Oh by the way: as the AI gets better, especially when the worse builds are removed and/or improved, the difficulty settings should be re-adjusted.
As it is now, there's only 3 settings for non-cheating income, but as the AI gets harder, people will almost never want cheating income AI. Even now, I think it makes sense for hard to be the best non-income-cheating AI right now, because it beats many players (I think diamonds?). Blizzard's AI goes to very hard without cheating even, and this is on par or better in some cases than that.
Hence, I think only insane should have cheating income, which should be like 10% to start, and 1 additional percent every minute later. If extra-hard modes are desired, then just have them accessible in-game from chat commands.
Frankly, to build a real AI, none of the difficulty levels should have income cheats OR map hack.
If you get rid of a lot of the junk builds and just focus on some core solid builds the AI should be able to macro flawlessly. Add in a micro-bot for some sick micro and that will already be quite a challenge even without counting strategy & tactics. Basically the AI should be mechanically superior to any human but strategically and tactically inferior. Adding in the strategy and tactics decisions when the AI has incomplete information (no maphack) would be the final stage.
IMO there needs to be a smoother difficulty curve. Right now the jump from medium to hard to very hard to insane is too much due to the ridiculous income cheats and map hacks. It's far better in the long run to do away with such gimmicks and actually make the AI react to scouting information. But that's for the strategic/tactical programming. As far as a basic method of differentiating difficulty, its easy enough to program in some common mistakes that players of lower levels have. For instance:
-Every time a worker finishes building, set a random number of seconds between say 0 and 20 before it starts the next worker. You can do a similar thing for production buildings. This approximates the Bronze League mistake of forgetting to make workers and/or constant production out of production buildings. Add the delay into more things like MULES, Injects, Chronoboosts, etc. and you basically have bronze league macro.
-Add a condition where the AI doesn't build units/workers when its fighting. Another common mistake.
-Add in occasional supply blocks.
-Add in floating minerals/gas and not enough production buildings.
etc.
Once you've added these mistakes for the AI, the difference in difficulties can be managed simply by toggling these conditions on or off or tweaking the numbers. For instance, the Very Easy AI would have all of these conditions on. The Easy AI might have the worker/production delay between 0 and 10 seconds instead of 0 and 20 and perhaps the supply block condition toggled off. The Medium would have constant worker production, not get supply blocked, and enough buildings, but forget to build stuff during battles. So on and so forth.
I'm still iffy about APM limits since part of the fun of AI's is to use human's superior strategy and tactics to overcome the AI's huge mechanical advantage. But either way, the ideal result would be that the difficulties should roughly be:
Very Easy -> Bronze Easy -> Silver Medium -> Gold Hard -> Platinum Very Hard -> Diamond Insane -> Master Super Insane -> Grandmaster Bonjwa -> Bonjwa
The last two can be toggled on by in-game commands. =D
It would be useful if you can list out the current BO which build is bad, and which need some modification. For now I'm actually clueless, and haven't much time for testing ^^.
What does "Wallzone" with a timer mean? It appears vs Terran but I have no idea what it does and can't find anything on this subject. I would suspect something with Terran making a walloff but that doesn't seem to happen when playing the AI.
thanx for the AI maps, I used it in macro or die map, and will download asap for regular map practice. I think i found a bug considering .82 version( i think) in macro or die, dont know if it was fixed: my protoss opponent had his natural blocked by a semi-completed bunker, which he ignored and tried to get his natural(late) in a different location.
There are so many version on EU out now. Can you make one "official" upload for each map and update it, so we don't have to search for the newest version?
thx
@Sevenofnines if they try to make a good ai i think its hard for the guys to motivate them self to put work in it so its act bad ^^
hahaha this is awesome. So much better than Blizzard Ai. I have been beating the zerg and protoss but get tottally owned by the terran. The marine splitting is crazy good, but it is nice to play something that doesnt just A-move.
* Do you code in GUI or Galaxy? * How much do you use the built-in AI commands and how much do you actually do yourself? * Do you use the Issue Order or Issue AI order for the orders?
