Getting my arse whooped by CAI ??? HELP

CAI plays perfectly fair, though i think it might take some short corners with intel (i.e, it will always find you).

Few things to consider:

1) The bot is very good at expanding if left unchecked. Don't let it expand unchecked.

2) This is a game where you get almost all your gear within first ten seconds of game, just as you plop your factory. At 60 seconds, you should know where your enemy is. If you fail, at 180 seconds you can suddenly discover an assault gunship setting your village alight and there's nothing left to do (CAI doesn't do that, some players do when you don't scout).

3) The game saves replays. Watch them and learn from your enemy and your own mistakes.

4) The game is about ground control. Don't ever hope to win by fortifying a corner of the map to build in safety. Abandon safety; you must defeat the enemy, and that doesn't work by being safe.

5) That said, CAI has some REAL HARD time dealing with following classes of units and tactics, so they can be considered cheating - but might be necessary to pick up the skills:
- anything heavy soon enough. My first CAI victories were as simple as "capture 10 metal spots, then rush crabe crabe crabe".
- heavy defenses, especially ones such as Annihilator and Doomsday Machine.
- aircraft, especially planes, because it almost never makes planes of its own (but you have to know how to use your bombers right)
- terraforming. make a ditch, and AI will never pass it.
- dominatrix. nuff said.

quote: Tbh you`ll prob find the reason there are so many noobs plaguing MP purely because they want to have the possible option of playing the game for more than 10 mins or the hope that the person they are playing against is also a noob?

Actually there's a "newbies only" room especially for this case. It's badly underpopulated due to several reasons, one of which i'd call lack* of linux support for quickmatching.

* it is actually supported if you use weblobby. weblobby is that amazing.

The other factor is that every newbie just wants to play right now, and without the QM to toss them together, they all join the biggest room. Which is not only bad for the newbies: it creates that ugly one-huge-game culture that i personally would stop at nothing to eradicate.

Quote " Actually it doesn't even cheat for intel. It just uses a lot of scouts "

but how does it do this? By the time ive built the standard setup -
solar/metal/1 bot factory ...... they have sent at least 5 scouts out, follow by attack bots 30 secs later?? How does it get the resources so quick? by the time ive created 1 construction bot im out of resources and have to wait at least a minute b4 i have enough to build x5 scouts .... something is not right!

green, it has the lab runing at the same time as its building the mex, so units are already done by the time its finished the mex...

also it builds factory first (cause its free)

If you play some games online (can be SP vs bots too, as long as it is online) the played games will show in your profile. People can then watch the replays and maybe give you hints.

Those mission links won't work with Linux unless you manually download the startscript.

So my suggestion is to put some bots on your team or play against the Easy Chickens bot which is a bit like a tower defence. It is possible to add bots to your team with Springlobby, I don't know about the others.

I'll give you some advice for surviving early 1v1. Make a Lotus (LLT) to each approach to your base. Four of them in total should make you safe at the start. These towers are quite cheap and at least one is vital at the start of the game for most strategies.

Windows doesn't have any more extra bots. The other bots are for other Spring games I believe. Except for the Null AI but the Null AI does exactly nothing. Best way to learn the game is to play 1vs1 versus one of the more establishes players in Zero-K. Altough they will whoop your ass even harder then CAI most of them are very friendly and will tell you what you are doing wrong.

To ease the pain in the meanwhile I suggest playing smaller maps since when you start playing Zero-K the largest problem most players have (or at least I have) is the agresive land-grabby play of Zero-K. When you play on a smaller map with fewer mexes you won't get out-ecoed as hard as on a large map.

So here's some tips to improve your play:
Don't build a construction bot at the start. Most construction bots cost about as much metal as 2 Raiders meaning an enemy that doesn't start with a construction bot will already have 2 more attacking units 10 seconds into the game. That metal is perhaps better spend on making a lotus to protect your base from early raiders. Instead in your factory pump out about 5 raiders (Glaive / Bandit / or 3 Scorchers if you're playing light vehicle, but I'd suggest starting Cloakybots or Shieldbots) As soon as these are done. Move out! You have a lotus and the commander to protect your base (Your commander will be arround for a bit longer since he is making a radar, metal extractors and energy in your base). Try giving the commander a nice and long build order with shift (just like in TA) and put your factory on repeat to make something like 5 raider, 1 construction bot (The repeat button is in the unit building tab on the right, it's the 3 gray arrows in a circle that turn green if you click them).

So what you do is your automate your base as much as possible (Long build queue, factory on repeat) which gives you time to start raiding. Use those 5 raiders to carefully probe what your enemy is doing and if you find an undefended mex (Metal extractor) snipe it fast and move out again before you find any resistance. Since bullets in Zero-K are "Slow" as in not instantanious your units will have a range advantage when running away from the enemy, especially in raider vs raider fights this is very important since it is the difference between using all units and losing none. So as soon as you don't thrust it pull your raider out. And start probing somewhere else

As your raiders are scouting and sniping mexes try to have a look at what the enemy is building he will probably start sending out riots soon to counter your pesky raiders, but since you have the scouting advantage you can see it coming and build something in advance to counter the riot unit (Skirmishers work well). The ideal situation would be if your enemy responded to your raiding with base defense, meaning he's putting precious resources into fortifying his small part of the map. That defence isn't going anywhere allowing you to expand all over the map and use your superior eco advantage to steamroll his defence while he tries to build his fortress of doom with only 2 mexes.

factory -> 3 mex -> 3/4 solars or 4/5 winds -> LLT/defender.

Pump raiders from your own factory and expand with your commander. Get radar and intercept enemy units with your own.

Put a CAI on your team with 1 enemy CAI. Watch what your CAI does and copy him.

Almost every AI in every RTS cheats horrendously with. CAI does not. Never. It's not even particularly smart, it just plays the game properly.

quote: Thanks for the response Anarchid, but i think that you've just advised the very reason i should give up the game, as u say 180 secs (3 minutes - come on :O ) into the game im getting attacked ... not very friendly for new users of the game.

I think having a hard time against an AI opponent that plays completely fairly is literally the best, best possible thing in a game - once you can beat the AI or figure out how to gap-in-the-wall it the fun is gone. Treasure the feeling of danger - it wont last. Anyone who has played online for a few weeks will squash CAI like a bug.

if you find the idea of losing distressing then RTS is a genre you will have trouble loving.. the most beautiful moments in games are often the ones where you are being unfairly ganged up on and forced to hold huge swathes of the map for your team while other players are sitting on a dildo in their bases. Its brutal, but if you hold your shit together there is nothing more rewarding than pulling through and feeling like a fucking titan as you swing the whole map with an army that operates like a huge, complex appendage of your will and beats down your opponents.

Worse, it breaks the game. It literally breaks how the game is played. You cannot use any standard build orders against the harder difficulties of Starcraft 2 AI's, you can play a perfect game of Starcraft 2 and lose. You cannot copy your enemies strategies, you cannot mirror his unit use to figure out the counters, you cannot watch their build order.

I remember my first time I watched a replay of Age of Empires 2 to try and understand how the AI teched up so fast. When I saw his resources, any illusion was shattered. It cheated!

If you're going to make an AI that cheats abandon any notion that this is symmetrical warfare, this is what Chickens does.