Battle AI mod

[DARTH VADER]

Yes I know what you mean. I like your sincerity. Good.

[Lazy Knight]

I am sorry Darth, if you have written this explanation before I must have missed it. I remember your BAI fix to be based on firing angles, skrimisher unit class and other things

I have in fact followed your updates, yet I have never seen this explanation of columns before. Hence I assumed that Luntik here was the first to share any of their meaning. I guess you can easily prove me wrong...



In either way, Luntik is doing a great job exploring the battle AI and I, of course, am espacially interested in this since this mod seems to be easily compatible with everything else.

am glad you support his work, and I don't think lessening it is appropriate, since he has indeed taken a very different path than yours, as you say yourself. Let us see what comes from this approach.

[T.C.]

I am sorry Darth, if you have written this explanation before I must have missed it. I remember your BAI fix to be based on firing angles, skrimisher unit class and other things

I have in fact followed your updates, yet I have never seen this explanation of columns before. Hence I assumed that Luntik here was the first to share any of their meaning. I guess you can easily prove me wrong...



In either way, Luntik is doing a great job exploring the battle AI and I, of course, am espacially interested in this since this mod seems to be easily compatible with everything else.

am glad you support his work, and I don't think lessening it is appropriate, since he has indeed taken a very different path than yours, as you say yourself. Let us see what comes from this approach.

I agree, Id like to see someone new take a shot at this AI, without building on Darths work - It might give us a new type of gameplay

[DARTH VADER]

PdGuru post made me finally to see this myself.

Thanks for the answer Lazy Knight.

@Luntik
So, basically I was inspired to look at those charge values (0 30 0) and put them in DarthMod (together with all the other tweaks I have). I especially was eager to see how the zero values worked.

I confirm that the zero values do make things a lot better. I changed as below (see right of the image) and the fix will be included in the next update of DarthMod with full credits to your inspiration and proper links to your thread, so that others can find this.

I did not use the other values you used in other db files because I have my own in DarthMod. But I urge you to experiment with the acceleration and deceleration values (see left of the image) as well as of the nullification of the xhold parameters in kv_rules tables (other zeros I put).



I suspect that the zero values are replaced by a default internal value of vanilla but this is OK. We do not care if it gives the results we want. I apologise for my harsh comments before. I openly say good and bad words always so now I want to help you and promote what you did. I did not test the whole mod and with vanilla but others here can test and help you optimise the results. Good luck and good work.

[Luntik]

Good luck and good work.

Ok, thanks!

[♔Dignan♔]

The force is strong with these two...

With their combined powers they have gotten one step closer to ENDING this destructive gameplay bug

[Pdguru]

The force is strong with these two...

With their combined powers they have gotten one step closer to ENDING this destructive gameplay bug

Ah, it's good to see the walls come down and collaboration emerge... We have hope for humanity (and even ETW Battle AI!) after all.

Darth - glad I was able to help you see. Now I wonder if Lutnik's work will enable you to return your mod to the shorter ranges?

PS: Just when y'all get this done, CA will dump their promised revised AI on us via Steam... and it'll be back to square one!

[DARTH VADER]

Oh god yes, I forgot about the so called upcoming patch... I am so tired of this.
About Luntik fix, I know that these values worked as a supplementary good addon to DarthMod. I am not going to revert my findings unless the patch... I do not want to think about it. Also, I do not know how much impact the Luntik mod has to the "vanilla" mess. Surely there will be needed more, so this is why I tipped some to look(kvrules and acceleration/deceleration values).

[Pdguru]

Oh god yes, I forgot about the so called upcoming patch... I am so tired of this.
About Luntik fix, I know that these values worked as a supplementary good addon to DarthMod. I am not going to revert my findings unless the patch... I do not want to think about it. Also, I do not know how much impact the Luntik mod has to the "vanilla" mess. Surely there will be needed more, so this is why I tipped some to look(kvrules and acceleration/deceleration values).

Darth,

I have used this (Lutnik's) mod on plain vanilla, and then with a few other skin-change mods and Killzone's mod files. The result is very good, as reported. For sure, the BAI seems to try to re-arrange itself intelligently and not chaotically. Firing lines are good and charges happen - but it all seems logical, not just chicken-dance based (although results do vary by nation). If this mod achieves that without yours, perhaps there's an even better one possible by merging - or perhaps there are just different ways to skin this cat, eh?

It's ironic that after all this time of asking for a CA fix to the BAI, here we are dreading it... How funny is that?

[whynaut]

Absolutely Fantastic!!!

After growing jealous of DM's improved BAI, and reading some of the glowing reviews, I decided to try this mod out.

To start with, it works brilliantly with IS. In the battle (campaign), I did notice some of the behavior mentioned earlier, with the army marching in "blob" formation, then "deploying" in to a line just before coming in range. Still a vast improvement, and acutally compatible with IS (and probably most other non-DM mods). I was outnumbered fairly heavily, but had higher quality units, plus the other army had taken some casualties from my using the town guard as skirmishers (they have longer ranges than line infantry in IS). The enemy shot one volley and then charged. There was a small issue here... all my units faced off against exactly one enemy unit, and the AI seemed to not know what to do with its uncommitted troops. There was no attempt to flank, which would have been quite devastating to me.

One of the enemy units on the edge of my line routed from melee, and I was ready to start rolling up the other enemy units. However, in the smartest move I have seen the AI make in quite a long time, the troops that were engaged actually retreated (not routed) from melee, and formed a new battle line on the opposite side of the battlefield from the unit that had routed. The enemy general relocated behind this new line, and the battle turned in to a shootout...

