Spring RTS Engine

Guess it would be nice if minelayers could build minefields on their own...
sort of like the economy AI builds energy/metal in a defined area. You could specify area for minefield to be put, then put a minelayer on minelayer AI so it would build mines in that area with reasonable spacing...
What do you think?

Select minelayer. Chose mine. Click and Drag. Set spacing. Drag minefield. Let go.

Wonderful minefield. What do you need an AI for? Selecting that instead of doing the above saves about 3 keypresses/clicks.

I don't want to seem impolite, but what, indeed, would the point be? Or am I missing something? I must be missing something :/

That makes an evenly spread and easily predictable minefield. A feature in Earth 2150 for minelayers was to select an area, and then select how much of the area was covered with mines (25, 50, 75, 100%) and it randly dropped them around. Quite handy, and confusing.

Ah, good idea that.

What would make it useful is if after finishing, it would go somewhere safe and wait for mines to be detonated. Then it'd come back and rebuild them again. That'd be a good MinelayerAI.

Exactly my point. You know - in the long run it would save valueable micro and maybe make mines more popular. I think they are underused somewhat.

Edit: Should this be posted in feature request? or should i PM AF or someone?

I think I will have a bash at doing this in the pyAI framework, could be fun

Thnx! Looking forward to it!

If an skirmish AI could use something like that, now THAT would be interesting

redcoat wrote:What would make it useful is if after finishing, it would go somewhere safe and wait for mines to be detonated. Then it'd come back and rebuild them again. That'd be a good MinelayerAI.

make that behavior dependent on the firestate as well, in case you don't want minelayers running back into no-man's land in the middle of a fight

It could be done the same way a Metal Mine AI is constructed. Basically to give complete coverage of the area to mines. So that any enemy unit that passes through will set off a mine.

Could a minesweeper AI function the same way? Say arm the Minesweeper with a mortar weapon, only AI useable, and have it sweep in an arc infront of it, or an entire area thought to have mines.

Exit69 wrote:Guess it would be nice if minelayers could build minefields on their own...
sort of like the economy AI builds energy/metal in a defined area. You could specify area for minefield to be put, then put a minelayer on minelayer AI so it would build mines in that area with reasonable spacing...
What do you think?

I think it's a great idea. However, a while back on these boards I made some posts supporting the idea of something like the economy AI and got piled on by a couple of folks who claimed such a thing would amount to ending the need for skill to play the game, and result in new players never learning how to manage their economy properly and/or being able to easily beat experienced players who chose not to use it. So there may be some initial resistance to the idea. :)

However, now that there is an economy AI, I predict that the world won't end after all and perhaps the objections will be muted in the future. I've never liked micromanagement that in "real life" would be trivial to delegate to lieutennants; a real battlefield commander shouldn't have to specify the location of each and every mine, he'd just tell his men "cover this area" and let them worry about the details.

On the topic of mines, not sure if most people know this, but I found out you can "stack" medium mines and possibly other mines on top of each other, so you would have lots of mines in the exact same space. Turn repeat on and tell a minelayer to build a mine somewhere. Insane damage, to the enemy and your cpu. Worked in AA 2.11, not sure of the new version.

Thought it was fixed in 2.2 or 2.21 Well, having no coding skill whatsoever, i gave the idea - hopefuly someone WrItEs A pAtCh

the problem is that mines have to be walk-overable, otherwise they would get in the way of pathfinding...unfortunately, this means they can *also* be built on top of...

maybe we need some new footprint type classification that means you can move over it but not build...

If anybody can make a Helper AI that will lay mines in an area selected by a player in a random fashion, I will make use of it in the next version of NanoBlobs.

If you can make a helper AI that can not only do this, but will do so on an area, selectable by a user, and is the CAI assigned to a unit if a TDF tag and has a TDF tag such as "AIMinelayer=1;" that would be ideal. Minefields are major area of Spring, game-play-wise, that are really under-utilised, imo. The main reason why is the sheer amount of micro involved. I would love to see smarter AI for units for this very specific activity, where they can build minefields that are random and large enough in scale to be tactically useful.

And Soulless... you can make things with a footprint of c and they can be walked over, no problem. Really. And if the script state is set right, they cannot be built upon. Tobi fixed it.

I was gonna do this, but now wont have the time until next week at the earliest. However, it would be quite easy to do - it could reuse a very large % of the economy building AI.

<shrugs> it'll take longer than that for me to build the unit, given that I have two in the pipeline for the next version of NB anyhow, and we all know how fast I work

I can do it very quickly. Expect it in the XE9.3 release.

Thnx AF i knew you`d do it