 byte a game can store on a Figure besides Name, Owner etc. Thats not 256 Kilobyte, it’s 256 byte. That’s 256 numbers between 0 and 255. A single Windows Icon easily is more than 100 times that size. You can see that there is no room to store any complex behavior. But playing with an amiibo DOES result in very different play styles, so the DO have to store some sort of behavior, don’t they? Well, yes an no.
amiibos do in fact just use the AI all CPU-Opponents do use also. This AI has fixed behaviours for given „Moves“. A Move becomes „valid“, when a certain situation is „true“. Example: A CPU has a Side-Special with a Range of 80 Pixels. An Opponent 81 Pixels away will be missed, anything closer than 80 Pixels will result in a hit, but with decreasing damage done. For a Level 1 CPU this move will become „Valid“ when an Opponent comes close to anything between 100 and 50 Pixels. If the move becomes valid, the AI may choose to use it. It may choose which valid move it uses randomly or it has a priority list, I do not know. A Level 1 CPU will use this move with some chance to miss. For a Level 9 CPU this Move becomes valid then an Opponent comes close to anything between 83 and 50… as a result a Level 9 CPU will hit more precisely. This of course is just an example and much less complex as it really is, but this will be the way it works.
amiibos use the very same rules to fight. It only does not choose their moves randomly or by a fixed list, it does so by a changing priority. Here is how it works:
A Level 1 amiibo starts with random parameters for its Moves. It does not have any more Moves oder Combos than a Standard CPU has, it just has other priorities. This is why any resetted amiboo does seem to fight in another way than before. Lets again take the Side-Special as example. It gets an Priority-Value of 5. Then there is another Move that has a Priority-Value of 5 also. This is all that the amiibo stores. Now the AI of the game comes to play. Both moves get valid, when an Opponent comes close to a certain Range. As both have the same Priority-Value, they have a 50% Chance to be triggered. The Match ends with a certain result that is stored on the amiibo (lets say something like 0-100% success). The next fight the digital evolution kicks in: Priority Values are changed randomly. In our example the first Value is raised by one, the second lowered by one. The amiibo fights its match. It now uses the first move more often than the second one. After the match it stores its success-value. If it was more successful than last time, it will keep its new values. If it wasn’t, the changes are discarded. This way the behavior of an amiibo slowly changes to something it is successful with.
Additionally it gets more precise in its moves with a higher level, as it adapts the given rules of the moves as described earlier. And it also gets a damage boost, which makes High Level amiibos seem so much better than Low Level amiibos. You will find a Level 1 amiibo dealing only 50% of the damage that character normally deals with a certain move, while a Level 50 amiibo easily deals up to 150% of the damage.
If you play around with you amiibo, you will find it does not play as you do. It does however adapt to your weaknesses. Try it: If an amiibo alters its behavior in a way you like, let it pummel you like there is no tomorrow. It will keep the change. But in the end you cannot REALLY influence their behavior. The strongest and most aggressive amiibos I have I did not play against once while training. I just did let them Level by 8vs8 Smashes with amiibos only. That almost always results in 3-4 really strong amiibos and another 4 that are total crap. The good ones started to evolve in a good way, the bad ones did not find the right modifications… and they never catch up.
To get a good amiibo, it in not a good idea to fight against only one type of enemy. I tried. If you do, the amiibo will adapt to that exact enemy, but will be weak against others. If this exact enemy is vulnerable to a certain move, digital evolution will make this one move highest priority and other will almost never be used. You then have a specialist that takes a lot of time to adapt to new situations.
Of course all this is PROBABLY so, but it seems to be. And of course it is much more complex, as there are also rules involved how to react on moving platforms and things like that and then combinations of all those rules. But it can be taken as a fact, that there is only ONE Artificial Intelligence in the game that amiibos and CPU share, that you cannot train it anything this Artificial Intelligence does not already has in itself (like complete new Combos and such) and that trying to produce a certain play style for your amiibo will not work and is a waste of time. All you can do is tweaking the AI already there by letting it be successful or not.
amiibos do not imitate your Playstyle. They do not reproduce your moves or combos. The way you play does not have a direct impact on the behavior of an amiibo. It does passively influence it, as you will see later. amiibos most probably have some sort of „digital evolution“ I will explain later.
