Could try phantom. There is some strange appeal to playing happily with then betraying friends.

such professionalism Jip!

p.s nice work on todays patch!

Add a reclaim metric to the post game graph. Actually I've never checked if its recorded during the game, I just remember it from the supreme score board during replays.

Thanks for organising Swkoll! and the players for providing some interesting replays to ponder over (and whoever did the twitch cast as they pointed out where the AI's were failing by comparison to the humans they were fighting).

This is great reading. Especially about the auth woes. Makes you appreciate just how much unpaid time is put in.

svenni_badbwoi has done some great work with some of the older maps and has really improved them, I can see some of them are already in this list. It would be great to replace some of the other maps with those versions on ladder, forbidden pass being one of them.

Awesome work on this Brutus! Takes a brave man to dive into legacy code.

The replays were ok for me,
To be fair Mylaur anyone above a 300 rank playing against a non cheating AI is going to have an easy time.
For giggles you could try RNGAI (self promotion, just make sure you read the description for setup tips) with a 1.5 cheat/build multiplier on that same map and see if your experience changes.

Getting the acu to be remotely in the realm of a human is damn near impossible(have spent days/weeks/months trying), an (almost) single threaded game just doesn't have enough clock cycles to do complex calculations at the speed to capture the data required to react and make decisions, you can do fake micro but like you said the acu doesn't really know 'what' to do.

Example for reference : getting aeon auroras the try and maintain weapon range on a target during combat takes approximately 7 function calls per second per unit plus supporting logic, if there are 50 T1 auroras on the field fighting that's 350 per second and 50 units is a small number.

In an effort to help identify areas of focus and with the upcoming changes to the default AI I'd like to get community feedback. For those of you that don't usually interact with the community but play against the AI this is your oportunity to influence its direction. I've prepared some questions to help guide discussion.

Who am I
I'm a rather low key member of the community, creator of the RNGAI mod and having done some work on fixing some of the obviously broken parts of the Default AI. I would consider myself a senior citizen in the gaming community having started in the days when a Commodore 64 was the height of graphical fidelity.

How important is the default AI to you?
With 3rd party AI mods available in the vault that have more development freedom and quicker release cycles that provide a challenging experience for many. Do we believe its still important for those that pick up SCFA on sale to have a great AI experience. If so where should the difficulty to be aimed at?

What type of play styles do you want to see from the default AI?
People have different opinions on what they want from an AIs play style, some want something that can assist in preparing them for ladder, some want an AI that is focused on team games, others want something that will crash units into their firebases, others want 30 minutes of quiet time to build a city.

Do you want an AI that is adapting to what you are doing?
If an AI is seeing a weakness do you want it to be exploited. Or do you want it to maintain a predictable base state. There are currently a number of AI 'personalities', which is a smoke n mirrors way of saying there are some different build orders and configurations that the AI use to build in a way that is desired by the player.

How important is efficiency of the AI?
Gaps in AI efficiency have historically been covered by increasing multipliers. Is it important to you that the AI not cheat or are you happy for it to waste resources and aim for doing some of everything rather than focusing on efficient gameplay.

Do you want the AI to communicate with you?
Some AI's make use of taunts. Is this something that improves your AI experience or does it quickly annoy you? Do you want the AI to point out intel oportunities and request help during team games.

Is the AI's ability with the ACU important to you?
The default AI's ACU capability is weak, but its also one of the most difficult things to get right. Some of us have spent over 100 hours just on this one aspect of the AIs development. Do you care that the AI isn't using its ACU effectively?

What map sizes do you want the AI to perform best on?
The balance of FAF lends itself towards maps that are less than or equal to 20kms. Do you believe future AI development should focus on specific map sizes or types? If so which ones? Please don't say Astro.

What things about FAFs AI is most frustrating to you currently?
Do they steal your mass points all the time? Did they ignore you while you were being killed by gunships when they had a massive air force sitting doing nothing?

Do you see an obvious development focus for the default AI?
Is there something that you believe would give the most bang for buck in how the AI plays if it was improved/added?

How important is mod support to you for AI?
There are plenty of mods but not much mod support for AI. Is this something that the community feels strongly about? If so which mods do you feel are not supported at all that would be most beneficial.

