@beelee this forum thread has the link: https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/4304/2-7-lobby-bots-available-early-testing-phase download page was updated pretty recently

@kindwind exciting stuff!

@thedog downloaded the 393 and started a game. It's working great and the AI is much faster. Now I have a more challenging game and stronger allies & axis bots.

@johnnycat you raise good questions: Is the answer time and programmers? Or just programmers or just time? Or management ? Does it come down to Money? If the answers are: yes, no, maybe, and only on weekends, how could I and others help? Time and programmers is the biggest need. Every bug fix and issue probably takes 2 to 16 hours to fix. This is the biggest gap. Further, TripleA is a larger code base that is very brittle. Making that codebase be easier to work with would help. Money is useful for keeping the servers running and paying the monthly bills. As much as I would love to be payed for TripleA work, paying any type of reasonable developer wage becomes way too much very quickly. Additional management would be helpful. Getting issues sorted, cleanly stated, boiled down to a bare minimum would all be helpful.

@kindwind It would seem that training against random games would be every inefficient compared to training against the AI that TripleA comes with.TripleA is not Go, random play should be very bad.

@Darmok72 here is a new starter request, it was half done but not completed, it will affect about 1/4 maps, so please attempt this. https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/2999/2-6-release-getting-close-need-volunteers-to-help-beta-test-2-6/73?_=1762176127175 EDIT: Also copied links from above link https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/2752/maxbuiltperplayer-error-resets-purchase-ui-was-how-to-limit-the-number-of-units-purchased/11 https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/9231

@kindwind Efforts You seem to have in mind using a neural net style AI to play TripleA. I suspect that this we actually be quite difficult given the huge number of possible board positions.You might be better off using a very small mod like Minimap even without a large record of games to train it. TripleA's own AI can be used for training.

@ubernaut yeah, redoing MARTI would potentially save us $10/month on costs as well. I think redoing the bots with 'network relay' might be higher up on the list. That will save a ton of code, create an effective infinite number of bots, and save us maybe like $25/month. The 'network relay' will be an update where the bots will just be responsible for only forwarding network packets. Today, a bot is basically an entire player but is made somewhat invisible. We are bounded by the amount of RAM on a host for how many bots we can host. If bots are just sending network packets, they'll take up very little RAM. We'll only be bounded by network traffic. We could theoretically run dozens of bots per host instead just 3 to 5. This should cut our bot host count down from the current 6 or 8 today to maybe 2. I think there might be some quick wins with the server's as well. AT least for me, I might be inclined to do a quick ELO system before redoing MARTI.

@rogercooper Not yet. I'm thinking to bump the version number to '2.8' when all of these updates are ready. The '2.8' release announcement will be when it is ready. These backend changes are most of what we are waiting for.

@ubernaut What I have learned - in almost two decades of assisting people with TripleA - is that problems in many cases are not related to TripleA itself but to a general (not ) understanding of PC, Operating Systems and computer / software procedures.

@beelee In Stalingrad it is only a priority. On all other ways it is a normal combat roll and the targeted unit fires back normally.

@lafayette oh yea a bit out of our price range

I've opened an issue for this problem. https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/13244

Yes I considered it, but with 30+ Techs and growing its messy, times 8 factions. I tolerate its current way of bolting on units. @frigoref @LaFayette @Myrd Maybe a Dev could take a look?

@lafayette woot!

@ubernaut I'm all for such a meeting, even if regularly doesn't mean fix dates, but rather certain intervals for a get together to align directly. We'd need the active developers (@Myrd and @LaFayette?) and I would like to join. For topic discussions everyone else is welcome. Could you assist to find a slot (doodle or something)? PS: My time zone is CET and I would prefer Sa/Su.