amiibos do not store anything close to complex AI. When you google, you find that there are 256 byte a game can store on a Figure besides Name, Owner etc. Thats not 256 Kilobyte, it’s 256 byte. That’s 256 numbers between 0 and 255. A single Windows Icon easily is more than 100 times that size. You can see that there is no room to store any complex behavior. But playing with an amiibo DOES result in very different play styles, so the DO have to store some sort of behavior, don’t they? Well, yes an no.
amiibos do in fact just use the AI all CPU-Opponents do use also. This AI has fixed behaviours for given „Moves“. A Move becomes „valid“, when a certain situation is „true“. Example: A CPU has a Side-Special with a Range of 80 Pixels. An Opponent 81 Pixels away will be missed, anything closer than 80 Pixels will result in a hit, but with decreasing damage done. For a Level 1 CPU this move will become „Valid“ when an Opponent comes close to anything between 100 and 50 Pixels. If the move becomes valid, the AI may choose to use it. It may choose which valid move it uses randomly or it has a priority list, I do not know. A Level 1 CPU will use this move with some chance to miss. For a Level 9 CPU this Move becomes valid then an Opponent comes close to anything between 83 and 50… as a result a Level 9 CPU will hit more precisely. This of course is just an example and much less complex as it really is, but this will be the way it works.
amiibos use the very same rules to fight. It only does not choose their moves randomly or by a fixed list, it does so by a changing priority. Here is how it works:
A Level 1 amiibo starts with random parameters for its Moves. It does not have any more Moves oder Combos than a Standard CPU has, it just has other priorities. This is why any resetted amiboo does seem to fight in another way than before. Lets again take the Side-Special as example. It gets an Priority-Value of 5. Then there is another Move that has a Priority-Value of 5 also. This is all that the amiibo stores. Now the AI of the game comes to play. Both moves get valid, when an Opponent comes close to a certain Range. As both have the same Priority-Value, they have a 50% Chance to be triggered. The Match ends with a certain result that is stored on the amiibo (lets say something like 0-100% success). The next fight the digital evolution kicks in: Priority Values are changed randomly. In our example the first Value is raised by one, the second lowered by one. The amiibo fights its match. It now uses the first move more often than the second one. After the match it stores its success-value. If it was more successful than last time, it will keep its new values. If it wasn’t, the changes are discarded. This way the behavior of an amiibo slowly changes to something it is successful with.
Additionally it gets more precise in its moves with a higher level, as it adapts the given rules of the moves as described earlier. And it also gets a damage boost, which makes High Level amiibos seem so much better than Low Level amiibos. You will find a Level 1 amiibo dealing only 50% of the damage that character normally deals with a certain move, while a Level 50 amiibo easily deals up to 150% of the damage.
If you play around with you amiibo, you will find it does not play as you do. It does however adapt to your weaknesses. Try it: If an amiibo alters its behavior in a way you like, let it pummel you like there is no tomorrow. It will keep the change. But in the end you cannot REALLY influence their behavior. The strongest and most aggressive amiibos I have I did not play against once while training. I just did let them Level by 8vs8 Smashes with amiibos only. That almost always results in 3-4 really strong amiibos and another 4 that are total crap. The good ones started to evolve in a good way, the bad ones did not find the right modifications… and they never catch up.
To get a good amiibo, it in not a good idea to fight against only one type of enemy. I tried. If you do, the amiibo will adapt to that exact enemy, but will be weak against others. If this exact enemy is vulnerable to a certain move, digital evolution will make this one move highest priority and other will almost never be used. You then have a specialist that takes a lot of time to adapt to new situations.
Of course all this is PROBABLY so, but it seems to be. And of course it is much more complex, as there are also rules involved how to react on moving platforms and things like that and then combinations of all those rules. But it can be taken as a fact, that there is only ONE Artificial Intelligence in the game that amiibos and CPU share, that you cannot train it anything this Artificial Intelligence does not already has in itself (like complete new Combos and such) and that trying to produce a certain play style for your amiibo will not work and is a waste of time. All you can do is tweaking the AI already there by letting it be successful or not.