-Add in floating minerals/gas and not enough production buildings.
just no. thats a terrible idea.
terrible idea now; though when the AI improves its strategies and tactics (especially in harassment, flanks and surrounds), these would then become incredibly useful things to implement.
So what level should the Great Tea Ai on medium be considered? As plat I'm getting stomped by GTAI on medium... is it comparable to diamond level? (assuming you don't exploit weaknesses in the AI).
Great AI, although it has some weird builds. The '-re' command is not working for me in the 0.9 version, and when I do '-qr', it fast restarts but with the gamepeed on low.
On July 02 2011 13:40 skeldark wrote: @Xapti blizzard ai use income-cheat!
Only insane uses income cheat. When I mentioned Blizzard AI, I mentioned the very hard difficulty, which is the hardest difficulty before AI uses income cheat. what I was saying is that green tea should only have one income cheating setting (insane) just like blizzard's (or additional income from game chat commands if desired).
On July 01 2011 18:34 Sevenofnines wrote: Frankly, to build a real AI, none of the difficulty levels should have income cheats OR map hack.
If you get rid of a lot of the junk builds and just focus on some core solid builds the AI should be able to macro flawlessly. Add in a micro-bot for some sick micro and that will already be quite a challenge even without counting strategy & tactics. Basically the AI should be mechanically superior to any human but strategically and tactically inferior. Adding in the strategy and tactics decisions when the AI has incomplete information (no maphack) would be the final stage.
IMO there needs to be a smoother difficulty curve. Right now the jump from medium to hard to very hard to insane is too much due to the ridiculous income cheats and map hacks. It's far better in the long run to do away with such gimmicks and actually make the AI react to scouting information. But that's for the strategic/tactical programming. As far as a basic method of differentiating difficulty, its easy enough to program in some common mistakes that players of lower levels have. For instance:
-Every time a worker finishes building, set a random number of seconds between say 0 and 20 before it starts the next worker. You can do a similar thing for production buildings. This approximates the Bronze League mistake of forgetting to make workers and/or constant production out of production buildings. Add the delay into more things like MULES, Injects, Chronoboosts, etc. and you basically have bronze league macro.
-Add a condition where the AI doesn't build units/workers when its fighting. Another common mistake.
-Add in occasional supply blocks.
-Add in floating minerals/gas and not enough production buildings.
etc.
Once you've added these mistakes for the AI, the difference in difficulties can be managed simply by toggling these conditions on or off or tweaking the numbers. For instance, the Very Easy AI would have all of these conditions on. The Easy AI might have the worker/production delay between 0 and 10 seconds instead of 0 and 20 and perhaps the supply block condition toggled off. The Medium would have constant worker production, not get supply blocked, and enough buildings, but forget to build stuff during battles. So on and so forth.
I'm still iffy about APM limits since part of the fun of AI's is to use human's superior strategy and tactics to overcome the AI's huge mechanical advantage. But either way, the ideal result would be that the difficulties should roughly be:
Very Easy -> Bronze Easy -> Silver Medium -> Gold Hard -> Platinum Very Hard -> Diamond Insane -> Master Super Insane -> Grandmaster Bonjwa -> Bonjwa
The last two can be toggled on by in-game commands. =D
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ this a thousand times. I loved playing the BW AI because ( as far as i know) it doesn't use cheats, it was just infinitely mechanically superior to me. In some daily Day9 said that the standard is the way to get a maximum army value, and any interesting tricks took away from that standard army value. so program the standard into the AI for each race, and simply limit its APM to perform that standard depending on the difficulty.
On July 03 2011 08:53 cekkmt wrote: this a thousand times. I loved playing the BW AI because ( as far as i know) it doesn't use cheats, it was just infinitely mechanically superior to me. In some daily Day9 said that the standard is the way to get a maximum army value, and any interesting tricks took away from that standard army value. so program the standard into the AI for each race, and simply limit its APM to perform that standard depending on the difficulty.
That's not true, in BW AI, I can easily beat 2, or even 3 AI at the same time. Also, I have no problem in beating 2 Blizzard Very Hard AI in Starcraft 2. But GT AI is much harder to deal with even on 1 vs 1 on Medium difficulty if it choose the right build.
EPT
