I just checked the vid and its very interesting. I am guessing it is constantly calculating whether it should attack units in its vicinity or go home .. and it is using many parameters, such as its own health, strength of ally/enemy units, distance from home, time of game, etc. Am i assuming correct ? Similar with overcharge, calculate mass of adjacent units, decide if worth the energy cost of overcharge ?
I am very impressed with the AI, like i said, it won against 3 sorian enemies. I am looking forward to seeing how it improves further. There is so many things .. for instance, sure, u can have a generic commander, same for every game. But, what if u spice it up, make a few personalities and at start of each game its randomly choosen ? So, in the last game, you saw an uveso enemy commander defending its base very well, then the next game, the enemy commander suddenly pops in the middle of your base, almost on a suicide run. I can almost hear my friend on skype, saying, what the f... and laughing if it happened to him. Sadly, im not a good player to give any tips on navy or anything.
1 thing i noticed, there seems to be certain markers on each map, you can even see them for a few seconds after the game starts. And then everyone builds navy bases on those markers (uveso sometimes even tries to build navy factory near enemy island, which is a neat trick, human enemies do it all the time). But, isnt the fact that those build markers even exist, kind of making the build thing almost scripted ? I was thinking about it earlier and if u set all the water as potential build site, you would probably have big problems preventing AI trying to build it in some insane places. But, speaking for 4 corners, i would add more navy build spaces, add different weight to them to make sure they more often then not pick the more optimal one, then just use a rand function to pick spot. I hope i didnt completely miss the point of how its done.
There is so much more i would like to say but i will keep it short just by 1 last comment. You said, units don't know how long the weapon range is from the enemy unit. But in a way, we do. Let's say we have radar coverage but no sight coverage, so we dont know which unit is shooting at our unit. But we do see that a) our unit is getting hit by something and in the case of torpedos, we do know its a torpedo, b) we know our unit isnt shooting back since we can see that visualy. And lastly, c) we can see that the unit is out of range, since we can visualy see that the enemy icon is out of the red circle that shows range of our attack. Now, it is true that we cant just by looking say exactly how many meters the unit is away, but we can approximate. We dont even have to know the distance itself, we just say ... if(gettingHit/taking damage && noUnitInWeaponsRange) doSomething (like move away, move closer, anything). Btw, is there any default unit response for what the unit will do when its getting hit ? In most strategy games, if u start shooting unit from afar, it will come to you and attack. Is that different in SC ?
Looking forward to your next AI update