This was some of the best fun I have had playing ETW in quite a long time.

Some questions:

1. Is there anything that can be done to encourage flanking? And I don't mean the "one unit of cavalry, taking as circuitous a route as possible" flanking. I mean using surplus (infantry) troops to roll up an enemy's line flanking (the type of flanking people use). I saw some of that behavior in one of the screens posted earlier (the Spain/Portugal one), but not in my battle (despite clear numerical superiority).

2. Is the 1-one-1 meleeing unique to me, or is this an official side effect of the mod? (It is still much better than melee blob behavior, but there's not much point in having superior numbers if you can only fight one on one... It was sort of like a giant version of ETW's melee animations...)

3. How will this handle reinforcements? Vanilla handles them quite horribly, but has anyone seen an improvement? Is seems that whatever magic this mod works only takes effect once the enemy troops come in or near range... Still, will it neatly slot reinforcements in to the line of battle? Use them to flank? Or just have the vanilla style overlap and subsequent chicken-dance-fest?

[Germane]

I apologise for my harsh comments before. I openly say good and bad words always so now I want to help you and promote what you did. I did not test the whole mod and with vanilla but others here can test and help you optimise the results. Good luck and good work.

in Yoda language: ..now we seen a glory Age in the Universum , where one modder helps the other modder..

[Welshman25]

I had a noticable improvement. The AI lined up and fired, and only charged when it had the upper hand (which shattered my flank lol). Great job, +rep!

Note, I was using this with just a few retextures and the like, no major mods like IS or DM.

[MorganH.]

@Luntik; you arent the CA guy whos trying to fix the BAI in his ''spare'' time arent you ?

No really ,many many thanks for this breakthrough mate+rep

@Darth; many thanks for getting involved in this as well +rep

[agnes69]

Have not got such pleasure from what was happening, the battle was indeed resemble linear battle XVIII century!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Lord Nova]

Well I'll check it out with my current vanilla campaign however I do have this question for both Luntik and Darth

The only way to improve AI is through groupformations.bin and gameplay tweaks?

In other words, is there no way to improve the AI itself without having to change movement speed, gun ranges, fatigue levels, morale levels, ect.. So would the Bin file tweaks be enough?

Also how does this effect Fort/siege AI? Does it perform better or should we just go with modding forts/siege battles out completely?


I would like to narrow down AI improvements to just AI behaviors rather then modding gameplay to suit the AI better, that way a "AI enhancement mod" could be compatible with all mods and not overwrite movement speed or morale values of another mod.

[DARTH VADER]

The only way to improve AI is through groupformations.bin and gameplay tweaks?

Yes unfortunately. I even changed indirectly the formations by changing the classes but this TW title has locked all AI parameters for us modders.
The bin files cannot be modded. ( I use older vanilla version in DarthMod which was from the times of 1.3 patch and it works better)
Fort battles are a mess from CA. Those tweaks we do help the siege system a lot... but not enough to make them enjoyable.

---edit
Checked it is not. Nevermind the question.

[Lord Nova]

Yes unfortunately. I even changed indirectly the formations by changing the classes but this TW title has locked all AI parameters for us modders.
The bin files cannot be modded. ( I use older vanilla version in DarthMod which was from the times of 1.3 patch and it works better)
Fort battles are a mess from CA. Those tweaks we do help the siege system a lot... but not enough to make them enjoyable.

---edit
Checked it is not. Nevermind the question.

That is rather unfortunate since it means every mod will have to borrow certain gameplay tweaks to improve the AI, meaning less freedom in mod variables.

It seems from early discussion here that changing the unknown columns.

Darth Vader

The 3 values in battle entities unknown columns 2,3,4 are:
charge_distance_commence_run, charge_distance_adopt_charge_pose, charge_distance_pick_target
(Lee Cowen CA staff has the credit for this info)

Luntik

But you do not think that the error may be hiding in the algorithms CA around charge distance and reformations.

So would these 3 variables be the most important change to the AI behaviors in other words would simply changing those and only those result in improvement. I would like to have more freedom with my editing of unit fatigue, movement speed, ect. then to be constrained to optimal AI performance meaning all mods will have to be similar to each other in terms of some battle mechanics for decent AI.

[DARTH VADER]

I tested vanilla and Luntik mod and there are improvements, but, in my opinion, there is MUCH more that is needed in terms of gameplay balance. There are a whole set of things already implemented in DarthMod (That is why I was talking before about the re-invent of the wheel) which cannot be ignored or become obsolete. But by nullifying simply the charge_distance_commence_run, charge_distance_pick_target it does a lot of good. ...Which leads to the finalization of DarthMod improvements I think. I am excited right now (thanks Luntik for the inspiration) and I will upload the new DarthMod update 5,4 shortly.

[Luntik]

I delay the response, but my poor English does not do it quickly

I think "melee bug" leads to crash (conflict?) in the algorithms of the game.
If you can avoid the "melee bug" - the algorithms are working correctly and we see the logical steps of AI, concerted action units, attack, rebuild, retreat, flank coverages, etc.

That would avoid a malfunction of algorithms must be observed 3 condition
1 line alignment
2 fire-fighting priority over melee
3 maintain detachment from involuntary movements, leading to a chain reaction

1 and 2 does not cause difficulties
3 - 50/50

Siege, for myself, I decided that everything that can be done - make sure that the wall could not destroy

ps
many,many thanks to all

[Lucan]

Download link is broken.