AI Competition

[FizWizz]

I would like to see some kind of informal AI competition get rolling around here. I don't mean anything structured like a tournament, but more skirmishing by people using AIs.
What inspired me to have this idea was a game I entered last weekend. BvDorp was training his AAI profile on CometCatcher. I had been doing the same with mine (it happened to be AAI), and I thought it would be great fun if I joined his game with my own AI player. Unfortunately the xta se profile didn't load up and the commander just stood there until I left, but the idea was greatly entertaining nonetheless.
Anyhow, since we have at the moment several functional AIs, it wouldn't hurt to see them get more gameplay and publicity. Since NTAI and AAI have a learning and adaptation system, there would be the added element of training profiles, and making wins and losses a bit more personal to the competitors. If AI's got the kind of publicity and gameplay that mods got, I'm sure that it would vastly help their authors in rubbing out bugs and developing them to play even better.

[Nemo]

Personally, I'm surprised that the learning aspect of AAI has not been used more.

I think pitting 'trained' AAIs vs non learning ones (such as OTAI) or just having two seperately trained AAIs fighting each other could be very cool.

I have a feeling that OTAI would dominate most XTA games though <_<

[FizWizz]

well, I've been using AAI and Absolute Annihilation 1.44 -F. I think the -F version of AA would be best for AI fights because the build tree is simplified, so the chance of making a fatally stupid choice in factory is eliminated. I personally would champion AA -F as the choice mod for AI fighting, but that is just my opinion. I have done a small amount of fighting (with AAI) in XTA PE however, so I'm not closed to the possibility of it.

[Baloogan]

I love -F personally. The build tree is needlessly complicated and much too ... flat for my liking.

[FizWizz]

Well, I'm going to make it a point to fight my AIs a bunch this weekend. If anyone would like to join me, I would be tickled to have another opponent. Let's get this ball rolling! I'm particularly interested in seeing how well my tweaked config files work =)

[AF]

lol, NTAI should be able to beat OTAI easily but I buggered my buildtrees up putting in more defences and rebalancing them and it lost it's competitive edge, trying to improve it to beat KAI only made it worse =p

If people train NTAI in a particular mod extensively could they send me the learning file? It's in c:\program files\taspring\NTAI\learn\ better yet modify it directly, with XE5 it's in TDF format unitname=efficiency; and in XE 6 untiname=efficiency; // ingame name

[Targon]

should the cfg files be modified so that the AI makes the best choice 100% of the time rather than continue learning in the matchup?

[FizWizz]

should the cfg files be modified so that the AI makes the best choice 100% of the time rather than continue learning in the matchup?

All according to your own tastes. Once I'm confident I've given AAI a good background to work on, I'll probably tone down the learn rate for competitive games.

[SwiftSpear]

The trick to beating KAI is just sending a well orchistrated early attack force and using a bit of micromanagement... How viable it is to expect an AI to be able to do that is a different issue.

[krogothe]

The trick to beating KAI is just sending a well orchistrated early attack force and using a bit of micromanagement... How viable it is to expect an AI to be able to do that is a different issue.

Indeed, one early weasel will own KAI 0.0 very easily! air attacks and some clever defense placement will too.
However if youve seen the dgun AI demo, youll know i have a few surprises coming to counter early rushes . Should be hard to rush it in AA anyhow