v22-v23 Update
There was no particular theme to these changes, other than that most of them arose from watching mistakes my AI made on a 1v1 against another AI on Burial Mounds
- Tanks can now suicide (sometimes)
- Fixed bug with power stall manager that made it far less effective; minor tweaks to this to prioritise HQ updates and initial engineer production (to allow more efficient power)
- Minor logic improvements to experimentals (stopping them from trying to kite, making monkeylord move instead of attack-moving)
- Ignoring PD that cant be pathed by land (so MMLs etc. arent overbuilt trying to counter it - relevant in particular for Burial Mounds)
- Various tweaks to air logic (more likely to refuel, target transports with AA, make use of stealth)
- More accurate logic for whether reclaim is within range (thanks to Marlo and Jip who helped me figure out how to determine the size of a reclaim object)
- Another rework of my land scout 'intel path' logic - it should now form a path along the shoreline on island maps
- Bugfix that caused my threat response logic to view each unit individually instead of grouping threats together
- Various other bugfixes and tweaks
Although there was no big area of focus with this release, I did manage to achieve one of my long term goals with it, beating gunner1069 (the human sparring partner who usually plays a match against each version of the AI; they're a 1.1k global from playing astro exclusively, with their preferred tactic being to turtle - originally they played M27AI on Theta Passage, until around v10 when M27AI would fare well against their turtling on conventional maps, at which point they switched to Astro Craters).
Winning against a turtle on Astro Craters is harder than a normal map, since the normal advice against a turtle is to avoid attacking them, out-eco them with your map control (since T1 mexes are far cheaper per mass generated than T2 mexes), and then attack with an overwhelming force. Obviously this doesn't work so well if gaining map control just means you have 21 mexes to their 19. There are still plenty of flaws with my AI that a good astro player could exploit to win, but it can now at least offer a challenge on the map against weaker players.
V23 hotfix - Thanks to relent0r for flagging - there was a bug in v22 which caused my T1 platoon formers to not work, which should be fixed now.