Whic of the Spring games have the toughest AI for turtlers?

What do you mean? you can try chickens bundled with zero-k , they are meant to encourage turtlers to attack their nests so chickens become very very powerful if you only defend.

Which game are you talking about? Not all AIs work with every game.

A turtler will generally lose to an agressive opponent, so I guess any tough AI is tougher to a turtler.

For BA.

imo KAIK.

E323AI in BA is really aggravating to defend against in the early game, but depending on map circumstances often sort of fizzles out in the late game.

E323AI crashes to often...

How is Shard on BA? How does it compare to KAIK, RAI, or E323?

E323AI I like, but does not run on my computer (spring 85 and OS X 10.6.8 on a 2011 Macbook Pro). It does however run on my brother's older Macbook. When we've included one of these AIs in games it's often vicious in the early game.

KAIK would be more frightening if it built big groups of something besides level 1 kbots.

RAI does some smart things on occasion, actually attacking with a large enough group of bombers to destroy targets for example, but mostly is lousy at offensive action.

ok. So have you played Shard before?

imo RAI is best, playing wise and stability. Not perfect but at least it is always doing something, other AIs sometimes go afk after a while.

Shard needs a config to play a game, the included config for BA does seem like a placeholder so i would not expect much.

You can probably play against E323AI if you use the XTA_BOT autohost... there you can add server side AI's with the !addbot command (probably should use "!help addbot" first...)

Anybody with a spare 20 minutes could make the Shard BA support orders of magnitude better. I just told Shard to build a few mexes and solars, llts, and a kbot factory and spam peewees, so it will just expand and spam peewees/aks endlessly. I did no finetuning or optimising or balancing at all.

Even a child could do a better job, I just needed something to demonstrate Shard did 'something' other than an idle commander

Well, I installed the original TA and some packs. The original TA has a lot of custom AI's which are very hard to beat. It is too bad Spring do not have that kind of support for the skirmish AI's

ta = 1 game that hasn't changed since 98 really.

spring = engine with many games, constantly changing.

On the technical side, Spring has such support. Just nobody is actively working on AIs for BA.

The support for AI in Total Anninhilation was just text files with weighted lists of units the AI could build.

Spring has much better AI support in that in Spring you can write your own AI algorithm, in a variety of language.

TotalA AIs were stupid and easy to beat, except those who cheated by having AI-only special units providing near unlimited M&E.


Spring AIs are full of bugs because:
- The Spring environnment change fast, so any AI not maintained rot and die.
- Spring AI developpers tends to be outsiders make one AI for a school project then leaving.
- Spring AI developpers tends too much to make generic AIs, disregarding details of the games, instead of trying to make one AI taylored to one Spring game only.

Jan and Feb did around BA 150 battles on DSD Revolution, AI vs AI and I'm sure that current RAI is the best. From 10 battles vs E323 he (acts more like man than pussy) won 6 to 8.

on a non-technical level i would just recommend robot defence with tech annihilation for turtlers. Its perfect for just that.