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@cody-young You may want to take a look at the latest savegame of this PBF:
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/622/waw-charlesthescot-vs-wirkey
Those players are very experienced on the map.
The Yamamoto player made the very interesting opening of also taking Wake and Midway round 1, that allows sitting in 88 Sea Zone.
You can see, in that savegame he didn't even send the Bomber in 91, tho that is very risky, and most people usually send the Bomber too in 91, as per what I said, and regroup in 96 or 104.
I'm guessing CharlestheScot did that for the fun of trying something uncommon, but I guess it is a reasonable risk.The WaW map is actually anachronistic: Europe is late 1939, but without the non-aggression pact, so it is kind of mid 1941 in the east too, while China is 1937 and Pacific is december 1941. That was just what the mapmaker preferred.
I would agree that the AI doesn't look good at playing WaW, by just letting it playing and watching it, but I'm not a player. It also looks like it gets distracted by Neutral (like Switzerland) too much. I think @redrum didn't get a lot of feedback on the WaW map with AI, to fine tune it.
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@cody-young Actually, I didn't mean that I saw the AI doing it or not. I would be surely surprised to se a human player not doing it.
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@cernel How would I upload my own save like that for review. Because I just ran everyone on hard AI, and in my game, Japan ignores Pearl Harbor complete. I am willing to accept that my gamefiles may have been corrupted, but I would feel better being able to prove I am not a madman
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@cody-young Click on this thing:
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So this is for World At War 1940, if that distinction makes a difference.
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@cody-young Of course, "WAW" and "WAW 1940" are two different games. The fact that they are the same map (share the same skin) doesn't mean much, so you should always be sure to clarify which one you are referring too, just like if they were two different maps. I'm sorry, I assumed that you meant "game", when you said "map".
Well, "WAW 1940" is really a question mark, since I never see anyone playing it. I just ran the battlecalculator, I see there is a 100% Low Luck with +19 TUV swing and 2.67 Fighter left, sending 6 Fighters.
That is probably a terrific risk with dice.
Maybe it is good to sacrifice a Carrier, to get some better odds.
But if you clean 91, then you should be able to retreat the surviving air to 96 safely, as, for the Americans, only 1 Bomber and 3 Fighter reach, there, but I see attacking 91 on round 1 might be not a must, there; and surely much less appealing than in the original game (of the two games, "WAW" is the original and "WAW 1940" is the mod). Hard to say for me, not having played the map.
We would need the original game creator (ice) to consider the situation, or at least some reliable players of the game, to tell if WAW 1940 needs to be fixed, but I doubt we will, as I don't believe this game has a playerbase.
If you have setup changes proposals for "WAW 1940", you can open a topic for it. But I'm not sure if @redrum would review them, like he would do for the other game of the map? Let's wait what he has to say on the matter, I guess. -
@cernel Ah alright man. Thanks for your help. I guess I will wait to see if there is a reply here and make a specific post otherwise. Thanks for all your assistance though, I do appreciate it.
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@cody-young You're welcomed (to the forum too).
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@cody-young So feedback on maps or the AI is always welcome. You seem to touch on a number of different points in your posts so its a bit hard to follow.
If you are looking to have a discussion about WaW or WaW40 balance/strategy/etc then this probably isn't the right thread to do so in. That appears to primarily be what you've discussed with @Cernel so far. I'm not an expert at either WaW or WaW40 so can't add much there.
If you have feedback on the AI then this would be a good place to discuss it. Generally, its best to have a more specific conversation on AI moves/purchases and having a save game to look at. WaW is a fairly large map which gives the AI some challenges but its also a map that in order for the Axis to be competitive the first few rounds are fairly scripted in attacks that need to take place. Due to that map design, the AI plays the Allies much better than the Axis (as do most non-expert players). I would recommend you give the AI some small bonuses to income and probably a bit more for Axis than Allies to make a more competitive game.
If you have specific save games where you think the AI played particularly poorly or you'd like to better understand why it did something then I'm glad to take a look at those as well.
