AI player positioning

[[oc]Nick]

How do you position AI players with b5? I used to use the .team method, but now the game starts immediately when I switch teams. Someone suggested Springlobby, but that only works for singleplayer. I want to setup multiplayer games with AI. Any suggestions?

[Oxirane]

Not sure if this'll work, but make sure no one has clicked ready before you use /team

[hoijui]

i am neither sure if this works, but its worth a try:
i think, that when you do /team X, it causes you to leave the game.
so try adding a TestGlobalAI on the same team as you (i guess, it is id 1, team 1). so there would still be a player on your team when you switch wiht /team, and the game should not end.
... if we are lucky.

[yuritch]

I usually just set the startpos to fixed or random when playing with AIs. That way there is no bother with switching teams and manually placing them.

[hoijui]

i just tested what i suggested, it does not work :/

yeah yuritch... but when you play alone agianst or 3 AIs, the default/fixed positioning is unusable on nearly all maps (if you like one team on each side of the map, you beeing one, and hte AIs the other), and random will most likely neihter give you that set up, and possibly never when you play against more then 2 AIs.
its not like the /cheat /team X way was a good one, but at least it was usable. ouh... does random positioning with start boxes work?

[[oc]Nick]

Thanks. I'll try that. This may all be moot since I haven't been able to get RAI or KAIK to work with b5 anyway.

[hoijui]

a KAIK that works with b5 comes with the installer, and RAI that works in b5 is available here in hte AI forum in the RAI thread, in the first post. they are both tested and work with b5.

[Chojin]

I used to extract the smd file, modify it and place it beside the map.sd7. This used to override the included smd and thus override start positions without the need of every player to have it. Has this stopped working?

[[oc]Nick]

Thanks for the RAI tip. The KAIK included with b5 stops doing anything after building the first factory. That makes for pretty short games.

[hoijui]

well.. give some feedback for that, which mod for example, are there related messages in infolog.txt or the KAIK logs?
i am using the KAIK that comes with b5, and it works great all through the game (BA 6.5).

[[oc]Nick]

I am doing the same. BA6.5, b5, KAIK version that comes with it. I saw some other posts with people having the same problem.

[hoijui]

hmm.. this is strange.
lets compare our KAIKs, to see if we really have the same.
last change:
21. october 2008, 19:13:30
size: 1'097'216 Bytes

what about the RAI for b5? does it work for you?

[[oc]Nick]

My KAIK version is

1,097,216 Bytes
10-21-2008, 11:13:30 AM

Looks the same.

RAI does work, but I don't find it very challenging, even with 100 bonus. Whenever I pit RAI vs KAIK, RAI gets Totally Annihilated.

[hoijui]

hmm.. really strange.
yesterday i played 4 games of BA 6.5 with a mate. he added a KAIK, I added one, and all the games were good (KAIK doing something).

how do you add AI bonus?
only SA supports that, no? (and it never seemed to work for me)

when playing big maps against AIs, i often use 2 KAIK and a RAI. cause as you said, KAIK is more challenging, but RAI builds more planes and nukes and all the special stuff, so for late game (if you want to play so long) RAI is good.

maybe if you remove cached data of KAIK under AI/KAIK013 ? :/

[[oc]Nick]

Interesting. I've erased the AI folder and reinstalled spring 77b5, but KAIK still refuses to do anything past the first factory.

I used to do the same - mix KAIK with RAI, but I would find that KAIK would somehow takeover and RAI would do very little. So how did you position the players in your game?

By giving the AI a bonus, it expands faster and sends larger groups earlier. It has definitely been effective for me. In TAS, you right click on the player and add bonus, in Springlobby you use the arrow buttons in the player box.

[hoijui]

thanks nick for the tip with the bonus! i totally.. did not see bonus yet :/ (i mean, util now that you told me)

i have deleted my KAIK cache, but it again worked well, and KAIK recreated all of it. so the reason it works here can not be the cached data i had.

how we positioned:
i used Chojin advise.. we chose a map we want ot play, then extracted the smd, swapped start positions as needed, and recreated the map archive with the new smd file. was quite annoying, thats why we did it just with one map, and used random positioning on the others we played that day.

about RAI.. yeah you are right, so far, RAI never added much to the games we had with KAIK nad RAI mixed. it only comes into play on big maps, with loing battles (porcing). when RAI starts attacking with Krogoths, big berthas or atomic missiles. but of course, it only does so late in hte game, when it could only possibly hit you bad if you totally forgot about Krogoths, or forgot ot make anti nukes, cuase your economy could have affored it long ago already.

[merijn]

You can use RAI for maps with a bit of water, since KAIK is no good with that.

I tested KAIK and I have the same problem with the stopping after building a lab. It looks like the labs don't get any commands or something. I had this in BA chicken defence.

After this I tested with 2 KAIK's playing against eachother on XTA mod, and this worked fine. then RAI vs KAIK and worked too.

[[oc]Nick]

Hoijui:

I think one of the lobby developers could help out with the positioning. If TAS client allowed you to position players in fixed mode, then the positioning would be solved. It would also be cool if we could get the .team functionality back.

Merijn:

So it looks like it is mod specific? I only play BA6.5, so I've never tried it on other mods.

[merijn]

The game supports a position mode "before game", its used in the springlobby single player mode. However it seems they cannot implement it for online games because the lobby server doesn't support it.

So you'd need to ask the lobby server dev(s). Maybe the new uberserver of aegis will support it, not sure. Its probably not very important on their agenda

hoijui tested with BA too, so maybe its not entirely mod related. I posted to kloots KAIK thread, so maybe its better to post there instead (about the KAIK issue).