Best mod for TA-style skirmish play vs AI?

[Agamemnon2]

I was linked to the project today, and I must say, I am very impressed. Total Annihilation was always one of my favorite games, especially the skirmish games vs. the AI (no mission details to hold back the fun and no timing issues unlike playing against humans), and I'd love to try that style of play using some of the quite impressive the Spring mods. I was wondering if anyone has any pointers on what the best setup for that sort of play experience would be?

I guess it boils down to
- Big games
- AI that's at least halfway competent
- classic TA "feel", though not necessarily faithful to the original

I realize this is not a gamestyle that's in sync with what most of the Spring community seems to be keen on (I'm not too crazy about the idea of playing multiplayer RTS, because I like the ability to save the game and play in increments when it suits me, without having to accommodate another human's schedule), which is why I asked this before download.

[Pressure Line]

Save/Load isnt working currently at the moment (save works fine, load causes a segfault)

All of the *A games can use any of the AI's (although you will probably have to write a config for AAI)

Balanced Annihilation is the most played online mod, and should work perfectly vs AI as well (but it will be pretty boring, the AI's are about as good as the OTA AI's, most quarter-decent players can take on the AI 1vs2 and expect to win)

a typical 4vs4 or 5vs5 will only last 45-90 minutes anyway so its not like you have to be at your computer all day for one match.

[Agamemnon2]

Aha. Thanks for the info.

Nevermind then.

[Google_Frog]

CA games take about 20-40 minutes. Sometimes and hour.

[BaNa]

I recall lionheart having some killer AI configs, we should get him to upload them, those AI's where HARD to beat 4v1.

[[Krogoth86]]

Well the most "popular" AIs are AAI, KAIK and RAI. While you probably have the first two already installed you have to get RAI by yourself. It imo also is the by far best AI of the three. AAI is ok and has sort of an analyzing feature which kinda makes it "train" when you keep playing on the same map. It's also the only one that needs a config file to run. To my mind it's a pretty boring AI though and it starts creating some heavy load on your CPU pretty soon which makes the game run very slow very fast...

Then there's KAIK - imo it's sort of a brainless zombie AI that will throw anything it has at you (once it figures out where you are). That's nothing bad as it's actually a "challenge" in comparison to AAI. It being "brainless" is it's weakness though as it hardly techs up / replaces metal extractors by better versions and hardly uses any air at all. It's ok if you give it a high bonus when setting the game up which makes it spam lots of units very soon...

Finally there's RAI which I like the most. It's a bit like KAIK but with more brains i.e. it actually builds air pretty soon and actually does something with it instead of putting bombers on strange patrol routes what KAIK really likes to do after it finally has managed to build some. It also can handle teching so you won't have a T1 spammer like KAIK but also see some higher level stuff. I only experienced that it kinda takes some time to get it rolling i.e. in the first couple of minutes RAI often plays pretty passive and slow and if you leave it alone for a while it suddenly activates the afterburner and starts building some serious units. I mostly experience this when RAI has reached the 2nd tech level - it then tends to get way faster more strong than in the minuts before and with a high bonus and you idling a bit against several AIs you might find out that you thwirled your thumbs too long in order not to defeat the AIs too easily...

But go ahead and try the AIs for yourself - I can only recommend RAI as it makes good use of all the units types in the game, doesn't play too passive and techs up reasonable...

[Agamemnon2]

Thank you for the analysis, it is certainly very helpful. I tried AAI once already. It didn't quite work out for me because the other commander spawned pretty close to me (I could hear him building stuff, including a whole bunch of radar towers for some reason), so by the time I got to grips with the controls, it was already starting a decent attempt at swarming me off the table.

I'm not the fastest clicker on the planet, so it takes me a good long while to get a decent sized base going, doubly so if the controls are different from what I'm used to in other games. The last time I tried to play TA was also several years ago, against the typically passive stock AI it had, which could take well over an hour to start attacking properly on big maps.