Which game phase/Theatre is most important to you?
Alot of development effort goes into unit functionality for AI. Do you care about the T1 phase of the game when it comes to AI? Do you feel that the T4 phase or Naval is the most important to improve?

Other things that are important to you or you would like the AI to do better/ differently?
Open forum.

A note on the realities of FAF AI development.
The SCFA game engine is VERY old and people can only put in the time they have available after their commitments in life. So plugging openai into it or developing a neural net is not something that is going to happen, nor is it realistic to expect someone to to dump 20 hours a week into AI development. There are engine limitations that make some very obvious things very difficult or computationally expensive to work around. An AI being flabberghasted by a wall comes to mind.

It depends on if your going to enforce restrictions.

If your not playing with 100 mods and are happy to play against the AI like you would in a normal pvp game then the list of AIs goes something like.

M27AI - This is an efficiency king and at least 10% better than any other AI out there right now.
RNGAI - This is a much less efficient AI but can still give you a fun game.
UvesoAI - This is a more compatible with mods AI but is also turtle focused.
DillidalliAI - This is good fun on open land maps.

The important thing is that these all have different play styles.
There are a few others I didn't mention but you can track them down in the ai section of the faf discord if you still want more.

I'd say if you want to get a feel for which AI is good for your play style. Test them in 1v1 scenarios a few times on a classic map like open palms or something. Then you can explore team games.

Keep in mind that these AI's are not frozen in time. They are improving over time.

Enforcing restrictions is not really top of mind when someone is developing an AI so they don't support it well. If you want to win, just play a worse AI.

The blueprints-ai.lua file that Nomander referenced is what you want to look at.

Your obviously motivated to do something positive here. I don't believe we can dynamically adjust threat during the game as the blueprints are read once on startup sort of thing. BUT, I think the development team would be more than happy to see someone put time into improving the existing threat calculations that we are creating. The current calculations are based on a formula that Balthazar did however long ago and some adjustments since then and while it is ALOT better than what we had originally there is room for improvement.

You'll eventually hit limitations since threat also depends on situational factors (a sniper bot in dangerous unless an enemy Obsidian tank is sitting next to it sort of thing). So why not rather than making a mod look at improving what we are doing now? We're happy to collaborate and provide feedback on the impact it makes on AI games.

@keul
You just need to give us some replay ID's to go off. We can investigate, especially if its happening that early in the game.

@mrmcbeefycakes I've done valley setups a bunch. But never with this number of AI's. I'm thinking there are some oddities around the terrain that could cause the path finding to take longer.

I agree with Jip that you don't 'really' need that many AI per game. I'm not sure if you are struggling to be challenged with a lower number. If you are I'd be remiss to mention the amazing m28 AI available on faf. You certainly won't need more than 1 per player to get a good fight.

If you have a couple of the replay links from where you saw bad stuttering I can take a look as it's possible there is a pathing loop happening that needs to be looked at.

When you say 8-14 bots are you meaning 8-14 AI players? or just 8-14 units.

I've spent the last few days playing with and observing the reclaim rate changes and I really like them, I hope they go in. The economy swings are not so volatile where props are involved.

It didn't seem to give me any more time to interrupt someone from reclaiming all my wrecks from a skirmish I lost though.

I have a question as I've always wondered how this works.
In the numbers you've got there tagada. How does it translate to the various engineers tiers? like is the number you've got there of 20m/s for a wreck based on a t1 engineer. What part of the blueprint affects how much mass an engineer can pull in per second?

I'm curious about this one. When I play with my friend he often complains about this problem and I never get it so we were writing it off to lag or something.

But the difference is he plays exclusively UEF where as I mainly play Cybran. Everyone here that is mentioning it is also playing UEF.

Well the AI is running a separate thread of logic for every experimental compared to a human so that's going to cause sim issues at some point.

Also depends on which AI.

No changes have been made to the AI for a few months now so I don't think it's a change in that regard.
Which map and which mod are you using. Have you tried it without said mod? Usually a 5.9 AIX should result in pretty quick teching and building.

One thing you could do is observe the AI to see what it's doing thats causing this problem. There are also logs produced that can give us an indication of something is going wrong that's stopping it

@clyf

I'd always wondered what the Melee functions were created for. I thought that early on they had actual melee units that later on got cut. Didn't consider that it could have been for things like the firebeetle.