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.

The bulk of AI's don't do naval expansions very well. I've only just started trying to remedy that with mine.
This is likely where the request to decrease the expansion settings come from. Also the marker generator can make matters worse on certain maps when it comes to naval expansions.
Since we are talking about Sorian, it doesn't require a positive mass income to go and build a naval expansion. But each one (assuming its a T1 engineer, if its T2 then its worse) will set it back almost 1000 mass just to establish. So 5 of those in the first 20 mins meanwhile the human already put that mass into building actual ships.

In general though the expansion limits are also going to impact performance since every expansion is going to spin up some process heavy managers. The expansions are a double edged sword and the usefulness/detriment of them often comes down to how they were designed for that particular AI and what map type is being used, gameplay style is being played.

Sorian will make giant proxy bases that require significant investment, other AI will make the bare minimum so the eco can be used for main base production. Pros and cons to each approach.

Is it perhaps possible, since the costing/duration while being in the blueprint is not static in the teleportation logic to adjust the cost and time based on the distance that wants to be traveled?

This would allow teleportation to scale in cost and charge duration with the more distance desired. If someone wants to teleport across a 20km map they can but its going to cost alot more and have a longer delay than a shorter distance.

Whats the determining factor in the teleport range? e.g Is it aimed at 10km maps?

btw if your going to use the default ai use the adaptive one, the easy and normal one are more for people that have just picked up the game. Perhaps we should update the normal one as well.

This is going to sound like a long winded explanation.

None of the defensive builders have been removed, BUT the economic requirements for the defensive builders have been increased.
The reason for this was due to the AI destroying its economy on every game when it wasn't using large aix multipliers which resulted in a human player being in one phase of the game and the AI being two phases behind.
The other impacting reason is because the economic upgrade triggers have NOT been touched, so the AI has spare economy but it is throwing that economy at mass extractor upgrades rather than balancing its spending. This was supposed to be rectified in a structure manager feature that would better control mass extractor upgrades but this wasn't ready in time for the 3rd iteration so the AI's economy is still out of whack.

What will happen in the future is that we will get the structure manager sorted which will allow AI to better balance its economic distribution, there is a feature for defensive structure placement that is also due to be implemented. Then we will rewrite how the AI builds defenses in general and implement a better focused defensive logic for the turtle AI personality with the other AI having a more efficient reactive defense build logic.

So post the replay link and I'll take a look and see if the reason it isn't doing defenses is purely the above or if there is some other issue that can be fixed.

@ftxcommando
That sorta comes back to me not really understanding its role. Initially I thought 'oh given the bomb ignition point I could use this to soften up a firebase before I attack it with real units'. But a bunch of them wouldn't even take down half a shield in an offensive role.

If I'm defending they do a good job at forcing unshielded snipers and mobile arty to relocate. But again, shields.
Emp would be good in this scenario since it would interrupt firing and not let them kite as easily, can also serve both defensive and offensive roles.

I don't really understand its new role. What can it do that a t2 gunship can't for cheaper. Maybe if gunships had their weapon reverted back to what they originally were so they had no aoe.

Now if they ignored shields that would be a different story.

@rama

CPlatoon:AttackTarget(Target, platoon)

Needs to be the platoon object in question.

e.g platoon:AttackTarget(Target)

This is assuming that 'platoon' is the object for the platoon that came off the transport. and that 'Target' is the unit object for a target that you have already got via some other means.

Thanks for bringing great communication skills and unpaid hard work to the team!

In your example you are using the unit id's in that function, its like saying you want to put someones name into a car instead of a person and wondering why they are not in the car.

What you would want to do is create the units first, for example. Actually I'm not sure how the units are being created but you get the idea.

local unit1 = armybrain:CreateUnitNearSpot('UEB0101', posX, posY)
local unit2 = armybrain:CreateUnitNearSpot('UEB0101', posX, posY)

ScenarioFramework.AttachUnitsToTransports({unit1, unit2}, {transport})

p.s just to clarify your confusion. The function takes a table of objects rather than the table being an object itself.

I believe Uveso updated his AI today, Swarm is currently waiting on the developer to update.