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How good is AI?

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7 days ago
Is it possible to make that kind of comparison with human players? What level would AI brutal be on as a human? Or is the style of play too idiosyncratic to allow for comparison? In a blinded 1v1 could one distinguish between human or AI opponent by the play alone? Are there upper limits on the abilities of AI - somewhere on beyond brutal?
+0 / -0
Some of those questions make me wonder if you're asking about an AI model being trained to play ZK or the BrutalAI we currently have.

Strictly speaking about 1v1, BrutalAI is somewhere between Orange and BrightYellow (Subgiant and Giant). If the match is allowed to drag on a lot, I think AI makes the kinds of decisions the upper end of BrightYellow or low end of BlueWhite. It is very easy to forget to keep building overdrive when you're trying to micro a lot, but the AI will never forget. If you let BrutalAI live long enough, it will spread the grid all over its base and it will try to make striders and even a super weapon.

It would be trivially easy to disginguish a match that involves an AI with one that does not for really anyone, anyone at all who has mild experience with 1v1. The biggest sign is simply that all of its units are always doing something. Not necessarily something that is good or even makes sense, but they're always trying to go somewhere. Players, especially lower skilled ones, often have units sitting somewhere either guarding the front or just being left unattended after being produced.

For the most part, BrutalAI tries to play like a player. Other games increase difficulty of computer controlled opponents by giving them more resources or increasing the stats of the units, mainly because the developpers couldn't figure out how to make an AI that can beat players on equal footing. Another thing AI gets in other games is full map knowledge. If you picked a really large map with multiple start positions the human player would have to scout to find their opponent, but the AI would know immediately where everything is and would also craft its strategy around what the player is doing despite never having scouted the human.

BrutalAI does not "cheat" in any way. It makes decisions based on the information it discovers, either from radar dots or having sent a unit to actually see what the player does. BrutalAI does not get more resources or better unit stats. It simply tries to make smart decisions.

The biggest flaw of the AI is that it is very defensive, so it is trivially easy to contain it and expand without any sort of opposition. A good player will out eco the AI pretty much from the start of the match and will effortly crush BrutalAI with pretty much any combination of units.

The AI will attempt to raid, but it is so late at trying that it is trivially easy to deflect. The AI also cannot learn. It doesn't know what are common weaknesses for lower skilled player opponents, or habits of players it faces frequently. It will try to gather information and try to attack in the exact same way it would regardless of its opponent, meaning it will never try a quirky strategy that is very effective against a lower skilled opponent, against specific play style or on a specific map.

There are many things that work extremely well vs AI because it doesn't know how to react, and might not even be detecting certain threats at all. For instance the AI is notoriously bad at handling phantoms. Because they stay cloaked when shooting, the AI never sees them unless it runs into one by complete accident. A player who can get to a point where they can spam phantoms will just overwhlem any amount of AIs. The AI doesn't know spamming raiders and sending them all at once to the front to form a detection line. It will probably just never find the phantoms unless they make a mistake that causes them to take damage and decloak.

The AI also doesn't know how to deal with terraform. If you make a wall the only thing the AI can do is make spiders or flying units. If a map features narrow paths surrounded by water, making a small trench is basically making sure the AI can never use that path again. It doesn't know how to restore the terrain or make a bridge. All it knows is: there is water, therefore make ships/amphs/hovers. More often than not, if water is not prominent on the map and you dig all the paths to water, the AI will just get stuck and form massive balls of units standing at the edge of water, unable to do anything at all.



I have seen some AI models trained to play other games, like Starcraft 2. In those an AI model can become far superior to a player, but this has more to do with the game design than the kind of decisions the AI makes. For instance in Starcraft it is extremely difficult for the player to keep a group of units from bunching up. All orders tend to have the units try to stand on the point at the destination of the command and end up in a ball. In Starcraft this is terrible because units die quickly and AOE attacks tend to deal a lot of damage, so clumping usually means instant death. It is trivially easy for an AI with inifite inputs to keep units spread apart, while humans must spend time moving individual units apart.

