Spring RTS Engine

short update:

according to IMSabbel mteal maps now work more or less fine

i'm currently in the middle of rebalancing ressource management, i hope to be able to release aai 0.5 within the next one or two weeks

The more I play this, the more impressed I am by AAI. It's far more stable than the other AIs from what I've played so far. The only real weaknesses are a lack of early aggression and not building many T2 units later in the game. I assume the latter is due to learning taking a while, and I imagine with little in the way of resources the AI will struggle to produce more expensive units, so that's not unexpected at this point. Looking forward to the next release.

the new test version is literally ROCK stable.

Ran a 9 ai ffa on wideopencombat overnight, and in the morning i found it still happily running, after 1100 min of gametime, without crashes and one team having won...

IMSabbel wrote:the new test version is literally ROCK stable.

Ran a 9 ai ffa on wideopencombat overnight, and in the morning i found it still happily running, after 1100 min of gametime, without crashes and one team having won...

lol, interesting!
but yes i've been telling the same for the last few times , AAI is now very very stable

this AI just beat the shit out of me.. I like that!

Does this AI support SWTA?

@imsabbel:
good to hear you did some really extensive beta testing :)

@bvdorp: yes it does, however i made some changes to sw:tas config file to make it use air scouts as well

open sw:tas cfg file abd replace the SCOUTS line by
"SCOUTS 3 IMPPROBOT REBTWING IMPTIEDR"

One small comment about SWTA air scouts: IMPTIEDR is the Tie Drone which has a poor sight range (100). IMPTIEV is the Tie Vanguard which is intended to be air scout and has much better sight range (350). I think this line will do better: That is unless a scout is required to have a weapon, which the Tie Vanguard hasn't.

thx i didnt play sw:ta much; aai will consider the units specified as scouts, not dependend on their los range or weapons. remeber to delete the mod-learning files after editing the cfg file so aai will take the new scouts into account

here's a short update of my work:

- added support for air-only mods (e.g. final frontier) - doesnt work as well as "normal" mods but its playable and imho better than nothing

- aai now builds stationary jammers (however jammer placement has to be optimized)

- aai now builds metal makers when running out of free mex spots (however there still has to be done some balancing concerning energy usage)

I hope it automatically puts those MMs on the metal maker ai, right?

Also, FF is a real nice place to see the bug i mentioned to you about the aircraft parking in base stuff.
Run it against the ai for half an hour or so, and then go to spec and watch the ai putting 95% of its build ships simply in on the floor.
Same, although not quite as bad, with the planes...
Maybe these are those who would normally have attacked the top left corner before?

IMSabbel wrote:I hope it automatically puts those MMs on the metal maker ai, right?

Also, FF is a real nice place to see the bug i mentioned to you about the aircraft parking in base stuff.
Run it against the ai for half an hour or so, and then go to spec and watch the ai putting 95% of its build ships simply in on the floor.
Same, although not quite as bad, with the planes...
Maybe these are those who would normally have attacked the top left corner before?

i mentioned this in my game, i porced to watch the ai for 150+ mins and at the final stage it keept madling attacking with ground units and having 100+ planes parked on its base (allthought it had before made some quite interesting air attacks.:)

Is it possible to specify to NOT use some specific units as scouts?
Currently AAI uses SWTA Hailfire Tank (IMPHAIL) for scouting because of it's speed, but this unit is much better suited for attacking - it fires over units and wrecks and so is good support unit (and being seen as a scout, it seems to be excluded from attack teams).
In general, a way is needed to specify that some of high-speed units are not scouts.

@yuritch:

yes it is; aai selects scouts in two ways:
- the units specified in the cfg-file
- all ground units exceeding the speed limit in the mod cfg-file. so if you want to specifiy all scouts manually just set MAX_SCOUT_SPEED to a very high value so no ground unit will be faster than this


once you're done with thatand consider aai to work better with sw:ta i'd appreciate if you email me the file so i can include it in the next release

I don't know about sub, but I'm going to try and add a couple of parameters to my scouting, so that if a unit has high damage, in addition to being fast, it's not considered a scout. I can't say if it would work for AAI though.

i personally dont think that the damage should matter.
You wouldnt disregard a cheap fast unit just because it has weapons and select a cheap slower unit without, right? (if it did exist, of course).
There is no harm done if your scout also has some weapon power...

I think the selection formula should only depend on following parameters:
- speed
- LOS
- cost
- Radar/Sonar radius

for throwaway scout units. If a armed unit has the best fit... well, then it might hurt something on its way to hell, which isnt that bad either...

since this values have to be adjusted for every mod i thought its better to give the player the opportunity to define scouts manually

See the problem with that, is that certain fast, strong units are going to end up designated as scouts, when they shouldn't be. For example. A Jeffy, is a good scout, and is armed. The Flash has a higher damage, and is only slightly slower, but has a higher damage, should be an attacker. by limiting the damage that means that a Jeffy would be scouting, instead of attacking, where a Flash should be, instead of the otherway around.

heres a replay on painted desert showing a battle between aai pre 0.5 and otai 1.07...

since it's a fresh buildtable aai is building a lot of pewes

http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=2322

looks very good. when will be the release?

I know AAI is supposed to support FF but I have tried everything and I still can't get it to work
I have renamed the cfg for FF from 1.05 to 1.10 so theoretically it should work right? but it just crashes on startup... 'error in ai, please contact the maker of your ai etc...'
It works fine for xta, AA, wd5b6 etc