Turtle AI intelligence problem

Discussions about AI types, units, tactics & strategy.
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Dr-Hanc
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Turtle AI intelligence problem

Post by Dr-Hanc »

Off topic: Many thanks to all the people contributing to keeping this game alive and fun to play. Compared to other strategy games wz2100 has always been unique imo. I played this game a lot when it came out until the speed-bug killed the community and the competitiveness.

As far as I know the new "Turtle AI" is a Nullbot variant. With the 3.1.1 release Nullbot has sped up a lot since 3.1 (maybe there have been some improvements in the game itself too) which helps when I play the game on my older PC.

On topic: Turtle AI seems to have a huge priority for building oil rigs. I played a custom map (8p Julia something - similar to the old TeamWar maps) which has a lot of oil. Late in game when I had only 1 bot left I noticed that after an attack where I had eliminated all but one factory and most power plants that all the Turtle AI did was produce building units non-stop and sending them in different directions to uncaptured oil points which in itself is fine. But at that time it had more than 40 oil rigs already and only 2 power plants.
The empty oil spots were guarded by defence and the trucks naturally all died. The AI didn't produce a single building and never got into the game again. The only thing for me to change this would have been to capture every available oil spot.

I would suggest adding a check for oil rigs owned and power plants present and would put the priority on building the plants if enough oil is available already. Throughout the whole game I killed hundreds of trucks trying to get to empty oil spots I had left on purpose. This is probably fine (although stupid if there is defence present), but it should be very low in priority if there are other options which could improve the situation for the bot.

Turtle AI is a nice variant and fun to play, thanks for your work
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NoQ
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Re: Turtle AI intelligence problem

Post by NoQ »

NullBot never worked well on high-oil maps.
The empty oil spots were guarded by defence and the trucks naturally all died.
Due to performance problems (which are due to lack of API in 3.1.1), AIs cannot check if the oil is defended or not before sending trucks (has to iterate over everything to do that; the next API version for 3.2 provides range iteration functions).
But at that time it had more than 40 oil rigs already and only 2 power plants.
And this particular problem is interesting and unexpected.This AI clearly splits trucks into ones it sends to capture oils and ones it uses for building base structures, and both groups are maintained to be non-empty. If you manage to reproduce this problem in any skirmish game, please attach a saved game. If you had any errors in the logs, please attach them as well; there is a reported (yet uncaught) bug in group management in 3.1 (#4124) that might have caused that, and we'd see that in the logs.
Dr-Hanc
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Joined: 29 Dec 2012, 18:00

Re: Turtle AI intelligence problem

Post by Dr-Hanc »

Thanks for the quick reply.
I never play skirmishes, always Multiplay / Host / and setup a game against AI and sometimes play on LAN. Maybe an old habit, didn't give it a thought, but I can't save games that way...

I will try to reproduce the problem in a skirmish and check the logs or tell you how to reproduce it, if possible. So long, keep up the good work!

Greetz Hanc
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NoQ
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Re: Turtle AI intelligence problem

Post by NoQ »

Well, of course, you can post logs even if it's not skirmish (:
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