I have noticed that the AI tends to land it's aircraft for no apparent reason. So far, that is the only problem I have noticed.
The core of the AI seems solid (although, I would love to see where the AI Strategy module was heading) so I really need a starting point for modding.|||Next week, I'll have some insight into the strategy manager. It was abandoned fairly early but left in as a starting point for some cool new stuff.
I'll be trolling some until next week though, so I can answer some questions as they come up.|||Maybe you can answer a quick question. When I try to run a test game (AIs only) where I am an observer the game wont let me change the game speed. Vanilla allowed me to do it. Any idea why it isn't working anymore and where I could change it?|||In the console type SetFocusArmy 0 ... set the speed ... then SetFocusArmy -1.
You have to be in control of an army to do that.
Just make sure cheating is on, Variable game speed, blah blah blah.|||I've noticed on at least one occasion of the AI building way too many transports (literally several dozen of the buggers), most of which will end up just sitting around not doing anything.
None of the AIs seem to work right on water maps really.|||I'll repeat what I said elsewhere so it's in a good spot.
I noticed the AI tried to build a mavor and a novax without any t3 power (or any real power at all). Their power handling in general is fairly weak...
I had seen the AI try to build a experimental nuke launcher, leave it at 250 health, then start on another one.
Fairly inefficient handling of ship groups (a lot of the time single ships will run in and suicide themselves). Air is a lot better than vanilla, though.
Water maps definitely cause quite a bit of difficulty for the poor AI. It'll stack tons of ground units on ridges and they'll do nothing, it is very slow in acquiring tougher ships, the ships themselves think they are Chuck Norris..
Seen the transport bug, too.
Commanders like to get shot at.
Doesn't like to repair stuff.
Doesn't escort experimentals.
The Cheating AI is not nearly as aggressive/unit spam happy as Sorian's in vanilla. There is a lot less units on the field... in a 3v3 on some random land map, the game was dominated purely by tier1 bombers and ASF until late-game when a exp bomber finally showed up and blew everything up.
As I play more I'll document more things I find.
edit - Somewhat related... as an Observer, why can't I use the minimap to move my view around? How did this stay in FA from vanilla...? That's a pretty severe bug imo.|||Awesome. This gives me some things to work on. The building before it has the appropriate Pgens will be easy to fix. The vanilla AI had the same problem.
I have an idea about what would be causing the AI to just leave things unbuilt and when I fix the above issue it should at least help for now.
Commanders are using the same behavior they were in vanilla. I should be able to just cut and paste my commander behaviors into the game.
I'll look into the Engineer Manager to see if I can get the AI to repair things like in Vanilla.|||I've seen the normal AI pump out engineers when my buddy and I were attacking his base. It was a prolonged assault, and he kept pumping out engineers, so he had nothing to oppose us with. It seems like the prioritization on what to build needs to be tweaked a bit.
I've also noticed the odd excess of air transports, although not to the same extent.
I've played on a (built in) water map against an easy AI, and seen it pump it large numbers of UEF land vehicles. Those vehicles then all clumped up trying to get to the enemy. Which they couldn't, since it was a water map. So, the AI shouldn't build gratuitous land units on a water map. It should build them when it intends to put them in transports and attack with them.|||The biggest problems I've noticed are,
1. Doesn't build enough defenses. Even Turtle AI builds less point defense and AA than vanilla AI, and none of the AIs seem to use T2 artillery for defense like they used to. Lack of AA in particular is a big problem.
2. Doesn't fully utilize its resources. Even if you sit back and let the AI capture almost the entire map's worth of mass deposits, it doesn't build its base or tech at a rate commensurate with its resource income. Could be related to bad power management, as some have mentioned.
3. Builds loads of land units on water maps and never transports them. I saw the mention of the "water map marker" in the dev's AI discussion, but it seems like this marker is either not present or not working on several maps.
