AI-Swarm

This mod has been in development for about a Year, Now. My Goal was to create a well rounded AI, that would be able to do Navy, Land, and Air. I wanted it to be able to face any challenge from 1v1 to 1v8 Situation. My Goal was also to make an AI, that doesnt depend on Multipler to win the Game. I, Also wanted him to be good in all situations be that on a map with less mass or a map with more mass, and I wanted him to be able to adapt to any situation and be strong in T1 to T4 Stages.
Requires AI-Uveso For The AI Map Marker Generator in the Options

Installation - AI-Swarm is available on the FAF Vault. Search for 'AI-Swarm'.

Swarm plays very good on Open 10km Maps. It can play some 5km maps (Note: I havn't tested him very much on these maps). It, also can play a mean navy on 20km maps or 10km Maps. His land game isnt the best on 20km maps depending on the type of 20km map. He doesn't play very well on "Gap" Maps.

Special Thanks to
Sprouto, and Uveso: For Basically teaching me everything i know about AI, Especially Sprouto, who without him. I'd be not close to where I am today. Uveso, too for helping me fix many bugs, and proving the base for Swarm. Both of these kind fellas gave me motivation to never give up.

Relent0r: For Basically giving me the competitive motivation to improves Swarm 1v1 capability and Relent0r was a good sparring partner! He, also helped me with a few things

Evan and BullydozerNoob: For Being Some High Leveled Players, that 1v1'd Swarm many times and gave me VALUABLE Information and help!

Jammer, Mhad, DFViper, and Clarko: For being long time players and testers of Swarm

Everyone Else Who Made Swarm, what it is today 8-)

3 New Sub AI's:

-AI: Swarm Terror/AIx: Swarm Terror : This is your Standard Swarm AI.
-AIx: Swarm Eternal : This one cheats harder as the game goes on and Cheats harder when its losing. (mostly for Fun)
-AIx: Swarm Test : For Testing Purposes

Map Suggestions

10km:
Adaptive Wonder Open
Adaptive Hilly Platuea
Adaptive Diversity
Miracle
Crash Site
Crash Site - 1v1
Mavys Marsh
Abhor
Adaptive Pyramid
Adaptive Morning Prayer
Adaptive Hansen Gorge
Open Palms
Oracle
Cadmium Green
Hollow

20km:
Adaptive Metir
Adaptive Maridia (Only 1 AI)
Point of Reason
Adaptive Skadi
Seton's Clutch
Seraphim Glaciers
Chiron
Osiris

Updates will be Posted On This Forums and the AI Development Server!!

AI Development Discord Server
https://discord.gg/ChRfhB3

@FtXCommando said in The Last Thread about RAS SACU Balance:

They aren't "OP" in the sense of being a dominant strategy but they promote inherently toxic gameplay. The only thing that should combine mass + e + flexible BP is the ACU itself. When other units do it, you open up the ability to do things like protecting infinite eco in a single, condensed area. Lategame eco should be about factoring in the risk/reward of additional eco adjacency efficiency and additional risk of exploding mass fabs. Not make boys and forget.

They should just be nerfed into irrelevancy or even removed just for the sake of promoting a healthier game.

100% Agreed.

To key in on this performance and development large phase that faf is currently going through. I am working on really improving functionality and performance of ALL core AI code on faf so helpfully for you AI Players you'll get even more benefit once these patches come out.

Very exciting stuff that jip has allowed us to do

Ideas, that are dumb ofc

1. The Othuum is a siege tank correct? Why does this "Siege Tank" have less health than both bricks and pervicals? The classific of this unit makes no sense really. A siege tank is supposed to be extremely beefy, but currently, balance shows this as a glass cannon with lots of DPS and no health.

2. Does anyone use Harbinger Reclaim Ability? (Just a Question)

3. Purposed reduction of Engineering Stations Buildpower to encourage more mobile engineer usage?

4. This is a restated purposal but the Reduction of t3 extractor income to a lower value, maybe 12 with ringed income being 18?

