Ajunta, I think GPG did overhaul the AI in FA compared to SC. They fixed many of the major issues. Sure there are some bugs and it was a bit rushed, but I imagine the these are due to the time constraints the developer doing the AI was under.

Also Wuped (who used to be the number 1 FA player) once said he was beaten by one of the stock cheating AI's. Sure you could say that making at AI cheat by that much is a copout, but it is still good practice.

I find with my AI fix pack installed and with the cheat tweaked down a bit that the stock AI's are good to play against. The main issue for me currently is the performance in a long game or team game with many AIs (as noted by many others). Hopefully its a bug we can fix, but it may just be the complexity of the AI and hence we will have to wait for faster CPUs ;-p

well they sure are, i am beaten by cheat Ai for sure i think i might be beaten by any AI too if i play a +10 simspeed, which is also good practice. But it does feel more like training than playing. Games stop being enjoyable when the issue of the game is known before the game starts. In FA just as in vanilla when you pick the Ais in the lobby and set the game parameters you can predict the game outcome with a 100% accuracy.

i am very aware there has been changes from vanilla i stopped working on my vanilla Ai when i reckoned they would fix most of the things I was trying to find a workaround for, like the way factory was building platoons etc... they did a great job and the whole Ai architecture is cleaner.

I just wonder what they have been doing since release. It is sloppy to leave so obvious bugs after they have been brought forward by the community and even sloppier to leave the community in the dark.
There has been no live sign of gpg since european release 2 month ago. Guessed everybody needs holiday.
There was Xmas and stuff. Fair enough.
New years eve is gone now when is the radio silence goin to stop.

Skirmishes are fun, and modding skirmish Ai is fun , this part of the game needs to run as smoothly as the rest of the game FA is soon three month old we are having no aknowledgment of issues being taken care of, so we dont know where we go, we dont even know if FA is ever going to be fixed.

Hey all, thought I might as well comment.

Okay, recently played a team game with a friend of mine, with your mod installed, on Burial Mounds. It was the two of us versus four adaptive ai on the other side of the river. The first issue was that the AI continued to send transports with Engies to the same spots on the maps. I looked and there were piles of dead transports. It was slightly bothersome, but nothing major. Second thing was that all the AIs built hordes and hordes of land units.. on a map with water seperating us from them. Even better, they were t1 land units for a large part. They built alot of aircraft though, and there was a huge air battle for the middle island for a good part of the game, but once we took over the skies.. well, the AI sorta gave up.

I know the AI are supposed to self destruct t1 units when they hit their caps, but i still saw huge amounts in their bases, just swarming around. It kinda reminded me of the rush ai on Vanilla, when it would spam units into its base and never attack. I agree with some of the other posts, and it would be pretty cool if the AI just sent all of its offensive units at your base at once. The problem doesnt seem as major on land maps, because they can attack on the land, but they still tend to get overloaded towards the end.

As far as the transports go... i just thought i would point it out. its nothing major, just something that someone might adjust at some point.

Version 0.9 is released

I have rolled my custom AI plan for Setons into this release to try and improve the performance situation on that map. (select Rush or Adaptive)

AI will now self destruct mobile t1 units when it reaches the unit cap. This should also improve long game sim speed performance.

The Commander attack range has been extended. The ACU will now be play a bit more offensively.

I have added improve Tech AI plan for small maps. It plays more like rush early on and then techs up quickly.

I have tweaked land expansion base sizes and engineers from Naval expansions. This also helps performance.

Still to fix:
- Engineers getting stuck doing nothing
- AI building too many land units on island maps
- Its possible that Allied AI's will steal your engineers (I havent confirmed this myself).

You know you rock, right?

I really appreciate the positive feedback....

The main reason I started this mod is that I really love FA, but just want the skirmish AI to be better... If I have gone even part of the way then it feels worthwhile.

I'm actually surprised at how well adaptive can play with the fixes really.

Oh I tried a 3 v 2 AI on Setons and one guy got owned by repeated transport drops near their base, heh (cheating adaptive). Anyway the game was getting well into it before we quitted out and max sim was +5 or so. Looks way better than before.

