NTai config questions

[the-middleman]

Hi guys. Im pretty new to spring and a completely new to ntai. Im working with it since all the other ais seem to be messed up with the new spring version. There is no documentation that comes with ntai so I guess ill have to annoy you with my noobish questions.

Im using:
- Spring 0.75b2
- XTA v9
- NTAI XE9.73
- NTai ToolkitV0.27

Here is my first load of questions(expect more to come):

1) Spring will crash when something is messed up with my config. I read here on the forum that I should look into the log what caused the error. But what exactly should I look for? Im clueless what causes spring to crash and where is it represented in the log?

2) After a little while when the AI is expanding the game will become laggy. I have started a lot of different configs in the last day but this problem will allways occur. Anything I can do about it or is this a general NTAI problem? I could play the game lag free with many of the other AIs in one game(before the update to 0.75).

3) How can I make the AI more agressive? Right now it attacks only with one or two units at a time. Sometimes not at all. It has dozens of units standing right next to the factory where they were built but they are not moving. Yes I did make them "Attackers" and yes the ai can see enemy units on the radar. Im assuming this has something to do with "Global config options"->"Attack groups" but im not sure how to use that. What do "Increment size by" and "Increase by (%)" do?

4) Does the "Exclusion zone radius" work at all? And what unit does it use? Is it the same as what is shown as "Pos" ingame?

5) How can I make the AI use crawling mines? They are not moving at all(like most other units...see 3) )

6) How can I make clear to the AI that it should build factorys...many factorys and also more than one of the same type at a time but that one factory is more than enough for the beginning. As far as I see it I can only tell the AI to build zero, one or unlimited factorys. How can I make it build one kbotlab at the beginning an then expand a little before it builds more?

7) If I use my config on any map that has some water in it the game will crash only seconds after start. Any ideas about this? See 1) also.

Can I delete existing Task lists?
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edit: lol

I had more questions but I forgot them so expect more questions "soon"

thx for any help

[the-middleman]

9) How can I make the AI reclaim old metal extractors and replace them with moho ones?

[the-middleman]

Ok im not sure if anyone gives a damn and also im a noob so I probably dont know what im talking about...but this is what I currently think of ntai:

Dispite the problems listed above I was able to create a decent config for it. It builds units lots of units and does attack now(I fixed problem # 3) ). However it will still loose every match(currently fighting against KAI 0.12). The config does need more work but there are several problems which afaik cannot be solved via the config but are problems of the AI itself.

It seems to me NTAI is not a very good fighter. Although my config produces plenty of units NTAI will not use them "smart". Basicly it just sends them towards the nearest enemy, no matter what that is. It doesnt try to attack the enemy infrastructure but prefers to challange the enemies DGun. Also it doesnt seem to have any sense of territory or terrain. All buildings, including defense-towers will be build wherever the builder just happens to be. Once a building is built NTAI doesnt seem to care about it anymore. It wont defend any of its buildings. I have seen KAI build lasertowers INSIDE ntais base and ntai didnt react at all although it had many units nearby who could have easily blown the enemy builder to dust. Furthermore ntai doesnt seem understand terrain at all. It will make no use of montains or valley for its defenses. When I let it play against KAI on smalldivide ntai was able to rush the enemy and destroy its commander. But it lost the match because KAI had a single heavy lasertower on top of a mountain. Ntai sent all its tanks towards that tower although they couldnt climb the hill. Ntai continued to waste its units on that one tower(often sending them in one by one) and in the meantime KAI was able to rebuild its base and then won the match.
Afaik there is no possibility to affect the combat behavior of ntai via the config. Correct?

Also the entire tasklist-system isnt effective as it is now. It is simply not dynamic enough. All you can do is create a buildtree. However I can not really control when and how many units it has to build. So far I can choose between 0, 1 and unlimited units. None of these is a really good option. As it was said before by someone else it should be possible to limit the units construction not only by min and max energy-income. The same should be available for metal and the total ammount of resources available. One example: It is essential to build metal storages to play effectivly. But how high should the energy-income be before ntai build a metal storage? Makes no sense.

Ntai is depending on its tasklists. And the tasklists depend on units which use these tasklists. Therefor ntai can be easily influenced by destroying its builders. If the enemy manages to break through and destroy a whole bunch of construction-kbots ntai will have a different set of tasklists to work with...but it would be much smarter to simply replace the construction-kbots that were destroyed. But ntai will continue to build what is on one of its randomly chosen tasklists. IMO tasklists should be bound to conditions such as military and economical succes...instead of random choice.