5. T2 Scout Planes? Since I saw a pull request on the GitHub to give Aeon and Seraphim; engineering stations before. I will propose the introduction of T2 Scout Planes.

6. Removal of Veterancy from all units except SACUs, Commanders, and Experimentals If you want the stats; this will increase sim speed by 2 - 4 sim speed. We have tested this in AI Development, many times. I will give data if wanted.

This is a topic of ideas so bring them on, criticism is welcomed

Thomas has the right ideas so, i think clans should really be about getting new players into the game and right habits and such. Galactic War is pretty essential to that, and i think after TMM - GW was the plan? Atleast thats what i remember being said.

Making Reclain like 20% of the original unit cost or even lower will make gameplay 100x better honestly you'll get a lot more action, lot more risk, but overtime you can still lose from reclaim war. This also fights turtling and not only that you dont have to worry about losing the game so fast due to one battle, also slows the pace of the game especially late game where shit tons of reclaim that causes the game to slog.

@HoujouSatoko

@ftxcommando said in **Platinum question**:

Repair station for land units sounds like a pathfinding noobtrap

You can create an aura around such a station if you were to even consider adding that. The aura would essentially be a range in which it repairs and such like being attached to the actual staging fixes those clumping issues and such.

@TheWheelie

Late game should have options... Right now your kind of forced into this standoff late game where the middle of the map is a wasteland with tons of reclaim your just licking your lips at and I understand reclaim is very vital to the Game of course.

I'm not saying remove but it's so important to the game in some many aspects its hurting more then helping. Every T3 you lose is basically 1k mass on the enemy's doorstep which may look good but it's really not good, because you end up rewarding certain bad behaviors and punishing certain gameplay styles.

This is where stuff like turtling and being aggressive diverge Because reclaim will always lend in favor of the defender but late game it lends so hard into that said defenders favor your basically forced to play like him even if you have 80% of the map, you cant attack with your large useless army too risky too punishing especially if he has lots of pd and his own big base. You lose 20 pervicals there goes 20k mass to the enemy for example.

By late game theres so much reclaim you might as well not even have mexes. What I'm stressing is this is just one step towards creating a healthier playing environment. Where you can be proactive late game instead of it being almost a 100% chance of mass economical artillery/experimental spam.

If the game wasnt so stalematey you could play 20km more proactively, because you could actually attack, you could invest into these larger pushes without having to worrying if you lose this single reclaim field the game is just cooked. 20km is a prime example of economy being extremely out of hand. Most of the time theres simply too many mexes, too much early game reclaim which turns into a super quick stalemate because you reach t3 and t4 so quick that reclaim is pretty much out of control, everyone has these large bases full of ras coms, Sams, Pd, And Armie. That any push any proactive gameplay is immediately shut down because even if you gain ground it's done nothing to the enemy in fact you've probably done more dmg to yourself given the enemy more reclaim and demoralized yourself into this slog fest of a game.

I would happily agree with FTX, and i dont believe we should be balancing the game for PvE though maybe a differently balanced gamemode because of a AI Developer, its honestly really hard to do real ai improvements and work and etc with the way balance is right now.

To simply describe balance issues, bascially the balance is forcing us as AI Developers to develop our AI in a very specific way that i keep in mind most of dont like in reality and simply put the AI cant keep up in the way the balance is right now. The game is just too fast especially mid game and late game and even early game. Eco in FAF scales too quickly, The Meta is too strong and the balance is restrictive on what you can actually do in the game. I mean like seriously you do it the meta way or the highway. Thats how FAF balance has always been.

I have played LOUD, and ill say it here and right now, that the balance on LOUD is a lot more fun because i have choice and that choice lets me play the game more happily and more creatively. Thats what should be important and fun. I feel like we stress that we are a pvp community so much that we forgot
Quoted From FTX "That half the faf games are launched with a single team" which means in reality we look over 50% of faf in favor of the pvp community when we should be balancing ourselves truly.

Supreme Commander is too boring lol.