Hope to give it a better test at some point.

The secret to having adaptive play well at all seems to be having relatively close by extra mass points. Then it will expand and turn into an economic powerhouse and spam like crazy. You try any map with modest mass and it never seems to quite know what to do expansion wise and is very slow to start. Cheating or not.

I wonder do you think it might be a good idea to bundle sorian's cheat options in your fix and get rid of your defaults? I think being able to dial up the cheat a bit would be very useful.

Remind me, the interim solution is to rename the cheat options with a lower numeral or something?

Lurkah,

Do you have an example of a map where the AI is slow to expand?

For the cheat options add 3 zeros to the front of the cheatoptions.scd file and it will over ride my mod. I dont really want to include it... I would just like to see the default set at a challenging but not impossible level (which I think it currently is). Having said that I will try to adjust how I change it so that its by default compatible with Sorians cheat mod.

Well, I haven't had time for much gameplaying. But, after trying the regular GPG AI's in Skirmish Mode with Forged Alliance for a few games and getting a feel for it on a number of different types of maps, this mod here looked enticing.

Moving down through my list of favorite maps, "The Wilderness" was next on my list, and it was the first map that I employed this DucanE AI Mod on.

Now, I'm curious as to how the regular GPG AI's would have done on that map. The regular GPG AI's were quite challenging on The Ditch, as there are land bridges, and the regular GPG AI's even built Naval Factories on The Ditch.

But, to be honest, I was a bit disappointed with this AI here on The Wilderness. None of the AI's -- ally or enemy -- built any naval factories at all with this mod here in control. I'm pretty much sure that the regular unmodded GPG AI's would have built some navy on the The Wilderness, as they seemed to build a few naval factories on the maps that really didn't need a navy.

Again, I'm probably using DuncanE's AI for purposes for which it wasn't designed or intended, and I can see now that it was probably a mistake to select "The Wilderness" as my first attempt with this AI.

The reason why I'm writing, besides to say hello to an old friend (hello duncane), is to maybe suggest to you to look and make sure that if there is water on a map that this AI of yours here will build a couple of naval factories. To not have any of the AI build a naval factory on a map that could clearly have used navy was kind of a shock. Also, the AI built tons of land units, and it really would have been better served on that particular map if it had built an Air Force instead. I built an Air Force right from the start, and used transports, and I never built a navy either in that game.

But, I do like The Wilderness (it's a 10X10 map) that allows you to take any course to win.

I also didn't see this AI build and use any transports. Furthermore, in the regular GPG AI's, their builders would often reclaim one of my builders, which was really nasty. With this AI here, the enemy builders would sometimes be just sitting there in the forest doing nothing, their orders accomplished, and it was really easy to go up to them and capture them.

Anyway, I got the feeling that this AI mod here has actually taken a couple of steps back while taking a step forward. Of course, it's probably just the map. Gotta play these AI's on the maps that they were made for, I guess. And, to add insult to injury, the AI commander of the last faction got stuck in the mountains. Of course, all the land units were all bottled up around him also, as they had orders to go but couldn't get off their island -- they needed active transports.

In the past with Forged Alliance, I did see the AI building transports, but the AI only used transports as combat units to shoot at my commander. If the AI were to not only build transports but actually Ferry stuff around, that would be a good deal with Forged Alliance.

So, can you suggest a better map? I guess I'll have to stick with land maps and land units. But, as usual for me, when I'm learning something new, I tend to use things for the purposes that they are not intended for -- because the best way to turn some of these Hard AI's into normal average AI's is to put them on a water map. Then you usually have plenty of time to figure out and learn what's going on, learn the new stuff, and even get the upper hand.

I think my biggest complaint against Forged Alliance is when the game clock says it has been 45 minutes, yet in reality it has been an hour and a half of real time, even on the 10X10 maps -- there's a lag or slowness in there that I don't know how to turn off or get rid of. Some said to turn the graphics down to Medium to speed things up to SupCom normal again. I tried that, but it didn't work. The game still took a couple of hours even though an hour of game clock went by. Forged Alliance is just goofy that way in comparison to SupCom. With SupCom, on a 10X10 map, if it says 45 minutes of game clock, it was 45 minutes of real time that had passed. Everything seems to be in molasses slow motion in Forged Alliance, even on a 10X10 map -- good for learning, but very painful if you are waiting for a unit to arrive at destination and you haven't built any Air Factories because it's a land map.

