Version 2.0 is out and it represent a pretty heft change, replacing the vanilla personalities with bronze, silver, gold, platinum and uber. It provider a wider ranges of abilities than vanilla - from easier than normal to harder than absurd - while playing a more humanlike game. Low levels expand poorly and overinvest in static defence, while higher levels will spread like wildfire and field large mobile forces. More detail on these difficulty levels is available in the first post which has been updated for this new release. In addition I've put some time into make Queller play better in FFAs, especially ones where players start on a single planet in a multiplanet system. There are a host of other changes and improvements too. The full changelog can be found below. Version 2.0 Integrated new AI checks to replace hacky workarounds Builds its factories tighter Slightly more cautious about artillery placement Won't build Halleys if the planet is its eco centre Won't transfer troops to another planet when its base is threatened Uses the new threat considerations when making fabber and army decisions so as to behave smarter in games with more than two players/teams Added support for the Unit Cannon Added Slammer support for use by the Unit Cannon Will use an Astraeus rather than a Teleporter to get off planet when its base is in water Will pursue orbital more aggressively when on multiplanet systems with only one spawnable planet Prioritise a factory above all else on arrival at a new world Will evac Commander by Astraeus if it doesn't have the energy to run its teleporters Use new eco checks to be more aggressive about avoiding eco floating Added support for the Phoenix to be built Throws more fabbers at advanced factory projects No longer rushes orbital when it has orbital elsewhere in the system Will consider more than just the local planet when considering whether to rush nukes Won't build laser towers on water any more Added some very beta level Boom support to counter aggressive Commander play which might be rubbish Looks at the air situation as a whole rather than just anti-air when considering building more air factories Will sometimes send Krakkens off by themselves to take advantage of their stealth Better about getting into the water on maps like Meso Will scout with fighters again as a means to find and kill sneaky air fabbers Reduced the ratio of bot factories to planet size Replaced HaveSeenEnemyUnit checks with threat assessments where possible to avoid responding to threats which no longer exist More reactive with its naval fleet compositions Complete overhaul of Naval fleet platoons to make them more appropriate in size and better avoid huge fleet in base syndrome Forced an air presence within the first three factories Introduced Queller personalities to allow for a range of difficulties - bronze is easier than normal and uber is harder than absurd - see the readme for more details Will no longer spam defence structures within a small area Will no longer loop the Commander through a teleporter Checks it has the radar necessary for ground anti-orbital defences Higher priority given to getting orbital radar when orbital has come into play Defends Halleys and Catalysts with ground anti-orbital Scales platoon sizes better in the late game Techs when there's no other way to grow the economy Tighter grip on economy Won't let nuke launchers sit idle for minutes at a time Reordered all checks to optimise AI performance Added missing placement check for teleporters Now builds Advanced Torpedo Launchers Much faster at taking over planets it completely owns Fixed error introduced in 1.3.3 preventing the building of orbital radar Does more to protect its gas giant investments Tries to control the orbital space before flying expensive and vulnerable radar around the local planet Builds SXX to destroy naval threats in addition to land ones
'Daww, was building MT forests in my Galactic Annihilation testing that were killing megabots, forced me to nerf the dps of them by a third. Does Queller use reclaim at all to grow economy? Is that even possible to configure an AI to do?
Please be aware that there is a bug in the current release of PA which causes an AI in slot 1 to behave incorrectly. You should not put an AI in this slot until the issue has been resolved.
I just played a bot match against some Gold level AI's. Very nice mod, I will be using it often. Thank you.
Here are a couple of games against v2.0. My recommendation is for platinum rated players to take on Queller's uber personality with a 1.6 eco setting. So here I go. I decided to recreate my older tests where I'd take on two Quellers, but to spice things up I used Roc which is a two planet system.
Version 2.0.1 Bronze and Silver no longer build defences where there's nothing to defend (thanks to DarkslayerRoy for the report) Bronze favours dual lasers over single lasers just like the other difficulties Bronze correctly only builds one anti-nuke silo at a time Bronze correctly checks Advanced Laser Tower numbers against other land defences rather than naval ones Bronze can build more basic defences Silver no longer builds multiple basic radars in a base Building defences against one threat layer no longer stops Bronze building defences against a different threat type
Just a reminder that if you have comments, suggestions, feedback, etc. I'd love to hear them. Replays are great, along with the difficulty you were playing at.
Looking forward to getting the AI used to the up and coming asteroids, as they don't take into account planets that spawn in later on. Also, if the AI defeats me on a main planet, from where I have fled to an asteroid, will it make the transition to building orbital and the like? The AI's are good, even if the ones on my team are always a little drunk, when fighting against a coordinated team who KNOWS to swarm me from every angle as I try to assault one of their team mates. Does the AI know how to use it's commander if an enemy spawns very close to it? As more often then not, it could be using a commander to combox a opposing base when it's very close to an enemy.
This was fixed in the latest PTE I believe, Oh yes, and it won't wait for you to flee either. No, the AI Commander doesn't really have much in the way of behaviour baked into it and is a terrible fighter. That's all hardcoded, though I'm going to try a few things to at least compensate for this somewhat. I also do other things like have Pelters constructed when there's nearby enemy base or Commander.
