Defense Bot

[ralphierocks]

I have been playing this game now daily for a few weeks. I have found the AI to be more irritating than challenging.

Let me explain:

• qBot will send 2-4 waves, then mass build villagers and simply idle them creating lag and stuttering in the game. Once you massacre these idle (broken) villagers the game speed returns to normal but the AI will not make any attempt to rebuild or carry on.
  
• Aegis Bot will send a decent sized army within the first 10 minutes, followed by wave after wave roughly 8-10 minutes apart. This forces you to just gather wood, food, and then send over an army to defeat them. Again once you dominate in the least bit the AI will not continue on, they will gather random resources without rhyme or reason.
  

I love the game, everything is going great minus a few bugs here and there, but I would love to see a builder (defense) bot introduced. Rushing is fun in it's own ways but it's preventing the game from fully shining. You rush to get wood and food and never get to see the late technologies, unless you simply back off but at that point the AI is broken and useless, so essentially your playing by yourself. If you introduce a Defensive Bot you can keep the AI from mass producing villagers, and even mass producing an army because they will be walled in with towers. It will keep pathfinding down to a minimum as they don't have to travel far for resources. It will give us an opportunity to strategically play the game instead of just throwing our blob of troops at the enemies blob of troops.

I like having the pressure of the enemy attacking me at (somewhat) random, but that concept will not work if the AI is quick to "give up" once you create a decent sized army and kill 10-15 of their villagers. At least with a defensive bot you will have time to see some of the later technologies without having to worry about stuttering (to the point that you want to throw your monitor out the window) simply because the AI thought it would be a good idea to wall themselves in with villagers instead of walls ( lol ).

These are just my experiences and my suggestions, I'm a fan for life at this point and I'm going to play regardless, but I would enjoy it far more if we stopped focusing on the attacking bots for a release and focus on at least one defensive bot.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

RalphieRocks

[zoot]

I would love to see some kind of on-going AI tournament which could be circulated in the AI community. Properly would require a more well-documented API, though.

[Oh, snap. Sorry for quadruple post. I thought the forum had some safeguard against that. Edit: Thanks, mods.]

Edited September 9, 2012 by zoot

[zoot]

its not a way that you can transform your gameplayinto a solid AI??? record in a file all your moves.

this question is for programmers

No human player has only a finite number of moves, so the file would need to be infinitely big. One could try doing some fancy machine learning, but I doubt it would work very well - there's just too many variables.

[zoot]

If we had access to the Google server farm, maybe we would have enough disk space to do something like that

[zoot]

Blizzard's AI's are made from scratch like ours, they just have more development time than we do. If we were to somehow 'train' an AI to be as good as one of theirs, it would still be very inefficient and disk-space consuming.

[raymond]

I also like one defensive bot (or choose aggressive, normal, defensive for each bot):

The bot never attack you on your area, instead the bot build a lot of walls and towers and fortresses and civic center and have the army only on his land. The bot tries to beat you to gain the max resources and have more land than you.

Edited September 9, 2012 by raymond

[Mythos_Ruler]

I also like one defensive bot (or choose aggressive, normal, defensive for each bot):

The bot never attack you on your area, instead the bot build a lot of walls and towers and fortresses and civic center and have the army only on his land. The bot tries to beat you to gain the max resources and have more land than you.

yeah, I could see varieties like: Conqueror, Defender, Rusher, etc. Civs will prefer specific strategies based on their style of play, but occasionally will choose different strategies than what they prefer, perhaps as an algorithm based on the map type with some minor randomness thrown in. By default the player would not know what strategy the AI has chosen, but it could be possible to allow the player to override the default randomness and choose a strategy for the AI in the game host screen.

[MishFTW]

I mentioned this somewhere else. I've always wanted to create a defensive AI and name it Mason. (Because it builds walls )

[Pureon]

The 'standard' AI isn't finished yet, it cannot use water or build walls, so until it is able to do both of those, it's unlikely you'll see a 'defense' bot being developed.

[ralphierocks]

I don't think nor expect any of the AI's to be perfect, but I am happy to see that others agree and would like to see a defensive AI as well. I hope that this idea does get overshadowed by additional in game features or the like. I also enjoy the randomness of the bots AI as suggested above and the ability to override that randomness, those ideas are pure genius. Keep up the great work, I can't wait to see what comes next.

[alkazar-ipse]

I agree with the idea.

But I do understand that this'll have to wait a bit as it is a prioritie to get the ONE bot better (not perfect, but walls and ships should be there even if the bot would suck at it, at least one should make him try XD)