I will continue to improve my config and I might release it once it plays somewhat effective but it would be nice to see the things mentioned above improved....code wise

[1v0ry_k1ng]

1) look at/play against at my xta config

2) start attack groups at a low number, and make each attack group slightly larger

3) it will replace mex, but it wont reclaim mex to make moho

4) Ntai is not smart at attacking yet

the toolkit does allow alot of flexibility you just have to figure out the use of min and max energy +single/solo build and putting things in the right ques.

also, KAI 0.12 downloadable from UF works and is currently the most dangerous AI

[AF]

You forgot the 9 or 10 dynamic attack universal build keywords.

On top of that most people are incredibly ignorant with regard to the b_rule type keywords which do exactly what they complain NTai doesn't do, aka AAI/OTAI/KAI style construction rules, that include metal energy and storage.

In fact for a long time I stressed the importance of b_rule_extreme and b_rule_extreme_carry so much so for a while NTai automatically added them in between every other task. Thats what the interpolate thing is.

However everybodies ignoring the universal build tasks and relying on hard defined unit names.

Attacking and defence placement:

Everybody makes out that NTai should have this, and I should do it. They dont really think about what it would require, or think of the limited amount fo resources I have. "KAI has it why cant NTai do it", and then "Why don't you just take it from KAI, its open source right?"

KAIs choke point defence placement and attack targetting both use a pathfinder. NTai does not have a pathfinder. KAIs pathfinder is highly integrated into its supporting components. To take out these systems would mean tearing out 80% of KAIs source code then pruning it excessively. I dont know much about KAIs workings either, so I'm almost guaranteed to mess it up.

So in the mean time while users are asking for more NTai features, and AFLobby is going down the drain, I'm stuck in the middle of a great tangled mess of code trying to remove a major component of KAI without any of the sub components and expecting it to still work.

If it helps I've already tried this and failed. I came to the conclusion that because I knew the basic theory behind the system it would be better to implement my own version with a superior pathfinder and support systems, along with numerous other ideas I had had which had a greater effect with far less time needed.


If you can build an llt inside an NTai base and it isnt targetted then theres a serious problem with how NTais learning values have been trained.

However since NTai was commited to svn nobody has suggested a change beyond the usual feature request. I've heard plenty of 'we want this feature' but no 'we should do that because then NTai will be able todo this feature and that'.

No patches of any kind submitted.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

the only thing NTAI needs is intelligent attack behavior (attacking where there is no defence/units)

[DJ]

You forgot the 9 or 10 dynamic attack universal build keywords.

On top of that most people are incredibly ignorant with regard to the b_rule type keywords which do exactly what they complain NTai doesn't do

I would be more than happy to educate myself but when i asked you if there was any documentation or guide on what the keywords all did you told me there wasn't any. We can't help not knowing all the keywords if what they do isn't documented.

[the-middleman]

I didnt mean to piss you off or something. Normally I am the one who yells RTFM at others but in this case there is absolutly nothing. All I can do is ask around here on the forums.

Also I do look at the universal keywords alot and I use some of them but stuff like "b_rule - a set of construction rules. see documentation" just makes me lol. Most of them are self explaining but what dynamic attack keywords do you speak of? Im not seeing anything that has to do with fighting

[1v0ry_k1ng]

yeah its true to say theres not currently instructions, i figured it out by asking AF each question manually

[the-middleman]

then maybe you can make a little doc?

[1v0ry_k1ng]

easier just to ask all the questions in a big list (numbered) here and ill answer em :)

[the-middleman]

look at first post then!

I allready solved 3 and 5 by turning "Dynamic selection" off

[AF]

If you just ask them in a big long list it gets lsot and someone else asks them and ti gets lsot and someone else asks them and so on.....

Where possible write documentation, even just savign questions and answers in a wiki page FAQ sort of thing, I lack the time to write extensive documentation as it is, nm answer all the questions over and over again.

[bwansy]

Then please don't call people "ignorant". No one is supposed to know the stuff without documentation, properly answered questions or tedious process of self-learning and trial-and-error.

[Linebacker]

Can I misuse your thread for my ntai question?

Which is: how can you turn off the chatlog spam in ntai?

Today I just found out that the BA config from DJ for ntai beats me sometimes. I believe it is cheating, but I'm not 100% sure yet. Did you try that one out? BA is a bit different especially with unit stats, but generally very close to original Spring. It won't let me easily win with my uber-aircon tactics, since it takes too long to build them en masse. And the BA-config is really good imho.

[AF]

I'm aware of BA.

You have issues running spring under 0.75b2 right?

This means you're using out of date NTai?

The builds with the uberlogging have fixes in them, but you cant use them because your not running 0.75b2

0.74b3 and the initial 0.75b1 release of NTai has a chatlog verbose spam error in which it randomly turns on and off which has since been fixed.

[Linebacker]

[quote="AF"]I'm aware of BA.[/quote[
I would know that by now, it wasn't directed towards you but the topic starter. Thanks for the clearing of the ntai chatlog issue. Will use the new ntai with the next spring version, which is hopefully not crashing all the time.