Hello all, just wanted to put this out there and get a bit of a discussion/request thread going. As far as I know, there is not much we can do with the AI as of yet to help it understand changes in balance, new units and perhaps even new gameplay elements that might be added to our mods... am I correct in this understanding? In many other games with otherwise excellent modding capabilities, I have noticed that AI is frequently largely omitted, leading to modders having to script together simple AI via sending atomic actions to units and creating a secondary "fake" AI to implement new ways for the AI to play the game. For example, in WC3 there was a mod where all of your units were automatically put under "fake" AI control as soon as they came out of your barracks. They could be given a basic waypoint that they would sometimes follow (a special high-cost building in of itself), but besides that would randomly "patrol" a certain area around their spawn zone. In this case, the strategy of the map became less on micro and brought it more to the macro where your choices of where to build barracks and how to upgrade your units based on the enemy waves that came in won the game for you. I was hoping that instead of having to build out "fake" AI systems in PA, that some parts of the AI system could be exposed to scripting such that we could use pre-existing AI routines and agents and apply them to different units, structures, etc... on the fly, and that could allow us to build in unique AI to go along with the (frequently) gameplay changing elements of our mods. As i'm sure @sorian would agree, good AI is a large part of making a game fun. Without any way to dive into the AI loop and change things, we will be forced to either create inefficient "fake" AI, or to not introduce new gameplay elements into PA.. which i'm sure most of you would agree is boring. Footnote: Many gameplay ideas such as the DOTA style MOBA have come about due to having access to at least some basic atomic AI on the unit level. Perhaps with a bit more support in PA, modders will come up with new ideas that might become similarly successful?
I think its possible, since you can technically use cheat mods to switch to AI team and AI still actually issues orders. Theoretically, you can order the AI to only believe it posesses ownership of certain units. Theoretically, even have a few ai action weights, which is in an editable file last I checked. if you added new units and wanted to polish a mod, you'd simply throw it some mention of your units and weight of build in the Ai script. A lot of how it plays isn't scripted, it just knows, but units and weight and Ai use ingame are theoretically controllable.
Changing build orders and such is quite different then having access to the AI's atomic and strategic action loop. For simple mods that just add new units with similar to abilities to existing units, I agree that what is in place now is fine. However, for mods adding different gameplay elements, we need more control over AI scripting.
I think you might have to wait for the server to be released for this kind of mod. Don't worry though; Sorian's career started with making AI mods so he will make sure this is possible.
