Spring RTS Engine

1. They have no concern for their commander and don't keep him inside their area of occupation.
2. They don't keep rapidly spreading and growing like a virus (which is what makes them hard)

This is in reference to the newest KAI and NTAI. If anyone could fix this that would be great. Discuss!

omg, we did so not notice this..

Well, (in XTA) NTai *should* keep spreading like a virus, because of its agressive commander expansion.

The problem is that the commander dies at some point, leaving expansion duty to the level 1 constructors. Though in my experience they seem to do it well.

Lindir has noted that a lot fo lvl 1 con bot expansions are stopped dead in their tracks because they go after mex spots they cant get.

NTai rc22 tries to halt this by filtering out mex spots that have enemy weapons or allied unit deaths near them, but this just results in conbots heading for mex spots further into enemy territory.... A solution was found to this and will be included in RC23 but there's no intended date of release for rc23.

What would be nice for NTAI profiles would be a "protect" tag which tells it to protect specific units at all costs, or at least have some defenses near them at all time (mobile defenses for mobile units, turrets for buildings). That way we could at least reduce the likelyness of a single scout approaching and killing the com or other things of importance in mods where they can't defend themselves.

Perhaps also a "good reclaimer" tag that allows telling the AI that this unit can be used for reclaiming enemies in combat (with a threshold of course so it wouldn't attempt to reclaim a target that takes more than a few seconds to deal with or at least starts with the weaker ones). In CvC the Titan can't kill a drone that approaches it (at least most of the time) but it can easily reclaim it. I don't know what other mods have units that are good for reclaiming enemies but it'd be worth a try...

when i was working on one of my groupais, i noticed that the AI can tell if a metal spot is taken without ever even being near the spot, the closestbuildsite function seems to know even outside of radar/los know.

Maybe then that would stop the commander from roaming around and eventually getting killed...

Its on the priority list for all of us. Eventually it will be fixed, dont worry!

KDR_11k wrote:What would be nice for NTAI profiles would be a "protect" tag which tells it to protect specific units at all costs, or at least have some defenses near them at all time (mobile defenses for mobile units, turrets for buildings). That way we could at least reduce the likelyness of a single scout approaching and killing the com or other things of importance in mods where they can't defend themselves.

Definitely wouldn't work with the current NTai, because:

a) There is no fancy defense placement algorithm. NTai just uses Closest Build Site like everything else.

b) Mobile units in NTai are really stupid. They try to clump together, and when anything is under attack they are supposed to protect it, unless they are already in combat with something. What you want is some way so that sometimes the units will try to hang around near specific other units, and that wouldn't work without major modifications, because currently every unit has the same code executed to figure out what to do. So either all of them would try to defend (it if they arent doing anything else), or none of them would. And then the defending units would still run off when anything else comes under attack, unless you put defending at a higher priority than attacking, in which case the defended unit would accumulate a bigger and bigger guard, restricting its movement and wasting resources.

So you can't have it simply give out guard orders for mobile units or have constructors check for unguarded "protect this" structures when building defenses?

Simply guarding isnt always the best option, it includes several unsightly behaviours...

Yeah, okay, the guard command is a bit borked in Spring anyway (e.g. planes will land when guarding instead of circling their target which I often used in OTA to provide some near area recon data to my ships)