Also there are units like stalkers which have a short range teleport ability. Any attack that was targeting them when they teleport will miss, which in Starcraft an attack missing is very rare. If a unit is in range and shoots, it will almost always deal damage. It is very hard for a player to tell their stalkers to blink (teleport) when they're getting targeted and are about to die when they have many to control, but for AI that is trivially easy. It can check thousands of times per second where all the attacks are going and if it detects a stalker is about to die, it will command it to blink to safety. I haven't checked in a long time, but last I saw, an AI model trained to use blink stalkers will effortlessly beat all the best players in the world. In that specific game, we've entered the realm of machine speed capabilities humans just can't rival, and we've done so years ago.

But in ZK there aren't many mechanics like that and the action is slower. Some attacks are instant, but most have a bullet/rocket that has travel time that is slow enough for a player to respond to. That said, if allowed to give an infinite number of commands, a well trained AI model could individually control all their units and perfectly skirmish them, avoiding every single shot. That would be the equivalent of the SC2 example. At that point a human's only chance is to find something that can kill the AI opponent before the match scales up to superhuman control. It would be the chess equivalent of opening with a weird set of moves that the AI can't handle. I haven't followed chess in a long time but I've seen Magnus Carlsen in interview. Stockfish is humanly unbeatable, so if given sufficient processing power and better models, there is no reason to think the same can't be done for RTS or any game really.
+11 / -0
CArankGalamesh has shared a super good overview on the topic.

I want to add that there exist other AI's then the "basic"-ones we have available by default, at the moment.
There has even been an AI-Tournament once or twice.
And some of those AI are considerably stronger then the "Brutal" model.
USrankivand used to programm AI's.
He once had an AI playing against me, without telling me beforehand.
And nearly beat me with it.
I think there are probably some AI's on his harddrive that could be ranked in the top 50, maybe even higher. (casual rating)
+5 / -0

6 days ago
My friend and I have played against the AI for more than 1500 hours now. What Galamesh says is spot on.

Phantoms and terraforming are great for baffling the clankers. Though the clankers do respond to Phantoms with Merlins and the smaller, similar unit who's designation escapes me.

Lately we've worked up to fighting "Super Brutals", brutals with a 1.75 Team economic bonus. So far the only map we consistently beat them is the Castle Gods map. And then only by sealing the entrances and trenching the moats deeper early in the game. They trounced us the first eight times we went against them until we tried fighting them on that map.

Thank you guys for resolving the special weapons issue where the AI wasn't using them. It's refreshing to once again have to build nuke defenses or call out, "That was me!" on the announcement that a nuke had been launched. (When you forget to announce it before hand.)

Though we don't use it often, full reveal, which makes it like a board game, makes the AI too cautious when we thought it would make them bolder. So we stopped using it.

A challenge we haven't beaten yet is Brutals using K tech. And we haven't won against even normie Chickens in over a year so we pretty much stopped playing them, after a concerted month long effort to do so. The Blobbers and other spitting units are absurdly difficult to counter. Combine those with some "flawed", (in my opinion), spotting rules and the Chickens are not beatable by mere humans.
+1 / -0
USrankLordBorzoi

Here is an example on how to effortlessly beat suicidal chickens:
Bots B2445376 1 on MiniNuggets_v5.1

Essentially make reavers and kill eggs pushing forward, reclaiming as you go.
Make gremlins before the first pigeon wave. 10 is more than enough.
Build another wave of reavers that hangs at your front in case an egg spawns behind the front line and rushes straight at your base.
Make a small amount of LLTs, the range of which cover your entire base just to prevent chickens cheating and just spawning directly in your base. This tends to happen if you squeeze them out of the map completely and have no remaining nests anywhere.
Then at around 30% anger with all your eco built up, start spamming nimbus. If you want to be extra funny, make 30 or so gnats and instantly EMP the queen.

This works because for some reason everyone wants to porc when playing chickens, but they lose tech progress (which units spawn) when you kill nests. Kill enough nests and the chickens will stay at basic units the entire match. The drawback of killing nests is that it angers the hiver sooner, but when it's so easy to severely outpace chicken evolutions that's not actually an issue. The advantage of killing nests is that you never have to face blobbers.


By the middle of the match I'm playing at 4x speed because this is taking too long, and that explains my poor reaction when the queen spawns. I'm already so far ahead I can't possibly lose so it doesn't matter.

