The sorian PA AI thread

Wow. I just watched a replay of a guy playing against the AI, and he was basically turtling. All of a sudden the AI brings in a huge bomber force with a scout and snipes the dude! I was laughing out loud!

For anyone complaining about the AI in PA... they should watch this replay The AI is far cleverer than pretty much any other I've faced. If you leave an obvious opening for attack (e.g. insufficient AA) it will exploit it (no anti nukes is another one). You also can't just expand with fabbers without defences, and it knows enough to micro it's units if you counter

So what's the lobby ID then?

Sorian, what makes "buffer":15 so magical for the opening factory? Set it any lower and you will see a noticeable pause before the AI begins building, but put it back to 15 and the AI starts as soon as it spawns. The Commander doesn't appear to exhibit this behaviour for factories after the first one

So, I guess my question is: what's up with that?

Crap, sorry - I didn't think to jot it down.

Yah I just found out the hard way about the AI's nukes...

thats simple, i found out the hard-way that an AI will smash a planet into you

I know there is a lot of programming frustration involved (creating game AI is not an easy thing to do), but when the AI proves its worth it has to put Sorian on cloud 9.

I have watched the AI play each other, it still makes stupid mistakes, like how one of them had the other cornered against a lake, but the former AI wouldn't send his vanguards to kill the other's commander (who wasn't in the lake, rather right on the edge of it), they just kind of went back and forth until they all got killed by battleships. This repeated for a good 15 minutes until the AI cornered against the lake launched nukes from a second planet and ended the game (the first AI could have just nuked the battleships and went in - but it was waiting for 3 other nukes to finish). So, the AI plays well, but it still has its quirks.

The problem was that the AI kept hesitating after the vanguards took a hit and pulled them back, and then repeated. You may have already fixed that, not certain.

The 'feeder planet' thing is a nice fix too, I got kind of mystified watching the AI sit and do nothing but build a teleporter and a factory on its other planets previously.

One issue I've noticed is the AI getting its units killed when resources are around. It will target pens and mex over anything else, including enemy combat units. This leads to it struggling more than is necessary when assaulting bases because it doesn't eliminate threats from the area which it could easily crush (like the one Dox that just rolled off the factory) because it's focusing everything on killing those two pgens it just saw.

This is especially noticeable with ships. Due to their range you'll see them crash into the shore to attack resource ignoring the land army which can now (and is) shoot at them.

I recall this change came about because the AI would often fail to finish off mex when units rolled into the area, but what the AI needs to do is differentiate between the times its tiny raiding party is dead and should finish killing resources before it dies, and when it's launching an assault and it should be using its overwhelming force to kill threats before resources.

I'm the n00biest of n00bs in this game, but I've noticed some bugs or other particulars that may have already been mentioned.

1) By far the most annoying, on Relentless 1v1, the AI will make a few extractors and that's about it. This usually happens when the AI Commander is in water.

2) I've noticed that Commanders avoid actual impassable ravines (or fractures), but attempt to cross water-filled ones, with hilariously incompetent results.

3) I'm having issues with Naval construction units building Vehicle or Bot factories on land. Sometimes they are able to. And sometimes, for no discernible reason, they simply can't. This leads to a lot of player time spent trying to build land factories through frustrating trial and error.

4) Why would ANY player want to block a metal node? Why should they be able to be blocked? It's frustrating to build factories or defenses near a node, and find out afterwords the node can't be utilized. Why not make it so a player can never cancel himself from a node?

5) When playing repeated games again the AI, the service will sign me out, necessitating a re-start.

Thanks!

AI PTE Report:
The Good ~~
AI builds tons more factories, and uses those units, the only units it keeps in its base are the aircraft to defend, and uses ground units aggressively....awesome and evil!


The Bad ~~
AI doesnt use naval well, some pretty bad naval fabricator use, doesnt build those torpedo-turrets, and rarely builds more then 1 naval factory. Oh ya, biggest thing, doesnt use the naval unless a close threat is nearby, and never deploys the navy aggressively (from what i have noticed...

Can the AI learn to only build units that can path to the enemy?

Like it's fine building ground units on islands if they are planing on transports, but otherwise, they should probably learn to switch to air and sea when there is no land path.

That or proxy factorys on enemy islands.

Wanted to post the same thing as mjshorty, on the two naval 1vs1 maps, the ai in the pte did not build any naval at all during a few test games. Especially on pacific the ai got totally stuck on the small starting island building tanks.

There have been some changes to the AI's handling of rally points in the latest PTE which might improve this.

A simple range increase on the construction boats will solve point 3 Just mention it to @tvinita , I don't think it will hurt the balance

On the other hand, the AI has always been bad at naval and should really be trained to do so now Naval becomes more awesome every update