What is M28AI
M28AI is an adaptive AI for Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, intended to provide a challenging experience for players, making extensive use of microing skills coupled with strong macro capabilities to defeat opponents.
Competent at both 1v1 and team based games, M28AI adopts an aggressive approach to the game, utilising a wide variety of tactics that will adapt based on what the player does.
A variant of M28AI, M28Easy, disables M28AI's micro capabilities, while other variants include land, air, and turtle options. There are also various configuration options to allow players to further refine how it plays:
- Hybrid AI option - if enabled, you can enable M28AI logic on selected units you control (note that this option should only be enabled if you intend to use the feature, as it will result in all normal M28AI calculations being applied to your own units which may impact on the sim speed with high unit counts)
- AIx overwhelm option - allows you to increase or decrease the AIx modifier over time to make it harder/weaker
- Micro level - In addition to the option to disable all microing with the M28Easy option, a 'M28 time between orders' option allows you to adjust M28's general responsiveness level for most units. By default units consider new orders every second, but this allows you to increase the delay up to 10 seconds (which, for example, will make M28's kiting behaviour much weaker, as well as making M28 run faster)
M28AI is highly compatible with mods and unusual map settings, including (but not limited to) popular mods such as BrewLAN, BlackOPs and Nomads. It can also handle a wide array of unit restrictions in FAF (e.g. it is capable of completing the original supcom campaign which in early missions can involve restrictions such as only building t1 air units).
It also supports campaign missions, both as an AI teammate; or as a replacement for the campaign AI (whether for AI allies such as the rebels in the FA Mission 2 Dawn campaign or for the enemy AI), with further configuration options relating to this to adjust your experience set out in the FAF wiki for co-op missions.
M28AI was originally developed for FAF, and this is recommended for the most competitive experience. However, it also now supports both LOUD and steam (see the installation.txt file for details of how to setup M28AI on LOUD and/or Steam; for FAF setup you can either refer to this same file or the FAF wiki which details how to play with custom AIs).
Why should you use M28AI
- Arguably the most competitive (non-cheating) AI available
- Runs significantly faster than M27AI in larger teamgame scenarios
- Chance to see the AI improve and influence it's development via feedback
- Different playstyle to M27AI and other AIs
- Greater compatibility with mods and unusual game settings
- Compatible with campaign missions (FA, SC and custom campaigns) as an AI teammate (in co-op), and/or as a hostile campaign AI.
Background
M28AI was intended as a long term potential successor to M27AI, involving a complete rewriting of the AI framework to run significantly faster in large teamgame scenarios and provide greater tools for the AI to make use of. As of February 2024 it was able to outperform M27 on most maps and settings, and has improved further since then.
As with M27 it makes extensive use of microing and its focus is in trying to win games, with an estimated global rating of around 900-1200. An M28Easy option is available that disables most micro (along with a setting to effectively set the level of micro used for the normal M28AI), and an AIx overwhelm option is available for people wanting to customise the difficulty more (by increasing / decreasing it over time).
Find out more information
- This forum thread contains summary information of M28AI updates
- A detailed devlog is available where I've noted my progress with M28AI and include far more details on updates made (e.g. the devlog relating to the v1 release of M28AI is more than 100 pages!). Due to file size issues, this is split between
a devlog covering pre-release to v103 and a devlog covering v104 onwards and a list of possible future changes.
Provide feedback
- Send me a message on discord (maudlin27), either via direct message, the AI development discord (https://discord.gg/jTvFqGKC) or alternatively there's a general AI feedback channel in FAF.
- You can also post in this thread
Where providing suggestions or highlighting bugs it'd be helpful if you would describe the issue, include the replay ID, and the time in the replay where the issue occurs.
Playing offline
If you want to play against M28 offline and can't access the FAF client (e.g. due to DDoS attacks), you can download the mod from Github and ensure the M28AI folder is saved to:
C:\ProgramData\FAForever\user\My Games\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\mods\M28AI
The mod files can be obtained from Github by downloading a ZIP of the code (and then extracting these):
https://github.com/maudlin27/M28AI
While the game can be run offline either by clicking the offline mode from the FAF client, or running the shortcut C:\ProgramData\FAForever\bin\ForgedAlliance.exe /init init_faf.lua
Trophy holders
Introduced from v54, this recognises the person to complete a challenge with the latest version of M28, going to the first person to beat the highest M28 cheat modifier above a minimum level.
-
Radde trophy - awarded for beating a 1.4+ resource (1.0 resource) M28 on a 15km+ mapgen
Current holder - DillyDally (for beating v101 at 1.4 resource on a 15km mapgen) -
Sladow trophy - awarded for beating a 1.5+ AIx (i.e. resource and build rate) M28 on any 5km or larger map (i.e. 256 x 256 or larger)
Current holder - Radde (v81, 1.5 AIx on a 10km map; more recently Sladow came closest to claiming this with a win against 1.4 AIx on the 20km map the Ditch against v144)