[3.1+] NullBot: an adaptive skirmish AI

[raycast]

[[ Pathfinding improvements to avoid traffic jams: moved to a separate thread: viewtopic.php?f=32&t=10088 ]]

[NoQ]

cue: Well, this will make insane easier than hard ... I'd rather set this for the Easy AI, which is designed to be your traditional "punching bag" AI (no tech specialization etc.)

raycast: Could you post it in a new thread, probably in development? NullBot doesn't do pathfinding, it doesn't even have enough API to see whether a certain tile is passable or not.

[cue]

Do you mean that after the AI has spent all his units on a failed attack, the formerly attacked could attack and wipe his old attacker out because he would not have any units to defend himself?
If you mean that, is that not what stationary weapons are for?

Could you make it do blitzkrieg attacks some of the time, perhaps it could do an estimate on its attack and if enough damage was done it does a blitzkrieg?

In the games we play the AI attacks and many times it looks like it’s going to destroy us, but then its units hit some damage limit and retreat, it would have won if it continued.

I’m curious, are you not having this problem when playing?

[aubergine]

That's a symptom of you turtling most likely - nullbot is getting pummelled by your arty/rockets/missiles and deciding to keep a safe distance to avoid losing too many units. I assume it's particularly noticeable from mid- to late-game? If so I also notice that Many times if Nullbot didn't retreat quite so quick when hit by base defences it would likely wipe me out.

[Giani]

Why does nullbot try to build like 4 research labs when it is a low oil map?
And i have seen many times that the default nullbot researches most weapon lines. Is that a bug?

[cue]

We just played a game where NullBot build some AA cars and sent them to fight our stationary defenses.
Non of us had any airplanes.
So there seems to something fishy with the AI adaptiveness feature.

[NoQ]

We just played a game where NullBot build some AA cars and sent them to fight our stationary defenses.
Non of us had any airplanes.
So there seems to something fishy with the AI adaptiveness feature.

On <medium it assumes you always have planes (and it doesn't know whether you have any). Better than assuming you don't. Also, on medium, it doesn't adapt at all.

[NoQ]

Why does nullbot try to build like 4 research labs when it is a low oil map?

Define low oil. It's normal to have 4 labs when you have 9 oils.

And i have seen many times that the default nullbot researches most weapon lines. Is that a bug?

We already talked with you about that.

[cue]

You are right
We played on hard and the AI give us a hell of a time ! it was excellent!

We tried to change const RETREAT_AT = 70; to 30 and that changed the game somewhat.
We are going to try to disable this element, so our next game should be with this set to 0.

Then I hope we will stop seeing AI units all bundled up because they tried to go and repair.

[aubergine]

@cue it might be worth looking for the regrouping code and disable that as well to see what effect that has? I think a lot of the logjams in bases are caused by that, but not sure. Let us know what difference your changes make pls.

[cue]

I would love to try that also, but I just dont know what that looks like.
Is there a value that I can disable or lower?

[NoQ]

it might be worth looking for the regrouping code and disable that as well to see what effect that has?

The result will be one unit at a time attacks, much more pathetic than that of Nexus. To have a look, try inserting some return statement at start of regroupWarriors().

[themac]

Hello NoQ, I wonder if we get a new version of nullbot soon, the latest one is some time ago now.

[NoQ]

Ok (: Just weren't many changes while i was afk, so i didn't want to bother. Now i could do a few more tweaks.

v1.39.

Changes:

• Actually put two turrets on dragon bodies (makes them significantly less underpowered). Also, still decrease the use of super-heavy bodies.
• Tweak certain parameters to reduce traffic jams: decrease repairing, make existing anti-stuck mechanism more aggressive.

[themac]

Finally, a new version of NullBot. Tnx NoQ!