It's far harder to try to survive chickens using only towers. It's definitively possible, but the units path completely trivializes anything chickens can do.
+2 / -0
And here is with towers.

Bots B2445390 1 on MiniNuggets_v5.1

I got bored by the end and made gnats which are technically units, but I could have just continued spamming lucis everywhere and the queen would have gotten vaporized as soon as it entered range.
+1 / -0
4 days ago
Part of the question is how to find a more difficult version of AI beyond brutal. I guess using the economic multiplier is the simplest way to do that. I hadn't thought of that.
+0 / -0
https://zero-k.info/Mods/Detail/207
my scale ai is slightly harder then a vanilla ai as it applies a time pressure.. but its not that hard still

1 boss ai can solo an entire team.. and 2 boss ai can easily kill an entire team

https://zero-k.info/Mods/Detail/205

soon ill release the king ai.. an ai that can kill the boss ai

however these ai cheat

+0 / -0

3 days ago
First off: kudos to CArankGalamesh for the thorough writeup.

quote:
USrankivand used to programm AI's...
...I think there are probably some AI's on his harddrive that could be ranked in the top 50
I would love to spar with those eventually. Are the replays accessible somewhere?

One thing that's been on my mind: The current AI doesn't utilize the newer units:
Bulkhead, Lobster and Sparrow being the oldest additions. Now there's Magpie, Odin and even Commander Egg.
Doing the Lobster logic (*insert joke here*) would probably be a headache so I'd cross that one, perhaps same for the Radar->Sparrow and whether it should activate the special self-destruct though I would love for the AI to send some across throughout the game to gather intel and also hint new players of that scouting option.
Bulkhead and Magpie would be neat additions to their army compositions. Odin might be a tricky one.
But the egg, oh my that egg. Imagine farming AI commanders as a passtime. Hunting down those new clueless hunks of metals each time they ripen.

Though I'm not going to pretend I know about AI programming or how easy/maintainable it is. The current AI is already stable and enjoyable to skirmish with and primes new players for PvP. Updating it to use the new units would probably not have been worth the effort.


+0 / -0
https://zero-k.info/Mods/Detail/209

king ai - never been defeated

attempt was made by an entire 10 player team but the team lost to enemy detriments and disco
+0 / -0

2 days ago
play against 2 brutal (per player) and set yourself the following restriction: no terraform, no defenses heavier than stinger.
thats hard enough.
+0 / -0
another new ai

https://zero-k.info/Mods/Detail/212

also very hard

this one is allot easier then boss / king ai
+0 / -0

2 days ago
what makes king ai hard?
+0 / -0
2 days ago
it copies any unit you make 1-3 times depending on your map mex percentage over 50% or 80%

but it also gets units from flea to detriment every 20 seconds at 6 then 12 then move up cost

and it also plays normal

when the commander dies it splits once into 3 and thus gets 3x spawns
+0 / -0

2 days ago
And by it copies units, that actually means the AI gets a free gift of the same units and porc you produce. Make a luci? One spawns near the ai commander. Make a gremlin? One spawns near the AI commander. It gets for free one of everything you make.
+0 / -0

47 hours ago
and terraform?
+1 / -0
43 hours ago
terraform stays a human advantage.. it will only copy units with a weapon.. this protects it from spawning snitch.. but also means it gets shields since shields are a weapon but snitch has only an explode as

if players manage to kill the king ai then ill splice in the moreme ai and call it the demigod ai.. there will always be something harder
+0 / -0
The AI is horrible. You don't need terraform at all.
+0 / -0

24 hours ago
No you don't, but a lot of players cheese the AI by building a wall around their base and then making nuke or super or something.
The AI doesn't need anything else but terra-restore.
1 AI brutal is not too hard, but 1v2 is something that definitely is. I am recommending this because apart from playing against 2 bots, there is no cheating or anything out of the norm involved, as it is the case with king AI.
+1 / -0
correct.. all my ai mods cheat =D i have no idea how to program a real ai

that being said all my ai apart from king ai have now been beaten including the new

upgrader ai

https://zero-k.info/Mods/Detail/214

so even while cheating they mostly loose.. this is a strong proof that human players are much better then the current ai models as each ai retains its normal play style and is buffed ontop of that massively and still cannot win
+0 / -0
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