skirmish with only AI players to increase game popularity

[DylanDog]

Hello

I am not 100% sure this is the right topic for this which is not only a wish but also an advise on how to increase the game popularity. My basic assumption is the following:

The more and better AIs WZ has the more interesting is for RTS gamers.

To achieve this I would add the following feature to WZ: possibility to watch AIs fighting against each other in a skirmish game (skirmish with only AI players).

Why this?

because this would attract more mod/AI developers, as tournaments between AIs on specific MAPs could be organized (not necessarily by wz2100.net but by third parties too). Mod/AI developers will try to develop the best AI which turns also to advantage to WZ skirmsh human player which will have more and better AIs to play with.

The same already happens with the chess game, where you have hundreds of developer trying to develop the best chess engine and you have chess engine championships organized all over the world (look here -> http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/).

Obviously the fact of creating tournaments between WZ RTS AIs involves some "check/control" on the scripts because what we want to avoid is to have AIs which only do cheats, ideally cheats should not be allowed or deactivated (like in BecomePrey).

I am not sure about the amount of work required to have the possibility to play skirmish with only AI players but maybe some temporary workaround would make this quicker by keeping anyway 1 human player in skirmish which is allied with all the AIs (but the AIs are not allied to each others!), in this way no AIs would attack the human player who can watch the game and see how the AIs beheave.

Cheers
DylanDog

[Avestron]

I think AI cheating is mainly in place because the AIs aren't impressive. This is nothing new. WZ does it with power. C&C does it with AI units' hp.

I would personally like to see a major AI discussion - unfortunately there are precious few coders and I'm not one of them.

[DylanDog]

I think AI cheating is mainly in place because the AIs aren't impressive.

This is not the thing I would like to discuss in this Post. But what I am asking for (see Subeject of this topic) would also improve AI generally.

[cybersphinx]

There is already an autogame cheat, where the computer takes over the player's units. Tends to crash though, since it's a hack.

To do it right would need an observer mode, which is already on the wishlist.

[DylanDog]

great. I' ll wait until the observer mode will be developed.
Thanks.

[Zarel]

Actually, Buginator uses the autogame mode for stability testing. He says it pretty much never crashes.

So just use the "demo" cheat.

[Per]

The "autogame" and "demo" modes are very different. I do not think "demo" is very stable under debug builds.