Jubalbarca

Thanks guys - made a new scenario as well which I'm just tweaking & testing at the moment... @Pureon: thanks, do let me know what you think @Feneur: yeah, all's going well, just finished my first year at Cambridge which has been great but has radically reduced my levels of free time. All seems to be going well so far though, exam results good etc. I'm getting to the end of a couple of big projects of mine atm, so I might well try and hang around here a bit more over summer and at least make some scenarios even if I don't have time to do any real work!

I finally got round to updating some of my better scenarios so they work with Alpha 13: From the Mountains to the Sea, Barcania, Colonia, Nova Isla, and Epidaurum are now all updated to use the new factions, and can be downloaded either as a bundle or individual scenarios here: http://www.exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=1078 A run-down of the scenarios included: - From the Mountains to the Sea is Multiplayer only (needs naval units), Athenians start on an island, Gauls in the mountains, fertile resource-heavy indefensible shoreline to scrap over. It's good fun, particularly when you find all the smaller mountain passes. - Barcania is the only map of mine that ever got bundled with the main game, it's an island, the updated Barcania II has changed it from Hele/Hele/Celt to Cart/Athe/Brits scrapping over it. Lots of terrain, coves, hidden bays, peninsulas, and so on to fight over. - Colonia is set on the shores of Iberia, Carthage VS Celts VS Iberians, the former on the seashore, the latter two in the mountains, with a deep river valley through the middle of the map. - Nova Isla is a rugged island with Athenians at one end and Gauls at the other on plains areas with mountains that contain the metal and stone in the middle. - Epidaurum is based on the modern coastline of Cavtat in Croatia, Macedon VS Athenians VS Spartans in three small villages around two coves on the Iberian coastline. These five are the only ones I've updated for Maghada, but I might make a couple more if there's interest; I don't think I really have time to get back to AI-making at the moment, sadly, fun as that was. :/ Anyhow, hope someone at least decides to download and enjoy them!

I'm not sure if morale would be an efficient system for an AI to use; what I'm working on is a system whereby it can run at the start of a battle, but if it commits it commits. Running away mid-battle is likely to lead to heavier losses for less gain/pain on the part of the enemy. Morale-based retreats happen in real life where people don't want to die; the AI has no such considerations really, it cares about whether its losses are efficient but not the life of any individual trooper. (This is incidentally why apparently, when a team of computer gamers controlled the enemy in a war-simulation to train US officer staff, the gamers won by miles. The US officers, trained to fight a real war, were careful to avoid un-necessary losses. The gamers, only used to playing games where efficiency trumps loss of life, happily ran some of their best squads in on a suicide mission, losing most of their best fighters but managing to destroy all the US supply bases and thus effectively winning the war as their opponents had no supply lines).

Yeah, I'm improving tower placement then I'll work on siege improvements.

Okay, playing a few games with improved JuBot against qbot. Main things I noticed, in no particular order, this may be useful or may not be; - Economically qbot is very, very powerful. It can keep throw - Minus side, it throws most of its units away far too easily. It attacks with armies that are slightly too small to damage a well defended base, larger but less frequent attacks would work better. - Responses to attacks are poor from qbot and it has too a high a percentage of women in the workforce; it's easy to kill a LOT of workers with quite a small raiding force. - In my last game, the two bots hit stalemate; qbot collected all the map's resources and then threw them away attacking JuBot's much better defenses, but JuBot was similarly unable to get past the fact that qbot had spammed about ten Persian fortresses around its base. They literally got to the stage where qbot had no troops at all and JuBot was never going to get enough resources to finish building another attacking force (which would've been mown down by arrows anyway).

My own suspicion is that the gains made via teamwork would be eliminated by the necessity of far more preplanning and team communication for the AI developers. Co-ordinating working on different bits of a single AI would take a lot of very tight communication, and could cause a lot of confusion if people were attempting to tinker with different bits of code simultaneously.

I've played against the current qbot (on the SVN) and it's certainly vastly improved economics and building. Still pretty wasteful of troops I find, it's an AI that does well against aggressive play because it can rush better but struggles against well built defences. I'm thinking I may look into updating JuBot for the newer stuff and API changes, and see if I can get it a bit more competitive again...

Okay... several exams, two Rome Total War mod releases, one text-based RPG programmed, far too many illnesses and a university offer later... I'm here again! I've got quite a lot of exams coming up, and they're fairly major, so I can't promise/firmly commit much at all by way of time, but in terms of modding/programming projects I'm a lot freer than I have been for a while at least. So if I have some 0AD time, what should I do with it? I could go back and work on JuBot, but I guess it's probably been massively superseded by now (correct me if I'm wrong). Or I could do scenario design perhaps, or figure out how to write random map scripts, or something else entirely (as long as it stays out of the bits that need C-family coding).

Noted, thanks HB, will get round to that if I get time.

Haven't done much team-play testing (as in, haven't done ANY team-play testing), so good shout. Will take a look.

A new JuBot update gives limited but functional support for territorial expansion in mid/late game, though currently defence is slightly weakened from previous versions awaiting a better system of building scout towers.

Well, eventually a lot of buildings will be convert-able. If it can be converted, then I guess it shouldn't need to be destroyed?

Will there be any good reasons for hunting? Deer are practically impossible to catch and don't really give much benefit when caught either at present as compared to the pretty low expense and stable output of farms.

Thanks, Pureon. How's the economy handling itself at the moment, anyone?

JuBot: The Feedback Thread Please post feedback on the latest SVN versions of JuBot here! Latest SVN: 24 Sept 11 The Exilian JuBot thread, which I am more likely to post progress on, is here: http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=1181.msg36786#new

Which faction was JuBot playing as, and how long did you leave it in which it didn't attack?

Speaking of arms races, expect a new version of JuBot pretty soon as well.

It's the bot being better or worse able to handle different map designs. Where it for example has a building order it can't complete, that messes it up. Same with a resource it wants but can't get to. In both cases it can't currently determine that it can't get to things, but it still tries, so it sends lots of repeated orders which is what causes the clogging up & lag.

My bad there, I suspect.

Okay, one of the biggest problems at the moment for AI speed, I'm fairly sure, is passability. Units keep getting stuck trying to get to unreachable resources, in short, and this is by far the biggest drain on AI resources. Three things need to be done to fix this; 1. The AI needs to call the pathfinding script to determine nearest resources, as opposed to a distance check. Is there any way I can currently do this? 2. All maps need to be checked and double checked to ensure that there are no resources outside the playable area. Several maps currently have this problem, including the Badlands RMS; it's fairly important that we make sure maps are compatible with the AI as well as vice versa, I feel. 3. I need to be able to determine if an area is in an impassable region (aka wholly surrounded by cliffs that can't be got up, for example. The current AI mostly, as has been noted, works on finding vector distances. This often leads to it putting foundations up cliffs where the builders can't get to them. Ideas on this much appreciated. These above account for well over 70% of AI speed issues. The battle finding script is probably another 20, but I can mostly deal with that in fairly simple ways I think.

This will need some major AI changes I expect - are we looking at some form of territories being in A7?

Aligning with the CC would be very tough, as I have no idea how to backwards-extract the angle. I've put an update in which should make a default angle for now anyway.

That's very odd, I've never had a problem with that section of code and it's had no recent edits... anyone else getting this?

In theory, I've stopped them building masses of mills at the back now. Can I have as much testing data as possible on bugs? I suspect there may be several left, not to mention slownesses due to bad optimisation.

The AI's builders are set to return to the towncenter on occasion to prevent those hangups and give the chicken time to move. The trouble being of course that this assumes the darn chicken moves.