I love this AI! Here are some things i noticed in some of my games that could potentially be fixed / improved: (replay: http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=341826) 3:54 - doesn't respond to my two dox in the back of its base for a while and wastes fabbers by randomly sending them into my units instead of rebuilding the mex that my dox killed. Maybe it could build more AA with its expansions when it doesn't make a good enough attempt at taking the air (which seems to happen every game) or knows i have the air advantage. My bombers could have easily picked of any of its metal other than the 5 metal it starts with such as at 7:25 or 9:47 It seems that fabber use (or misuse) is a major problem. I noticed it uses its fabbers very weirdly (maybe it thinks they like to admire the scenery or enjoys watching them explode as they come into range of my army that it can clearly see) but i don't know if that is possible to fix. Is it possible for the AI to utilise pelicans for fabber drops?
Thanks for the feedback, always useful! For someone at your skill level I don't think uber (which is I presume the difficulty you played) at 1.0 eco is going to be tough enough. Aren't you plat? In which case 1.6 is probably more your speed (and in fact I could do with some feedback on how accurate my eco adjustment recommendations are) 3:54 - The AI spots your other two Dox on radar and sends its forces that way. I can determine when the AI forms platoons, but not what it does with them once they've been formed. What I could do is look at allowing it to form smaller platoons so perhaps it could have sent a couple of tanks to each spot. I've currently disabled platoons smaller than 4 units, so I'll enable the smaller platoons again I think and see if it helps. It's also a problem with the AI going all vehicles. I don't see that as a bug per se, I like Queller varying its openings so each game can play differently (and sometimes all vehicles is best). Had it gone bots first it would probably have dealt with that attack much better. Having said that, the development version of Queller is more flexible about its use of bots now that Grenadiers are a thing. Not a lot I can do about the fabbers unfortunately, that's one for sorian. The AI can check for threat at its destination but not on the route, and fabbers don't react to threat at all. Right now I don't (and neither does vanilla) make much use of the destination threat check because IMO by the time the fabber has arrived that information will be obsolete so no point basing decisions on it. I do think I need to be smarter with the number of fabbers the AI uses, and when it ramps up (right now it's pretty linear), but I haven't figured out a good way to do this yet. I'm not sure ground AA would be a good investment in this game because the AI is clearly losing on every front. At this point it just needs more metal ASAP. Galata turrets are surprisingly expensive. Some AA at the rear would have been nice though, so I'll see about that. I don't think it went for it because it varied between struggling for metal and not meeting its minimum expansion requirements. I'll play around with this a bit. Air has been an issue for a while and one I don't have a good fix for yet. The AI matched you in air factories, but it's really poor at preserving its air force and I haven't found a good fix for this yet. At some point I'm going to have to dedicate some real time to the issue. I did try out varying fighter platoon sizes by threat, but initial results weren't great. I'm afraid the AI cannot use Pelicans. My next update is intended to update the AI for the era of the Grenadier. I'm trying to find the right balance around when it should go Grenadier, or whether it should at all. The idea is it could potentially go mass Dox, Bolos and Grenadiers, or open Dox and Bolos and then transition to Bolos and Grenadiers. The biggest limitation I face at the moment is that the AI is blind to the units you build. It knows the threat type, be it air or land (or even antisurface, antiair), etc. But I can't see if it's facing a fast Dox force or a slow Bolo one. This makes Grenadier building a little trickier We need someone else to make an AI . Queller in both Total Annihilation and Total Annihilation Kingdoms got a lot better when people made AIs which exposed some of my blindspots. LiquidMetal and TA-Power Veteran were real eye openers to me at times when I thought Queller was about as good as it could be at each respective game. Hopefully sorian will build in a personality tag to all his blocks so multiple AIs are supported out of the box. Well, almost, ai_config will still be a thing (but Queller almost completely ignores this file so as to be able to fight vanilla fairly) Wow this got long I tried two Quellers on elodea's updated Systeem X (which was how I first tested the AI) the other day and got destroyed. Hopefully it means Queller is getting better rather than I'm getting that much worse
Off the back of this and the other game you linked me to I'm trying some changes: Uber smarter about assessing land threat when teching Uber will form squads smaller than four units again Uber no longer prioritises dual laser defenses over others Uber is smarter about when to wait until it can afford a nuke missile and when to just get building
With the new multiple personality tag support and the updates to AI-Showdown by @wondible, it's looking like a piece of cake to integrate the vanilla AI into Queller.
So with the new exciting additions to PTE-84871.. any thoughts on when your next release of Queller AI will be? Not that the current one is not thoroughly kicking my butt already..
I hope to have it ready for when PTE hits stable. My intention is to introduce the following: Vanilla AI integrated so you can play with it, Queller, or both in the same game Subpersonalities for Uber so you can tailor it to play a particular style Grenadier use by all levels Uber defaults to an adaptive style, basing more of its factory decisions on the map and the forces facing it Right now I'm getting my *** kicked by things I'm doing to Gold to better differentiate it from Platinum making it stronger, when my intention was the opposite! Also Grenadiers with the AI are proving tricky.
WOW I JUST BEAT THIS ON x2 ECO!! http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=344488 that gren + inferno composition is amazing and I don't think it did a good enough job at shutting down my expansions
Congrats I'm working on a new version which is updated for a meta where Grenadiers are relevant. I was hoping to have it ready for this new release, but it's not quite there yet. Infernodier will be a thing it can do too (though the AI isn't as good at it as humans). So long as it was on the asteroids build it will be fine.
Just watched the replay. Ouch, that was crushing (nicely played) Need to get this update done. I saw it chose to go for an all tank build, which is why the harrass was weak. Sometimes it will have bots, and then it would have done a better job on your expansions I suspect. The new update will be more flexible about including bots since they seem to be a lot more in use these days. Will be interesting to get feedback on how the unit compositions feel.
