Hi what about the AI design for the AI Engine Architecture - is there any idea on what technology will be employed? Will the AI Engine or the Game engine be accessible from mods or via dll's ? To use it as a playground for AI design or research or just plain fun? thanks
The core engine will probably not be accessible. If they do the AI in a similar way as they did in SupCom, it will be quite moddable. It's too early to tell though, they don't even have any form of gameplay.
One thing which I noticed about the AI in Supcom2 was that it was particularly good at eco/expansion, but it was miserably bad in actual combat, due to not exploiting units' ranges and speeds. It is key to a good AI in PA that it always stays at units' max range, as well as microing them well (i.e. to avoid mobile arty shots), instead of stupidly sending packs of units into heavy defenses, constantly feeding the player with mass. IMO instead of research/vision/income bonuses (as they did in Supcom2) the difficulty setting on an AI should affect how well the AI keeps the units at max range ("kites"), how well it microes, and how well it judges where and when to attack. A max difficulty AI should exploit units' speed and range to the fullest, to kite, and should micro against incoming shots perfectly.
One thing that I hope the devs do is make the AI artificially limited to one click at a time when controlling units. It would be the easiest thing in the world to tell every unit to stay at its max range, but clearly a human player could not tell ten units to go in opposite directions at the same time. I imagine it would be much harder to program effectively, but it really adds to the sense of fairness when AI does not behave in ways that a human physically cannot. Not sure I've explained it properly, this explains what I mean a bit better.
I'm talking about perfection at maximum difficulty, for players who like a ridiculous challenge, something like the "cheating AI" was supposed to be in supcom2. A "normal" difficulty AI should obviously make mistakes as a human would. And actually I can't tell 10 blobs to move different directions at the same time, but I can probably micro about 3-4 blobs effectively and pretty intensely, if I don't also have to deal with economy or base-related micro - especially with shortcuts assigned.
