I think ZK probably has the best RTS AI opponents on the market right now, that could be a major sell if you could incorporate CAI ZKGBAI, CSI & Circuit into the lobby in a more user freindly way. That would ofc mean seperating AIs and Chicken, and hiding all the AI that are not in the list above/ do not work well. It would also mean making a real effort not to break the AIs with every incremental patch.

This was 4 player vs 5 circuit.

quote: ~22 minute mark, vulture flyover by 1vory_k1ng seems to coincide with yellow AI (bottom right) breaking down for a minute. It stops all construction and excessess metal for a while before picking up again.

Hiding the evidence of that singu.

quote: I think they failed to group their smaller units into larger armies and so they couldn't have any impact. Many lone or small groups of tanks were lost. The use of Planes was quite bad.

Pretty much my notes - understand that lamer is likely to implement attack group size scaling with time elapsed/map size/player density. Once thats fixed, it needs to learn to deal with Stingers.

What does the top 50 have to do with it? I've been playing spring engine games almost exclusively since 2006.

I disagree with the whole sentiment of your post.

AI is notoriously bad at playing RTS, and I think Zero K is mechanically one of the most complex RTS game on the market. Game balance is extremely complex, handling of units and economy is very nuanced. That AI is playing the game to this standard is a miracle. Please tell me another RTS that has better AI than seen in the spring engine besides Starcraft 1?

What makes Zero K even harder to beat using AI is that players have such a powerful interface - the main advantage of AI, multitasking, is greatly reduced when the interface gives players many of the same powers. This is AI play is impressive, if you dont perceive that then you're not grasping the subject matter.

If you just mean from a players perspective its boring because it can't beat you - well of course, but then besides deterministic games like Chess there aren't really publically avaliable non-cheating AIs that beat humans at complex games.

Haha, I've seen your "blah blah but ZK is such a complex game and you don't grasp AIs yadda yadda" rant comming, [GBC]1v0ry_k1ng. That's only to be expected considering your enthusiasm for this topic.

quote: I've been playing spring engine games almost exclusively since 2006.

That suggests you might not have a lot of experience with AIs in hundreds of different RTS games.

I think you're making ZK appear harder than it is gameplay wise. The top 50 very much have to do with this topic, since your average player doesn't understand most of the complex elements about Zero-K either. What's applying to AIs also applies to humans. It takes quite a bit of knowledge and skill to be able to use the advanced features that exist.

The terraform UI is powerful, but horrible. Economy view is powerful, but apparently not completely understood by the majority of players. Hotkeys and modifiers keys are extremely valuable, but so overwhelmingly many that I'm sure there's not a single player who knows every one of them and many more who didn't even customize them.

IK is right in that an AI capable of challenging or beating low/average skill players, especially overly defensive ones, is already a fantastic thing to have.

CAI and chickens have taught way too many newbs to spam porc over the years. It's great that Circuit has the ability to escalate to take advantage of its map control.

quote: On a more serious note, I remember reading something about one or multiple of the AIs cheating via global vision or something similar. Which one was that?

Chickens, CAI, RAI, KAIK, E323, Shard (eeh, probably all legacy AIs).

If you want Circuit to have this awesome ability: manually edit 'difficulty' in AIOptions.lua. Global vision makes the grass - greener, the light - brighter! High hopes, try it!