Okay, that's a shotgun approach to everything that was bugging me, I think. I have deadlines at work now, so I probably won't get back into it again for awhile. I still like the feel or the gameplay of SupCom and Forged Alliance despite the annoyances. I still see promise in the whole thing.

I figured that one of these days I'll have to try Sorian's new FA AI, but I need to get my busy season at work over with and that will give him a few more months to get it finished. Then I imagine we both will be ready for each other.

ArchAngel,

Good to hear you are still playing occasionally.

Sorry to hear you had a bad run with this AI pack first go. I will check out Wilderness... Im not familiar with the map so I need to see it to work out what the issue may be. The AI should definitely build naval if the map is water based. Also what AIs did you select?

If its a total water map (ie islands with no bridges) then thats probably the issue. I am looking at reduce the wasted land units on this kind of map.

Try the AI on a few other land based maps when you get a chance ... Im sure you will find it much better.

Version 0.9.1 released

The only change in this version is there is a limit on the number of AI expansion bases. It is my theory that the number of expansion bases the AI builds is dramatically decreasing the sim speed of the game for longer games on larger maps. (See this thread:
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic. ... 2&start=75)

By limiting the AI to 3 bases and 2 naval bases each this should improve AI long game performance without limiting the AIs unit numbers on large maps and aggressiveness on small maps.

Im really keen to see how everyone goes with this release.

Unfortunately I still haven't worked out what makes engineers sit idle sometimes and also I can see that on island based water maps (such as Wilderness as pointed out by ArchAngel above) some of AIs still produce too many land units. These are the things Im going to look at next.

Played teamed with an adaptive AI against two adaptive AIs on Setons. Sim speed was still 0 at the half hour mark which is pretty damn good (although I'm on 4GHz quad-core...) compared to what it was before.

Sadly at that point it did the lock-crash thing. Renders fine, sim locked up. Not even possible to exit game and task needs to be killed. Bah. I think this is about the third time I've seen that.

I havent seen the lock/crash thing....

It happens often for you? Does it happen without any AI mods installed or could it be the mod?

Are you sure its the sim speed and not your gfx card? eg do you have ren_shownetworkstats enabled and fps on screen to see which it is?

Duncane,
On Winters Dual I had the Adaptive AI on the right side. I noticed that the commander moves to the middle and then moves up to the left (almost in the middle) and get sucks in corner (mountains on 3 sides). I noticed that it is trying to attack something that is not there, some very weird behaver. I have noticed this a few times.

Matt

Thats for the info zorin1...

I havent played WD for sometime (probably because I played it so much in vanilla).

I will check it out.

Hi Duncan,

Let me first say I love your AI fix. But I have found 0.9.1 is slowing a game more than 0.9 was. The game I am playing, I was playing with 0.9 and it never went as bad, as it has with 0.9.1. It is a new game on the same map, with one adaptive AI against me, and the game is down to a crawl. Sorry I don't know what the speed of the game was, but it became silly playing it at the speed it was.

The AI is more defensive, but it is not teching to t3, as it was with 0.9. It also builds no expansion at all, and with all the defences it builds, not one t2 arty is built among them. I am actually going to change back to 0.9.
The map has no large water ways, only a few puddles on it.

Just my two cents on this problem, i can produce this kind of crash by modding the Ai

if you add this to the EngineerBuild AI platoon you will see this kind of 'crash' happening as soon as the game starts.



now if you add



the game wont 'freeze' but the engineer platoon will still loophole.

Maybee there is a such kind of loop, though not so obvious, in one of the mods you installed Lurkah could be Duncane's or another.

99% of the time the loop is doing fine, but when called under certain circumstances it will enter a neverending loop and if their is no delay inside the loop it will use all of a cpu core ressources causing the game to freeze to the point is is not even possible to close it save for killing the thread.