4. Builds loads of transports and never uses them, as mentioned already.
The Sorian AI for regular SC really upped the fun factor on our LAN games vs. the AI, and my buddies and I are really looking forward to an FA version! Thanks!|||I'll throw out some stuff about the strategy manager and what we wanted to do with it. And why it was just too damn big.
The idea was to create a lot of AIs, more than we have now. The rush is sort of a similar idea. We have rush for land, balanced, air, and naval.
We could then swap in and out the strategies based on the world. This would mean basically dropping out all the old builders and replacing them with new builders.
There are about a thousand roadblocks for this though. What do you do with the engineers currently building? How do you determine which strategies are valid for which bases? How much do you break up the strategies? How many strategies do you need? How much time does each strategy take to build? How often do you switch strategies?
And that's without the technical problems, coding, testing, etc that it would take.
We had some pretty conservative estimates at being 20-40 hours per different strategy. And originally I was thinking of having 20 or so strategies. Thinking that would basically be the bare minimum.
So there were some decisions that had to be made about how to proceed with the AI. A number of other issues had a much higher priority so we basically had to take it out. We left in the framework there that we did some ultra-simple tests for viability, but it was just going to be too large and time consuming.
So that's the short history of the strategies concept.|||Quote:|||If I knew anything about scripting or lua I would gladly set up some build orders and try to figure out a way for the AI to determine them. Perhaps it could simply use a proximity-based algorithm or some such for the time being
As a foundation, I think each expansion base should just build tons of defenses, shields, what-have you, then move on to factories, ect... as rushing and taking advantage of other things means you can easily deny the AI expanding, which is one of their biggest pitfalls on larger maps.
I don't know what would need to be done to get them to use boats in groups like Sorian's vanilla AI handled land units, but if it could be done, it would GREATLY improve the AI's ability to fight on water maps. As it is, they are a joke unless they start pouring out experimentals, which is pretty hard for them when they have no power at all.
Sorian's vanilla AI was a quite strong foundation. I did read however that fixing boats was something he wanted to wait on to see if FA fixed it... well, it hasn't really, so hopefully that'll get some love as I enjoy water maps the most. The Air is fixed though! I see bombers attacking in waves... although they're generally only tier1 bombers, but I'm sure that'll get fixed as this project goes along.
It's really surprising to see a game developer say he wanted to make the AI better. That's gotta be a first I've ever seen in the industry. I've been modding games for 8-9 years, and I've done mostly work in the AI department, especially with Starcraft. One of the biggest tragedies is game developers generally refuse to even make the AI accessible to modders, like in wc3, most shooters, ect.
So, I'll do everything I can to relay important information to you guys.|||Quick question about modding the FA AI - can we add them to the lobby with a regular mod yet? Or is that still only possible through a gamedata .scd mod? If the latter is still true, there's another way you may want to use..
Since you guys are most likely starting from scratch on your AIs in any case - there IS a way to make your AI mod-manager compatible.
It involves replacing the default AI code with your own, which would mean that, for example, the Sorian Cheating AI would be selected by activating the SorianAI mod, and selecting the regular Cheating AI from the list.
The only caveat is that you can't change the lobby *at all*. If you do, you're automatically in the realm of a gamedata mod. However, nothing is stopping you from swapping AI brains at the very start of the game, so all you need is a window that pops up when the game starts, listing players & their AI brains. Add in some configuration options, and not only would you be able to enable multiple AIs from different mods at the same time, but you'd be able to tweak the cheat factor up or down while the game is progressing, depending on how hard the AI is acting....|||my biggest complaint with the AI is with its use of tech4 units. in late game it would be nice if it would send groups of them all at once, like 5 or so. When it sends 1 or 2 at a time they just die, especially when they have little escort from small units.
few other things that would rock
- AI send larger groups of units instead of little packs that get blown up before shooting.
- Stop building land units on islands :S
- AI seems to try to build more than it can handle. Instead of trying to build 5 tech 4 units at once, build 1 or 2 at a time?
