Spring RTS Engine

1v0ry_k1ng wrote:still needs d-gunning more than anything...

No, it just need to stop making 432342398573475 anti-air planes on EE like there is no tomorrow. Thanks in advance!
Except that, is a very fine ai, but it really needs to learn to tech up properly, sometimes it builds the factories but dont build no unit on them except constructors.

McLoud wrote:No, it just need to stop making 432342398573475 anti-air planes on EE like there is no tomorrow.

Hehe, true. It send around 30 heavy bombers and bombed the shit out of me. Blew my fusion reactors and caused a chain reaction wiping out my power supply

for all ppl waiting for an update:

im completly busy atm, i wont have any free time to spend on spring/aai before the next weekend, sorry

Is there any documentation on the AAI config files and different keywords and what they do, and their default values?

There is an example mod config that has comments. That describes the commands pretty well. It's in "aai\cfg\help\example mod.cfg"
"aai\cfg\help\example general.cfg" is an example general config.

Sgt Doom wrote: Hehe, true. It send around 30 heavy bombers and bombed the shit out of me. Blew my fusion reactors and caused a chain reaction wiping out my power supply

McLoud wrote:No, it just need to stop making 432342398573475 anti-air planes on EE like there is no tomorrow.

All the other planes are alright, the anti-air that aren't ,they can't shoot anything besides other plane and they just sit there flooding the map until it reaches the map limit. The only thing I managed to make it somewhat less stupid is swapping the scouts (who can shoot ground unit) with the anti-air, now it build a load of units who can shoot ground units and is a lot more interesting.

How do you get AAI to actually build and use mobile artillery?

Put it in the config?
Read the AA config or the example config.

AFAIK mobile artillery support isn't done yet. If you want the AI to use those long-range units, make sure they DON'T go in Mobile Arty category. Set GROUND_ARTY_RANGE (or SEA_ARTY_RANGE or HOVER_ARTY_RANGE, depending on what units you have) very high, for example. Of course, once the mobile artillery support is in, you'll have to redo the config.

yep those arty range statements are for future purposes. you may set the range very high, then aai will treat arty as "normal" combat units

At the moment there's no accurate definition of artillery that we can take an algorithm from for an 'IsArtillery()' function that's mod independent save searching for the strings 'arty' and 'artillery' in unit names and descriptions.

Otherwise we'd have had working artillery detection for months now, instead the nearest is simplistic keep out of range algorithms used in NTai and KAI.

Any discussion on such a detection algorithm would be very useful.....

It's possible to detect the maximum fire range of a unit from the AI?

AF: IsArtillery that gives you a true/false answer is quite hard. What you can do is assign several statistics to units, one of which could be used to tell which units are more artillery-ish than others, e.g.

arty score = (range/X)^2*(aoe/Y)^2*dps/resources^2

Example values for TA-based mods (sort of work):
resources = metal+energy/50+buildtime/100
X = 600
Y = 16

If you filter aircraft, ships and nuke launchers from the list, you should get artillery units on top. Similar scores could be used to tell which units are good to swarm with and to fight swarms with, etc. If you use such things already, sorry, couldn't be bothered to search in code; my guess is you can't really do much better than that.

i tried to do something similiar, but it always failes for a certain mod...

therefore i just check for high-arc weapons + a user specified minimum arty range. some tags indicating the purpose(s) of a unit would make it much easier for ai coders

Note that a high score in this category doesn't mean a unit can't score high in other categories... so it can be treated as if it was artillery when it is artillery what's needed, etc.

Quick questions about AAI:

1) How good can AAI get with proper learning?
I seem to win AAI 0.76 a lot of times. It's still fun most of the time.

2) How fast does AAI get to 95% max potential in AA/BA?
I know I haven't played the same map for too long. Maybe 3 games per map and 15 games total.

3) Any chance someone could play say 200 games AAI vs AAI or player vs AAI and prepackage the learning files with the release?

Right now, I would say that AAI won't match you, no matter how much you play. I've been using 0.76 for a while in testing, and I can take four or five of them allied against me at least.

Won't happen, I did 50+ on the same map and it still doesn't do much good. I always let it goes for a while before I start attacking it so at least gives time for it to build propert defenses, but once you start trying, it doesn't lasts more than 5 minutes (not that anything would last with proper radar stealth L3 bombing)

give AAI a 100% handicap. fight two at once. when AAI has d-gunning it'll be a bit harder.

if you actually want a real challenge, do not build any defensive structures fighting the AI, focus on units.

Actually, the only reason a play AI's is because I like building the perfect defense. Putting defensive structures in a way that's not possible to pass anymore. I like when the AI manages to do the same. Once the AI build a lot of L3 very heavy defense structures, all side by side, like this: That, and a constant stream of units from all levels. Took me a while to beat it :D (nukes doesn't work on EE 0.63 and no AI can play the newer versions , so I was stuck with plain ground strategy, long range artillery and aircrafts )