Bronze --> Silver --> Gold --> Master --> Grandmaster --> Legend

1. Remove Mass Storage from the game & add small amounts of storage to most units like mass extractors & factories.
2. Make Hover Units move slower on land and make them faster on water.
3. Make T3 Artillery more Tactical so it's not the absolute strategy on 20x20 Late Game
4. Make Shared Army the standard for every game, 1 Commander everyone else is support commanders
5. Remove Reclaim

I dont think gun is a problem really, I think OC is too good @Evan_

@ftxcommando said in **Platinum question**:

Repair station for land units sounds like a pathfinding noobtrap

You can create an aura around such a station if you were to even consider adding that. The aura would essentially be a range in which it repairs and such like being attached to the actual staging fixes those clumping issues and such.

@hinthunter said in **Platinum question**:

@ovo in general to prevent plebs from patroling the whole map, if anything I would reduce amount of fuel for some units to make air staging more viable, not by much tho.

What are you even talking about lol, that's not the reason at all. It's too add strategic depth to the air game, so air planes are intended to have bounding limits. It starts to appear on larger maps because it's a feature intended to work better and better as the Map grows. Also air staging is viable either way because repairing air units for example

Hope everyone is enjoying the massive patch. Havnt had time to enjoy the patch with everyone, but it seems like every is loving it!

@swkoll said in Soul Ripper should have stealth:

Guys, is this the first time the balance forum has successfully produced a balance change?

Yeah this has to be the first time, i've personally seen a Balance Team member be like "We'll consider it" XD

Thomas has the right ideas so, i think clans should really be about getting new players into the game and right habits and such. Galactic War is pretty essential to that, and i think after TMM - GW was the plan? Atleast thats what i remember being said.

@askaholic said in I cri everytim:

@h-master said in I cri everytim:

Hopefully, the TMM 3v3 and 4v4 will be a big hit.

I hope so too!

@pryanichek said in I cri everytim:

I think if we could give motivation to the clans to actively recruit and train new players (for example for clan tournaments or other events), then the situation could change

Oh yea totally forgot those exist. They are so pointless in FAF except for giving you the cool brackets in front of your name xD.

@arma473 said in I cri everytim:

I wouldn't mind a client mod that let people blacklist maps so matches hosted on those maps don't show up in the custom games tab.

It would be interesting to have some more advanced game filters. Probably it hasn't been done yet because we don't really have enough lobbies at any given time to make it necessary. But TBH I don't think it would be too hard to program even for beginners so if someone wants to try adding it that would be cool!

Clan Features when bb

@askaholic said in Questions about performance: tactical missiles:

The thing about performance optimization is it’s extremely weird, counter intuitive, and will almost certainly be a disaster if you don’t collect adequate profiling data at every step of the way. One optimization can easily gain you more performance than hundreds of other ones combined if you prioritize correctly. If you just start optimizing stuff arbitrarily because a tingling sensation in your tummy tells you it’s a good idea then you’re probably gonna end up wasting a lot of time and see no benefit (but you might end up breaking the game in the process). IMO what you want to do is gather a bunch of metrics on different possible optimizations and then decide which ones to go with (I think this is what Jip is doing in his main thread). So really, we should look at this change in the context of all the other proposed changes, and my guess is we’ll probably find a lot of other stuff that is more beneficial and less dangerous.

I feel like you are looking for the miracle change in the core which does not exist, it is a hundred changes that will improve the performance my guy, its not a magic bullet. You'll have to optimize units anyhow you cant dodge that, and THIS is a main issue. Yes there are obvious optimizations that make a difference but nothing is a huge magic bullet to performance.
I stress that with importance that there is in-fact no magic bullet to solving performance, and combat & balance related things will have to undergo the telescope just like everything else.

@askaholic said in Questions about performance: tactical missiles:

I would disagree. 1% sounds pretty weak to me. Remember this means if you can make the computation completely instantaneous you will gain 1% performance. So in reality you will probably be able to gain somewhere around 0.5%. Surely there are higher priority performance issues?

Certainly cant be picky with performance gains, like @Jip said every bucket of water counts towards better performance, plus like Jip & Sprouto said it's not one big change that fixes performances its hundreds of changes like THIS, that fix the performance.