Leaderboard

I've collected quite some papers about RTS bots. From time to time I'll present here either a recently published one or one otherwise interesting. Research on agents in RTS games is very active, because the time constraints and the broad range of needed AI technologies is challenging. Doesn't doing science by playing RTS games sounds like an acceptable job description? I'll start with the 100 page thesis BDI agents for Real Time Strategiy games It is about an 0AD bot written by Andrea Dallatana. Unfortunately he no longer works on the bot. He describes in detail the mechanics of his bot. One idea I especially like is the job market to avoid units standing around doing nothing. Here is the module structure of ABot: Currently discussed at HackerNews is A Survey of RTS Game AI Research and Competition in StarCraft (2013), 19 pages. The authors specifically analysed bot versus bot games and state: ... the top three ranked bots in the competition (Skynet, Aiur and UalbertaBot) do not change their strategy at all depending on their opponent. For example, the Skynet bot (both in 2011 and 2012), always uses the same opening (two gates), except when playing a Terran opponent, when it uses nony. This reflects the trend that the performance of bots is still more dependent on carefully handcrafted and non-adaptive behaviors, ... The paper includes and describes a long list of detected bot strategies. Might be interesting to some human 0AD players too. Very technical is Kiting in RTS Games Using Influence Maps. Kiting is a trick bots can do easier than humans, because the micro management is overwhelming. In short a unit does a ranged attack on another unit and flees out of the range of the attacked unit before it reacts. I'm eager to implement this in Hannibal. Have fun reading!

Thanks for the info. I have Blender on my macbook too, and it has the Collada import option, so I'm using that comp for the moment. I also found this page on the wiki which answers a lot of the questions I had: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Basic3DImplementation Thanks again! This is a really beautiful game and I've been playing it more and more the past weeks. What I love most about it is its openness and the fact that you can improve it and benefit from other peoples' improvements. Seeing this grow is a treat.

This massage should only apply to the walls (and buildings but the CC), not the units and the CC. I'm on it. Thanks for reporting!

Edit: That water is much better!

Esgaroth (Lake-town) from The Hobbit. (updated)

Well, there are different types of reachability: Unit wants to go from land cell to another land cell, both not connected: No pathfinder needed, that's terrain analysis. The path can be blocked by water, mountains or other non-walkable cells. It helps to have a list of regions which are connected and the mean of transport (ship, feet). Unit wants to go from island beyond shore into water: pathfinder should stop at first or nearest dee water cell and no repeat. Unit wants to go from land cell to another land cell, obstructions can be non-movable (houses, etc), completely blocking the path or just some cells. If full blocking there is no need to run the pathfinder again as long as the house is still on the map. This can be solved by temporarily splitting a region into two and make the pathfinder listen to destroy events. Or there are other units blocking cells or the path. Here a time limit makes sense. I think the challenge is to tell the module asking the pathfinder, why the pathfinder failed and that module should be clever enough to not hammer the pathfinder with unsolvable requests. Basically a pathfinder response is success w/ path, partial success w/ partial path, permanently blocked by terrain, temporarily blocked by immobile obstruction or temporarily blocked by mobile obstacles with partial path if available. On top the size of a unit matters, elephants and sieges should not get lost in a forest. I'm not sure if temporarily blocked by wall should get a partial path or not. The player might want to destroy the blocker with his units or not. In case of an AI having it self locked out, I'm not sure too. But an AI should be clever enough to not build houses on the only way out of the village. Unfortunately that sounds more easy than it is. What should not happen are AIs randomly building structures on the map and destroying them because the pathfinder said so. What I have in mind for Hannibal is taking the CC, creating a circle around and from 10-16 points on that circle let the pathfinder compute a path to the cc. Then you have a list of cells from multiple paths. I think building houses on cells which appear multiple times in that list is not a good idea. The idea is to make "streets" an obstruction for buildings.

----I'd rather see a larger focus on caravans, corrals (which is being worked on), perhaps even a fertile terrain mechanic so that map control matters even more---- I totally agree about caravans, regarding corrals best of luck to thee who work with them, they gonna need it to find a proper place in game logic for them, they were useless like males nipple in Aoe III . These fertile terrain is excellent thing, i mentioned it earlier. ------If it doesn't change the game fundamentally, then all it really does is give coders extra work doesn't it?------ regarding these farm ideas, there re small ideas, and good ones, i suppose. U can take them or not. Neither makes them good or bad. We do not come with small ideas only, we come with different ideas on different topic. I did not understand that small ideas are forbidden. I am just big supporter of realism. Never played Warcraft, starcraft and other Smurfs for that reason. When buildings out of players territory start to lose their health for no reason my heart cries

If it doesn't change the game fundamentally, then all it really does is give coders extra work doesn't it? Indeed, 0 AD has a lot of concepts in it that differentiate it from other, solid RTS games. That doesn't mean that 0 AD should do everything differently for the sake of being different. If you want to introduce a new game mechanic then it should be relevant to the way the game plays: how the units interact, how the economy works, what strategies you might use, how everything comes together. Changing farms slightly just for the sake being new and unique doesn't mean much when it doesn't change the way the economy works. I'd rather see a larger focus on caravans, corrals (which is being worked on), perhaps even a fertile terrain mechanic so that map control matters even more. Perhaps you could introduce of draft animals, mobile drop-sites for every civilization (no reason for Mauryans to be the only ones to have the fun), etc. Realism is always interesting but I don't believe that realism should be more important than an actual fun game. Realism should definitely influence how mechanics work in the game

Actually the current corral system is not the finalised plan. Rather, animals that are capable of being herded can be garrisoned in corrals for a useful purpose such as providing a steady flow of food or in the case of horses they would make for a small discount. Farming should be the primary source of food historically speaking.

so you are, Bienvenido , you speak Spanish don't you? Your mod is about Uruguay in century 19th and some Latinamericant Battles