- Less clutter in AI base. I often have to use 1000 unit limit just to prevent the AI from growing such a large base with useless buildings that it hits any other limit before it can become combat effective. Not sure if this is possible, but could the AI destruct or reclaim buildings once they are obsolete? Such as T1 power generators once it has reached T3 and they are just taking up unit count. Not only would this improve the AIs abilities but it would help with lag!
- Better naval abilities. Less solo ships floating around. AI often sends a single battleship without proper escort.
So overall my biggest things I would like to see changed.
Bigger armies sent against me! Both of regular units and bigger groups of Tech 4. AI should be sending groups of over 100 T3 units late game if there is to be any chance of defeating me.
The problem with most AI, even the vanilla SupCom sorian cheat AI was that they sucked late game. All you had to do was survive for the first 30 or 40 minutes of the game and after that your base won't be touchable by the AI, so then you just spend time breaking down the AIs tangle of junk structures.
the best AI i have played against is the King of the Hill version 10 map. Set to survival mode. Reason it is so fun is that late game it sends huge waves of good units against me and will really test my defenses, and break through sometimes. I think my base should take damage throughout the game so i have to rebuild things, no other AI has forced me to have to rebuild large portions of my base!
Sorry this was so long!|||Bigger groups should be doable.
DFS came up with a great idea on how to keep the AI from overbuilding (which is in use). Couple that with my improved unit cap relief code and that should do wonders. I could also bring back my reclaim engineers so that useless buildings get reclaimed.
I hope to keep the AI from building land units on island maps, or at least not so many. I also hope to get the AI to actually transport them. Right now the AI keeps its transports too busy moving engineers.|||Quote:|||sorian|||Quote:|||I have to disagree with the idea of the AI sending out groups of 4-5 experimentals. If you're that far into the game, it probably should have ended a long time ago and you're intentionally drawing it out by sitting back and letting the AI build. The only scenario where I can actually see 4-5 T4s being viable is on an 81x81 map with high unit cap and multiple AIs. With how effective the experimentals are now, I can easily beat the regular AI by rolling out with a single monkeylord or fatboy as soon as I hit T4. I'd like to see the AI build experimentals faster/earlier, but still send them 1 or 2 at a time until extremely late game (perhaps with some T2/T3 backup). One T4 can easily ruin your day if you're not prepared for it. If the AI waits until it has 4-5 of them before sending them out, chances are you a) know about them already and b) have had plenty of time to build a counter.
As a side note, the cheating AI seems to build experimentals and just let them chill in his base without ever using them. Not sure if this applies at all to the standard AI. The only reason we were able to beat the cheat AI was because he left 5 GCs just sitting around... otherwise it would have been nearly impossible.|||sorian|||im just wondering, why does the ai use its transports like gunships, while not building any real gunships|||It's funny- seems that GPG uses sorian as the AI's finisher. They build the foundation and framework but leave rooms incomplete and don't put the roof on.
|||A few things that I have noted while playing LAN with my friend. Of course, there are many more, but still:* AI builds a single experimental, sends it out and it is taken out very easily.
It would be more fun if they did, what Machater suggested, built a group of them and then sent them out.
* AI rush and AI adaptive does not use tech 3 for much in the end game. My tech 2 point defenses and my friend's tech 3 UEF bots kills hordes of tech 1 AI units. These were two separate fronts. And many of these were just running in a straight line down the location where the point defenses were place, so the defenses more or less just picked them off one by one.
If the AI could send in tech 3 units instead of tech 1 in the late game, it would be much more fun.
I am currently testing out custom made AIs from this site but mostly waiting for Sorian AI because me and my friend played his old AI in old SupCom.
The supreme AI from old SupCom was much more fun in LAN than the adaptive in FA, kind of a bummer. Now the AI is mostly good in the early stages but towards the end, it doesn't upgrade or send in much of the tech 3.
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