AI tourney: 10km Twin Rivers
Since the vote on the next map for the tournament was tied between twin rivers and white fire, I decided to go with Twin Rivers.
Each AI faces off against M28AI in a 1v1 on Twin Rivers to see what AIx build and resource cheat multiplier it needs to win half of its games.
Setup
M28AI will fight against the enemy AIx using mirrored factions. Based on how heavy the win/loss the AI modifier gets adjusted to try and quickly arrive at the AIx modifier that means half of games get lost and half get won; in some cases where significant factional differences are suspected or I have the patience to run more games, games will be run with each faction to identify the lowest modifier required with that faction for the AI to win. Results will then be displayed for the estimated modifier (e.g. if an AI wins with a 1.2 modifier with 3 factions, but a 1.1 modifier with 1, then it is assumed the 3 factions would draw with a 1.15 modifier, and the other faction would draw with a 1.05 modifier, meaning it's shown with a modifier of 1.125, i.e. (1.15*3+1.05)/4.
Changes to AI
Since the last tournament there have been minor updates to M28AI and RNGAI, and more interestingly a new AI mod is on the FAF vault, currently on v102, called Vanguard AI.
See the 5km tournament for details on other changes made in the previous 3 years
The results
Summary
AI Name
AIx modifier needed to win half of games
M28 Adaptive
1.0
M28 Easy
1.0625
M27
1.0625
RNG Standard
1.175
DilliDalli
1.25
LOUD
1.375
Sorian Edit
1.475
Adaptive
1.6
Uveso Rush
1.6
Steam: Sorian Adaptive
1.65
Vanguard
1.7
Sorian adaptive (FAF)
1.825
Steam: Nutcracker
1.8625
Steam: Adaptive
1.925
Swarm terror
2.375
Detailed results
The full results including the data used for the above graphs can be seen in the Data worksheet of the following file:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/101PqVFKozMaWcHbaceIbabLGDsfdnoY-/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100973959280546778272&rtpof=true&sd=true
Other Observations
M28 was generally hurt by going for navy on one of the ponds, with a significant mass investment for minimal benefit
AIs with high modifiers would typically win with nukes or an early experimental
M28 was able to win and hold both plateaus in almost every game it won
Land played a significant role with air generally not having much impact unless an early air experimental from a high AIx modifier, or M28 using gunships defensively
Swarm's poor performance (most AI would be expected to require a lower AIx modifier the larger the map) appeared due to not building/using anti-air units effectively until late in the game allowing M28's gunships to attack its tanks with impunity
Games on LOUD would generally go on far longer than on FAF (despite it being a 10km map which I thought might be enough to mean shorter games - I was curious whether LOUD's typically long game times are due primarily to its preference for 20-40km map sizes). My guess is a significant part of the reason for the long game times is the effectiveness of shielding (e.g. no shield damage overflow and rapid recharge times meant M28 in one game built more than 8 T3 artillery before it could break through T3 shields, in another game a mavor and 3 T3 arti were not sufficient for it to break through)
I've updated the 5km tournament results to include the new Vanguard AI, and also to re-run all the steam results in case they were affected by a subsequent bug discovered that could cause AIx overwhelm settings to be enabled and adjust resource multipliers (however the steam results only changed marginally so the bug didn't appear to have had a significant impact)
The average AIx modifier on twin rivers was 1.57, compared with 1.9 for Theta Passage. Such a decrease is expected since as the map size increases ACUs have less impact, it takes longer for land units to reach the enemy (so greater risk of being defended and/or out-teched by the units they meet), a greater proportion of mexes tend to be outside the core base (meaning greater benefit from the initial expansion boost provided by a build rate modifier), the economy (and hence resource modifier) generally plays a bigger role due to this, and high impact units that can end the game without significant investment to defend against them (like a land experimental or a nuke built with a build rate modifier) become much easier to build (more resources, and more time).
