AI War Beta 6.026-6.027 "The Guard Before The Storm" Released!

[chemical_art]

Using the command station fold outs to great effect.

I can already tell in galactic sized games the human player can have their own HW be almost as brutal as the AI HW worlds. With a universal anti-tele gravity field, hundreds of engine blowing railguns per minute, and an econ to fund defenders out of nowhere, player HW really can be their own fortresses.


*Imagines a HW with super forts, military and logistics I and III's, and an economy to fund merc fighters*

mwhaahahaha

[keith.lamothe]

Using the command station fold outs to great effect.

I can already tell in galactic sized games the human player can have their own HW be almost as brutal as the AI HW worlds. With a universal anti-tele gravity field, hundreds of engine blowing railguns per minute, and an econ to fund defenders out of nowhere, player HW really can be their own fortresses.


*Imagines a HW with super forts, military and logistics I and III's, and an economy to fund merc fighters*

mwhaahahaha

Human Brutal Core Guard Posts

Don't forget planetary tachyon coverage, planetary enemy-speed-reduction, and planetary ally-speed-increase.

Granted, getting all of the above is 27,000 K.

[keith.lamothe]

I should add that I heartily approve of the player having a reason to put their choke on their homeworld.  Much more entertaining that way

[TechSY730]

I should add that I heartily approve of the player having a reason to put their choke on their homeworld.  Much more entertaining that way

There is one. It's called the Backdoor Hacker.

Also, exo waves.


Too bad that exo's are allowed spawn from that exo-wormhole, or else the backdoor hacker would be one of my "standard" AIs I like to fight.

[keith.lamothe]

There is one. It's called the Backdoor Hacker.

I was thinking of "carrot" reasons, rather than "stick"

[RockyBst]

It's worth pointing out that the drones inside the new carrier guardians currently count towards threat. I was wondering why my threat was jumping up by 40 ships every 30 seconds, until I realised I'd annoyed a couple of carrier guardians. 

[keith.lamothe]

It's worth pointing out that the drones inside the new carrier guardians currently count towards threat. I was wondering why my threat was jumping up by 40 ships every 30 seconds, until I realised I'd annoyed a couple of carrier guardians.

Given what those drones are capable of, I think this is appropriate

[keith.lamothe]

FYI, it's looking like Tuesday morning for 6.028; I'm in cleanup mode after various AI changes over the week.  It's close to ready, but needs a bit more work to hunt down some curious issues that arise when the AI thread runs too quickly.

[TechSY730]

FYI, it's looking like Tuesday morning for 6.028; I'm in cleanup mode after various AI changes over the week.  It's close to ready, but needs a bit more work to hunt down some curious issues that arise when the AI thread runs too quickly.

Woa, careful there Keith. The AI is getting too smart for the engine to handle.


On a more serious note, what happens? CPU hogging? Race conditions? Excessive locking?

[keith.lamothe]

Woa, careful there Keith. The AI is getting too smart for the engine to handle.

Well, fast and smart are two different things.  For a little bit there it reminded me of a video I saw of someone playing an SC2 tournament.  But the overall result was "dancing" to the extreme.  So getting it to prefer "stay the course" just enough to avoid that while not closing out the ability to adapt to a situation is a bit tricky.

On a more serious note, what happens? CPU hogging? Race conditions? Excessive locking?

There were some logical race conditions.  Nothing that would crash the program or whatever, but the AI would give an order and then get back around to checking the same unit for orders and giving new orders before it got an updated state on the unit from the first order.  There were some safeguards to prevent this (it did have to wait to hear an acknowledgement that the order has been executed on the main thread, but that doesn't include a state update on the unit).  Before you didn't usually notice this because there was a lot of stuff slowing the AI thread down (stuff that was needed at the time it was written, but things have changed over 4 years, etc).  But sometimes you would notice this in some of the forms of unit "dancing" you've seen before.  It just depended on a particular timing of AI-thread-slowness and main-thread-slowness.  That is, race condition.

Anyway, it isn't too hard to just tell it "never ever give an order to a unit if you don't at least have a state update on that unit since the last command you gave it" but there are still a few gaps I'm closing up.

[KDR_11k]

I think what you mean in SC2 is stutter-stepping, a result of units being unable to shoot and move at the same time, players move units for a split second, order them to stop, let them fire and then give another move order.

[TechSY730]

Just FYI, for the "stuck threat" thing, I posted a link to another mantis that had a save.

Back to the "Threat/AI ships are stuck" thing, here is another report of it that hopefully has a good save in it.

3825: Enemy ships stop moving

Also, any idea about what is causing the game seeding weirdness in this version people have seen?

[TechSY730]

I think what you mean in SC2 is stutter-stepping, a result of units being unable to shoot and move at the same time, players move units for a split second, order them to stop, let them fire and then give another move order.

Yep. Done well, it's a great way to kite, and help your units last much longer.

Done poorly, and all you have done is make your units "dance" with no real damage being done.

BTW, a good variation of the stutter stepping is: move, then attack-move for a split second, then move again. This gives similar results, but slows units down less as there isn't time "wasted" stopping and then going into idle attack "scan", but goes straight into attack "scan". It also helps keep unit momentum up, as they no longer spend time trying to stop, but instead always move, which is very important for units with low acceleration (mutalisks for example). However, it's trickier to do rapidly as attack-move requires an additional click.

[Marmu23]

 Just want to say, you might wanna consider re-adding deepstrike spawns to lazy AI. I tried it on a 10/10 game with 2 homeworlds, and won it in 10 hours without ever taking a single planet. This was largely due to the champion + nebulae energy/resources/ships, but mostly because I could attack the AI homeworlds with impunity and complete my 9 nebulae without much interference.

 Also, from an earlier game, the spirecraft scouts are terrible and spirecraft jumpships are super overpowered (i recently won another 10/10 game by abusing jumpships+starships to snipe everything everywhere). Jumpships also are pretty unfun since constantly pausing is the optimal way to use them. I would suggest changing both spirecraft scouts and jumpships to only lose hp on wormhole traversal, and be able to go 3*mk wormholes deep, while also having regen on a friendly planet.

[keith.lamothe]

Just want to say, you might wanna consider re-adding deepstrike spawns to lazy AI.

It's lazy, that's the point   The only reason that toggle exists is that there are players that prefer not having to deal with various changes we've made specifically to force the player away from low AIP.  That forcing is necessary for balance in most scenarios, but some players prefer having the choice to play it unbalanced, or with "alternate" balance (via jacking up the difficulty some other way, etc).

So yea, you can run roughshod over a lazy AI if you cheese it in those specific ways, that's fine.  If you're looking for more challenge, I'm happy to suggest some additional options you could turn on