Hey, sorry for the late reply:
Indeed the AI does get a significant cheat cash to offset for the fact thy are generally dumb. However, difficulty will be toned down as the way the AI plays will be reworked into something that will make cheating feel less blatant and obvious.
Next release will fix it. I created a new AI from scratch and fort gen is Hard.
You can get it by joining discord, and then you ll have the chance to fight the very first non-cheaty AI :p
Fifth one is out!lets gooo....
TheHunter is pretty much responsible for 90% of content creation and coding. He's right now put in a job position that requires him to give alot of time, energy and responsibility at. We're just waiting for him to appear again if ever.
Nice work. Cant wait to try it. Did you remember to add those missing music scripts :p ?
Hey Stanislav, is it possible to fix the China mission 5's AI?
Hunter is busy with RL matters to be honest. Mod dev is continuing however.
We're in public beta right now. As for the lack of updates, we are simply preoccupied with real life obligations.
To add more into zeke's point, SAGE is really not optimized. Not everyone has a PC that can handle an AI that spams large amounts of units.
This is one of the reasons why I reworked it like this. The AI does not get alot of cheat cash unlike before, hence why they have to rely on smart tactics.
No no no. You see, AI needs that extra cash to operate properly due to lack of tactical awareness and lack of sec eco growth.
Just like any other RTS, it get its own cheat cash bonus in order to not get stuck. You re not meant to have an equal playing field.
The AI gets cheat cash just like a typical zh AI. For reference,ZH AI gets 50k, ROTR AI gets 20k. It feels hard due to the fact the AI actually manages its cash better.
The new AI is alot different than what you played with before, but it won't be any harder (in fact it will be easier sorta).
It moves its units and behaves in a smarter way but spams ALOT less compared to previous AI, hence its bruteforce capability is weaker.
With that being said,due to it being smarter,it knows how and when to be completely relentless so look forward to that.
Best way to prevent their attacks from getting too strong is to harass their supply lines. The AI gets less cheat cash so this strategy is effective.
The whole AI code is being written from scratch by me, which discards the older buggy ZH code in favor of something cleaner and more refined.
The difficulty will be increased in the sense that the AI will play out on a different 'feel', it will be a lot less predictable to anticipate incoming attacks that can come from any direction.
Couple that with smarter behavior, smarter money and attack team management all makes the AI harder in a sense ( while in reality they spam less overall units and get less cheat cash compared to the current version AI).
Tl;dr - AI will be harder because it's going to be a bit smarter.
Why not join our community on discord? I have an AI testing channel there where I submit new builds regularly. Seeing as you play compstomps alot,your feedback can be useful.
Your statement is correct regarding the AI.
Currently,it is set up as follows :
-Easy is Easy
- Medium is Medium
-Hard is Medium on steroids ( but they are the same).
Am currently working on the clock to figure a better way to code it,an idea I have is this:
Easy AI is easy
Medium AI is Easy on steroids
Hard AI will be sort of a new "level".
Good job though with the feedback. You'd be a good AI tester
Are you referring to the fact they are stuck using the same group of units over and over on some or all maps?
On some maps the AI doesn't tech up which can explain the monotony of the attacks. Further more, standard cash is 10k, and that's how the AI's difficulty is calibrated, any more would cause them to go haywire.
They're more of a defensive faction with artillery theme ( in the same way you can't really call USA the airforce faction etc..). Artillery is one of their weaknesses sorta because let's face it, they need a weakness. You need to use your own artillery assets to counter other faction artillery units like building mortar pits after the first 2-3 howitzer,and using air assets to fend off earlier artillery rushes ( t1 artillery rush is one of their huge weaknesses, you basically have to endure until you get howitzer).
As for Rushing with ECA,you still have the infamous dozer rush which can end games,having a lynx stuffed with infantry,or bloodhounds also work well for harassment.
True it is not easy to retake ground as ECA, you're supposed to take and HOLD ground, and not be forced out from the vital map points. This is where ECA Defenses shine, as they cover all weakness including artillery. A gun turret costs 1000$ yet it can take put probably more than 4 tanks before getting killed, which means it will always "repay its price cost in blood". Same applies for all other defenses except maybe mortar pits, which only become deadly after reaching critical number of 5+ in a front. Infantry also gain better garrison bonus. All of these factors should make it easy to hold ground.
ECA units are also very powerful. Rely more on infantry due to them lacking build time penalty and are pretty powerful as well. Leopards are good main line tanks,second best mbt in the game if not best after Manticore protocol. Pandurs have a low build time for their capability. You can put pioneers in them to have pretty good artillery units.
Tried it today This was an absolute blast to play in :)
This is not something that can be fixed though. Keep in mind that on top of the old engine, alot of units in the mod force it to do things it is not intended to do and abuses it so that you can have the more interesting units such as the Topol-M or heck, to even prevent the game to crash if USA picks chemical suites and veteran company gp at the same time.
This is something you have to love with sadly. The engine itself is simply not optimized enough to handle 8 players. ( even vanilla Zerohour barely handled it)
Dont put more than 1 AI then. Lower the graphics card to the max. Dont play on stupidly big maps and focus on 2-player maps to get a better play experience.
Mizo_ROTR
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