No, it's not happened often at all. It happened again at a very early point in a game too which made me deeply suspicious.



Perfectly. Game is running fine. You can pan, zoom etc. Just the sim has stopped. One thread is locked 100% on that CPU core and even when you hit quit game it wont. It's not, I think, a local problem because I've had it happen in a multiplayer co-op and everyone saw the same thing and had to kill task in the same way.

Since pretty much all I changed was your AI fix, I deleted that and played some more skirmish. No lock-crash yet but that doesn't mean it's your AI fix either. Edit: But from what Ajunta says it would seem likely?

Version 0.9.2 released

Thanks for the help guys....

Ajunta's comment reminded me that I had changed something else.. I had changed one of the engineer functions... looks like it was causing a loop.

I have removed it and put up a release.

No worries, cheers fella!

I played 9.1 last night, not tried 9.2 yet

I got two lock ups in a row, I played Four Leaf Clover map against 3 AI Randoms, the game was fine till about the twenty minute mark...

The game locked up, however the options menu etc were still working, just the map froze completely. I replayed the map again, and got the same lock up after 20 minutes. Replayed it again having removed the AIFix and the game played through to the end.

It was fine in the previous version (Version 0.9), plus I was turtling somewhat - which allowed AI's to grow. It was almost certainly your 9.1 AI patch, and probably the AI expansions as that is all you changed since the previous version plus it happened at a stage in the game where the AI's would be looking to setup an expansion base.

I will try 9.2 and hope this is fixed, otherwise I need the version prior to 9.1 which is 9.0 which I foolishly overwrote and have lost..

Good work so far duncan. First mistake, everything else feels improved.

Righty popped in .92. Three way FFA on Crossfire Canal. Me, Sorian AI and Adaptive AI. About the 20 minute mark the sim speed crashed to -9. I don't think I've ever seen that happen on Crossfire Canal before. It normally plays just fine.

So I jumped out, removed .92 and ran exactly the same game again. Sim speed stayed up just peachy to +5 or so at it's worst no problems at all. Then at 60 minutes or so crash-lock.

Ha!

Anybody still have version 9 that they can give me? I've lost mine...

It was the best working version for me..

How do you get the sim speed?

Matt

Well, I am few days removed from it now and can't remember all the details. I can't remember the factions involved. As they say, if there is a big car crash, it's usually the idiot behind the wheel who's to blame and not the makers of the car.

I had regular Tech and Turtle as enemies, iirc. And, I used the Rush as the AI ally, iirc. I don't use the cheating or adaptive AI's. The Rush AI is usually the best unless it is a pure water island map. Then I don't know which one is best. Iirc, the Turtle AI enemy was repeatedly trying to build Mavors in the space in the back of its base, and I was wiping them out with my transports and dropped tanks.

And, I was very aggressive and basically went and camped in the northwest in the back of the Tech enemy's base, so that enemy AI didn't have much of a chance.

But, the other Turtle AI that was left alone until the end of the game had no naval factories when I got there, which was a big surprise for The Wilderness. And, the fact that my AI ally didn't build naval factories or much of an air force surprised me as well. But, in the past it hasn't been as big a surprise for the AI ally NOT to do well on The Wilderness.

Towards the end of the game, I had lots of air patrolling over the back of the enemy base and then back to a refueling pad. However, in this game, while I was ferrying in lots of T2 land units into the back of the enemy base and losing them for the most part, my AI ally built a single Soul Ripper (the only finished T4 in the game), and won the game with it. But, I took out both commanders, so I had a 700K score, and my AI ally had something like 150K. The other AI enemies didn't do as well.

I do remember once or twice with the plain vanilla GPG FA AI's that I sometimes accidentally selected the cheating AI instead of the regular AI's, and I did lose those games -- got completely overrun. So, a more diminished 1.4 Cheating AI instead of the 2X Cheating AI actually made me feel more tempted to try the cheating AI's in this Mod here, once again. But, I don't have time to play games right now, so I'll have to see what there is to see after I get my real work done.

But, it has been fun nonetheless -- thank you!