Grading: AI category
| Reason game is unranked |
Amount of unique players |
Amount of games |
| The game has at least one AI |
40,380 |
384,982 |
We have a rough estimate that there were 70.000 unique players in 2022. More than half of those players played games with AIs - over 380.000 games in 2022 alone.
| Matchmaker |
Month |
Amount of unique players |
Amount of games |
| ladder1v1 |
December |
1,689 |
11,102 |
| tmm2v2 |
December |
930 |
968 |
| tmm4v4_full_share |
December |
1,934 |
3,211 |
We took one month as an example, but even if we'd sum all the games together then the number of matchmaker games are no where near the number of games with AI. That is why there is a separate grading criteria to check for AI-compatibility. With thanks to @maudlin27 and the other AI developers there is a wiki article that has loads of tips and tricks on how the AI can perceive a map:
We highly recommend you to skim it and to, eventually, read it through. The remainder of this topic will help the default AI (the one that ships with FAF) to understand your map properly.
Hotkeys
Over the last year we've introduced various abstractions to help the AI understand a map. We'll discuss each abstraction in-depth separately. You can enable a visualizer for them using these hotkeys:
Utilities window to toy with the navigational mesh
Utilities window to show markers
Utilities window to show the reclaim grid
Navigational mesh
The navigational mesh generates a quad-tree like abstraction across a map. There are various utility functions available to the AI to sample the abstraction. Once open, the following window will pop up on your screen:
You can use this to generate the navigational mesh (1) and to visualize it (2). When you visualize it there are two options: you either visualize the layer as a whole, or the individual sub areas in the given layer.
The land layer as a whole
Individual sub areas in a layer
The individual sub areas allows the AI to understand where it can navigate to. It can help it understand when it needs to use a transport to navigate to an area. As a quick example: an engineer from the pink area can't possibly navigate to the brown area, therefore it needs to call in a transport.
When evaluating your map using the navigational mesh we'll take into account paths that are dangerously thin. The minimum cell size is 1x1. But not all units can navigate through that. Take the Fatboy as an example. We recommend that any path has a width of at least 8 cells for land, amphibious and the hover layer. And a width of at least 16 cells for the naval layer.
(Generated) markers
A marker is a point of interest. I've written two extensive articles about it a few years ago:
Luckily with the navigational mesh in place you no longer need to place navigational markers. At the moment we only generate expansion markers. Throughout the year we'll start generating more and more marker types, but we're not there today yet. We're asking you to populate the map with the following markers:
- Rally Point
- Naval Area
- Defensive Point
- Transport
- Combat Zone
You can read up about how they work in the linked article about AI markers. You can find all the markers in the editor:
Grids
A lot of the AI awareness works through a grid-like setup. In particular the iMAP grid that the AI uses to determine threat values.
We ask you to keep this in mind where possible. As two examples:
- Reclaim spread over multiple cells means the AI can have a tough time understanding the real value, this is most important for the initial high-valued reclaim
- (Neutral) civilians over multiple cells means the AI can underestimate the real threat that the civilian base represents
