Does the AI have to cheat?

[Asgorath]

I mostly like to play games offline. Therefore a good AI is very important.
Why does the AI in Warzone cheat? It spoils the party if you know that for the AI oil derricks are mostly unimportant or when you see that after 4 minutes the AI already upgrades its factory.

Is it possible to overhaul the AI so that on easy, medium and hard the AI doesn´t need to cheat? And like in StarCraft II on insane only gatheres more ressources but sticks to game rules as well?

[NoQ]

DyDo doesn't really cheat, as far as i know (apart from a few really unessential details). Also, as far as i remember, in Starcraft 2, insane AI only has full visibility, but doesn't cheat in any other way (DyDo there also has full visibility).

[Asgorath]

DyDo doesn't really cheat, as far as i know (apart from a few really unessential details). Also, as far as i remember, in Starcraft 2, insane AI only has full visibility, but doesn't cheat in any other way (DyDo there also has full visibility).

For then I will test DyDo-AI. But of course it would be great if no AI would cheat. Does the AI cheat since the original Warzone or since this OS-Project?

As far as I know WBFs of insane AI in StarCraft II gather +2 minerals which means +7 from blue minerals and +9 from gold minerals.

[Per]

In 2.3.x, you can turn off the cheating yourself by setting the difficulty setting to the lowest possible. In master, we are in the process of phasing out the AI cheating (except for the 'Insane' difficulty). The semperfi AI does not cheat.

Dydo cheats (by default, at least). The original AI also cheated.

[Asgorath]

In 2.3.x, you can turn off the cheating yourself by setting the difficulty setting to the lowest possible. In master, we are in the process of phasing out the AI cheating (except for the 'Insane' difficulty). The semperfi AI does not cheat.

Dydo cheats (by default, at least). The original AI also cheated.

Sounds very good, thank you! Specially that you are in the process of phasing out the AI cheating
By doing that will you also improve the AI behaviour? Because often it happens that the AI attacks the same amount of defense with the same number of units again and again and fails every time. By now AI doesn´t learn from its mistakes / changes its tactics.

[Zarel]

Does the AI cheat since the original Warzone or since this OS-Project?

The AI in the original Warzone did a lot of cheating. We've done nothing but try to phase it out since then.

[Iluvalar]

I believe teaching the AI new and brighter research paths would help a lot.

[Asgorath]

In master, we are in the process of phasing out the AI cheating (except for the 'Insane' difficulty). The semperfi AI does not cheat.

Just a thought but why not take Semperfi-AI, improve it and make it standard-AI?
Sounds far easier than to workaround the existing AI with a lot of known problems.
Furthermore the game wouldn´t have 3 different AIs but 1 very good one.

[Per]

Semperfi is based on the standard AI, and I port changes that I make to semperfi that I think are well-tested and work well over to the standard AI eventually.

[Asgorath]

Semperfi is based on the standard AI, and I port changes that I make to semperfi that I think are well-tested and work well over to the standard AI eventually.

I didn´t test Semperfi-AI before and in the first game I was positively surprised by the fact that the Semperfi-AI builds MG-Turrets besides enemy oil derricks to destroy them and secure the place for an own oil derrick.

But I still don´t understand why you try to improve the old AI if you have a new (not cheating) AI basing on the old AI. Why not improve the new one and skip the old?

[Per]

I just have not gotten around to testing the latest semperfi properly yet. It tries a few really sneaky things, like sending the starting trucks to rush the closest non-built oil derricks of an enemy in full base mode, and then try to choke that player in with hardpoints, that failed miserably on some maps last I tested it. Maybe it is fixed now, though. I did make some changes to it. It works really well on eg Highground. The VTOL design and attack run code is also mostly new.

Basically, all I need at this point is for you or someone else to carry out some proper testing of semperfi, then tell me that it is better than standard, and without any serious regressions, then I can replace the standard with current semperfi. And then I can add (even) more crazy stuff to semperfi later

[Buginator]

Semperfi is based on the standard AI, and I port changes that I make to semperfi that I think are well-tested and work well over to the standard AI eventually.

I don't think that is a good idea.
We can just call the original AI "Pumpkin's best", and have another AI be "standard" (default).

[Zarel]

I don't think that is a good idea.
We can just call the original AI "Pumpkin's best", and have another AI be "standard" (default).

Well, we have a 1.10 mod... we can just stick the original AI in there. I see no reason why we should maintain an outdated AI in the official distribution of Warzone.