For Backers Only: AI building stuff

I love how annoying the AI is with air, good job there. Bombers need to be less willing to pointlessly bomb units by Spinners though, early on they should be looking for expanding fabbers (or fat tasty fabber groups) because shutting down expansion wins games.

The AI continues to be too bold with Commanders when defending, or perhaps simply not smart enough when to pull it back. I don't know if it's aware of this piece's importance yet. Commanders should generally be either building energy, factories, or stuck in the middle of a big army to provide a sizable advantage in an attack.

I think there needs to be an even bigger level of differentiation between Normal and Absurd. The AI simply expands too well for the bottom level. Low level players suck at expansion, the AI needs to be worse at it too. It should let factories idle, it should produce tiny amounts of fabbers (and they should idle too), it shouldn't do fancy small group raids. New players will build a "manageable" amount of stuff in a "manageable" amount of territory, then generally stop. The APM cap mentioned previously would be a great way to help with this.

On Absurd my biggest issue with the AI is that while it seems good at expanding and raiding, it doesn't make armies. It keeps moving these tiny ground forces about and I think this ties into the fact that it still doesn't make enough factories. Throughout the game it will regularly be floating, I think it's too scared of having a negative economy when in fact it should be more worried about floating. It already takes too long to make its second factory, this should be no more than four power gens after the first one, and some players make it sooner.

AI opening eco still seems off. It goes for two MEX and two power, but players have been doing three MEX and one power (2 MEX, power, MEX or 3 MEX, power) since forever in 95% of games. This might tie into its seeming terror of negative eco, but leads to a pointless early power float. If it wants to go this way it should be utilising this to push an earlier second factory and nothing but fabbers out the first until it's tapping that energy fully.

A possible improvement in its expansion could be looking at groups of MEX rather than individuals when planning fabber routes. I saw two fabbers head for the same field. They were working on different MEX, but long-term this was going to hurt the AI because it would be more effective to send those fabbers to different fields to spread out its risk, and reduce the total amount of travel time going on

Quitch, What have you done? you have given all of humanities secrets to beating the AI away to a relentless giggling Uber Employeee D=

Oh and AI needs some work assaulting planets xD they will send 1 transport every few minuts, that fabber will build 2 of either mexes and power generators before building a teleporter, which gives the humans (or enemy AI, yes let them fight eachother! muahahaha) plenty of time to take out the fabber

Giggle

Actually, on the orbital front (and perhaps this is part of the needed development of its orbital play) the AI still needs to build a factory first on arriving on a new planet. Sometimes it does, but it seems like if it has a teleporter back home it doesn't bother (yet at the same time doesn't always link up the teleporter, presumably an eco thing). This can severely delay its takeover of a planet.

Why u sell out humanity Quitch? WHYWYWHWYW?

I intended to be the last to die.

Matiz is the last to die
Because ima sell your secrets out

Sorion, we need to fix a problem where quitches have unusually high win rates...this needs to be fixed, whenever an ai sees a quitch, it should call down 3 more commander brothers, and a couple levelers

Yeah I definitely need to report the 'OP Quitch' bug... not cool! Uber fix it!

top work on the new a.i. Ubsurd is very hard to beat on single non water planets.

Soo glad uber hired you : )

the AI at least, doesnt work well when it goes bots, since it doesnt micro them effectively to target workers and mexes and not get into direct confrontations with the enemy

AI falls for as many noob traps as anyone else that doesn't know about them. I'd put a greater effort on fixing the noob traps than on fixing the AI that falls for them.

Watch out for GalacticMode---this "selfMurderMode" is sometimes the only possilty for me to win a match!
The AI is very good at fortifying a planet against invasions from other planets if you are just having a few types of units like most time in GalacticMode...
...anyways, the GalacticMode has

Oh, and BTW: I really fell the same like Quitch concernin the rountines for bombers---you´ve really got that "annoying bombers"-feeling, but AI doesn´t simply seems to know that Spinners shouldn´t be their first target if they aren´t capeable of completly overwhelming them...

...anyways, I´d like to have APM-Caps for the AI as well---not to mention it would be nice if general gameplay would be less APM-focused and more Strategy-focused, but that´s a general problem of real-time-strategy---and definitvly not the fault of the AI-team

But that's a generic issue with the basic unit AI for bots, automatic dodging / kiting just isn't in it, and target priority list is also screwed over. Not to mention that there is also no such feature as "re-prioritizing" targets, so target lock can get stuck on tanky units instead of sniping fabbers head on.

I agree, once it has t2 bombers its very hard to land anything...

I tried landing 8 t2 fabbers and 20 mobile AA, but they were all dead before i finished building a teleport!!

Sorian, the AI is in desperate need for a hotfix for the factory exit collision bug.

I'm talking about the scenario where the AI has placed a factory in such manner, that units won't be able to find a path. Hence they stockpile and eventually they start colliding.

Once that happens, the server cringes in pain as the AI still tries to somehow organize the units while pathfinding is unable to provide suitable solutions, resulting in HEAVY LAGS starting at only 50-100 units involved!

There is only one legit hotfix for now: Sample factory exit areas and if they are blocked, STOP THE FACTORY. It's close to impossible to play against multiple AIs in a multi planet system due to this specific bug as the game will almost inevitably start lagging rather soon.

This bug also screws over the player, since it feels like your AI is causing player issued commands to starve, resulting in broken area commands and units simply forgetting commands.

Do you have any screenshots showing this behavior? I haven't seen it all, playing with my friends against AI on multi-planet systems.

Try playing on planets with lots of mountains or other large scale terrain features. It's very likely to happen on such planets.

I will just start up an AI match and try to get a some nice shots


EDIT1:
Not the bug I was looking for, even though it's still a bug:

Commander spawned in a bad spot and got stuck at building first mex.


Also not the bug I was looking for, although related. The AI tries to move the bots over and over again, and the bots stop several times per second because path is blocked. Also note how server FPS are already down with physics >30ms/frame.

EDIT 2:
Well, no luck this round. The AI hasn't built any factory in an unsuitable place this time. However game still started lagging as hell, with physics step consuming about 50% of the server frame time.

And EVERY SINGLE STUCK PLATOON ADDED AT LEAST 2MS MORE TO PHYSICS. Seriously, you could tell whenever 2 AI controlled platoons collided just by looking at the time for the physics step. Two small platoons trying to squish through a bottleneck from opposite directions even results in 3-4ms. With larger platoons this goes up to 50ms.


This for example even made time for physics calculation jump up by 30ms(!!!!!) (from 70ms to 100ms). Once this specific platoon got wiped out, it normalized back to 70ms. Besides: What the heck is the AI doing there? It just kept sending units into that dead end.

Looks like it's more a "dead end detection" what the AI is severely lacking.
That would probably also solve the factory issue as well.


Time for "Fabber Manager - Proc Idle" just skyrocketed. Odly enough, it wen't down to 3ms rather quickly after both remaining AIs got hit by nukes. And back up to 30ms because fabbers got stuck and aborted their jobs.

Damn AI is cheating again. That wouldn't have been a valid place for a human player.

I've experienced the same lag issue when the AI has built a naval factory in a puddle and filled every cubic inch of water with ships. Crashed the game before I could nuke the factory.