M28AI Devlog (v224)
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v224 Update
15 changes, including:- M28 should place markers when it spots high value enemy units if it has a human teammate
- Engineers should be more likely to reclaim wrecks within a second of being in range of the wreck.
- Decreased bomber aggression early game and where M28 lacks intel
- T2 radar outside the base can be upgraded to omni on larger maps when M28 has very good eco
- 2 QUIET specific changes, including an infinite upgrade bug and fixing factory enhancements
Acknowledgements
- Relent0r - identifying triggers relating to a brain gaining visual of a unit that I was able to use to add in some taunts (although after working on it some more I decided to go with a custom approach for greater functionality)
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Firstly, I like the AI. For someone that likes to play vs AI rather than pvp, I appreciate the work you do.
It would be great to have a setting to turn down the strat bomber hover spam. Or the ability to scale the amount of APM to a more human-like amount. I get flooded with 50+ strat bombers, each hovering out of range, flicking bombs forward. No shields can protect you and AA cant kill them fast enough. By itself, it is a minor issue, but the AI being able to focus on that while doing micro on everything else on the battlefield can make it hard to deal with.
I'm also unsure of how balanced ASF vs AI ASF combat is. I've often outnumbered their ASF while having vehicle AA below, and my ASFs get decimated while the AI ASF are barely touched.
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The AI is cheating again.
Last game the M28 (easy) marked a nuke without seen it.
Same seems with other funktions but i cannot proof it. For example the first bomber. It seems he sees everything without having a scout.
It would be nice to have a funktion to stop M28 doing things that are not possible for humans. -
@Laso That's essentially how M28 (and many previous AI as well) performs. It has information it shouldn't, and does things with units that you would find it either impossible or incredibly difficult to do. It's not, and doesn't claim to be, a level playing field.
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@Swarm133 Thanks for the feedback; I can look at how feasible it would be to add further customisation into how it uses hover-micro as a game setting (e.g. the number of units it's able to hover-micro simultaneously); in the meantime you can play using M28Easy which should disable all hover-micro.
For ASF vs ASF combat I've seen it lose lots of air fights that have looked relatively close in separate replays, but there is a high degree of variability in asf matchups even with the same tactics being used by both the player and the AI, so it's certainly possible that you can have more asf and lose an air fight, although I'd expect with a significantly larger force you should overcome the variability/micro difference.
To help illustrate what I mean, in sandbox you could create 50 asf for two players, and have 1 group attack-move towards the 2nd group, and the 2nd group move and then press stop when near the 1st group; I'd expect the 2nd group to win the fight. M28Easy will disable the main micro M28 uses in asf vs asf fights, which I'd expect to make it weaker (although I've not actually tested to confirm!)
@Laso Please can you provide a replay - the only scenario I'dve thought M28 would have knowledge of a nuke it hasn't scouted is if that nuke has already launched its missile; M28 aims to approximate what a competent human player can infer by recognising certain units exist when they fire, to avoid scenarios where an unscouted unit can fire at M28 and it continues as though that unit doesnt exist (another example would be a monkeylord firing outside of visual range - a human player would see the big laser and know there's a monkeylord there). I'd need a replay to check or (if it's marking the nuke when it shouldn't) to fix the bug causing this).
As for the first bomber again I'd also need a replay to assess, but I can assure you it is very much limited by intel, and doesn't see everything despite not having a scout. For example, in the recent rainbow cup semi-finals you can see the dark blue early t1 bomber do a number of suboptimal plays due to its lack of intel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQI_jUrivfk&t=120s- Once it gets near the enemy T1 AA (bombers have a radar+visual range although you can't see this in the cast due to observer view) it decides to turn and try and seek a different target
- It then proceeds to go towards various empty mexes with no units, because it's trying to find enemy engineers to target (2m10 of the replay/2m32 of the video)
- It's not until 3m20 of the replay (3m47 of the video) that it approaches a location with enemy units, having wasted a long time trying to find some