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I don't think i'm gonna get to test that new version redrum, I uninstalled all my versions, cleared the map and saves directory, and did a fresh install of 9743 with fresh downloads of the maps and i'm still getting that error.
(I'm not gonna clutter this thread with anymore of this unrelated to ai bug, just wanted to let ya know I can't be testing that ai fix due to it) -
@redrum Thank you brother. I will go through a few playthroughs and see if I can arrive at more specific recommendations before getting back to you. It may take a few weeks for me to narrow down what is bothering me since I don't know what I am doing and want to make sure anything I site is demonstrable.
This really is my favorite map though, so I appreciate all of this immensely and am happy to help.
Just one question. How does the AI distinguish between priorities, are they hardcoded, or is there a mechanism for weighing variables?
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@cody-young Currently, AI priorities are all generic and dynamic for all maps. There isn't any map specific AI configuration yet but its something I want to add in the future. For example, in terms of Germany moving in WaW turn 1 it mostly sees Paris as the number 1 objective for most of its units since its the closest factory then secondarily the Russian factories/capital. The way the AI tends to see it is each factory/capital radiate strategic value which diminishes the further away from it. So each unit tends to try to move towards increasing strategic value.
@zlefin Can you create an github issue here so we can avoid cluttering this thread for debugging your error: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues. Does the error occur on other maps as well or just BW2: BoP?
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@redrum Can I request a feature? I want to hijack all methods in ProPurchaseOptions that calculate efficiencies to fool the AI into behaving correctly. I plan to use it on complex maps where the AI has no clue what is going on, so its unit choice is no better than pure random (while being awfully boring and stupidly easy to counter). If I understand correctly, the ratio of efficiencies is effectively the ratio of purchased quantity (although different efficiencies are calculated based on the purpose of the would-be unit). If so, instead of some cryptic calculation involving raising stuff to 30th power, could it not just simply read numbers from a map specific configuration file when being told so?
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@alkexr Yeah, providing XML AI configuration for influencing purchases is something I'd like to do as well as other AI XML configs. Its a bit more complex than just looking at the ratios as it calculates a bunch of stuff around what type of units to buy attack vs defense vs fodder vs long range for example. So just setting those efficiencies probably won't be enough to get the effect you are going for. Most likely I'll either add a few default algorithms to choose from that is different from the current behavior that looks primarily at say "TUV" to value units for complex maps. Could also create AI unit classifications so that map makers could tag units with different tags to let the AI know how they are meant to be used.
One of the challenges is its fairly easy to imagine specifying units for germany/russia on WW2 maps but much more difficult for say UK because they have lots of different threaters which need different units if you have complex unit sets. So really providing a way for the AI to understand the 'value' of a unit and 'when' to use it is the best approach IMO.
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@redrum I don't expect the AI to ever understand that "charge" special attack is good against infantry. I'm not even asking the AI to play reasonably well on such complex maps. What I want is to manually adjust for this blindness of the AI by forcing it to purchase more than a single type of unit, preferably a diverse unit composition. This won't make the AI much better, but it will at least make it less boring and less vulnerable to trivial counterstrategies.
I don't fully understand the AI purchase logic, but it seems like it buys units for specific purposes: sea, fodder, defense, etc. A map specifically configured mix of units for each purchase purpose would do it for me. Something like "buy 40% walls and 60% archers for defense". Not asking for the ability of the AI to assess the value of each unit in any way. (Yes, I want the AI to blindly believe that the units are balanced, and that there are no obviously op/useless units. It's the responsibility of the map maker if they are not balanced and the configured AI is suboptimal as a consequence.)
(For reference, I'm talking primarily about Large Middle Earth, and partly about the upcoming Fallen Empire.)
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@alkexr Yeah, while it would be possible to eventually have the AI understand units being good against other specific units we are pretty far off from that. Though for example the AI actually determines support attachment value by looking at the ratio of nearby supportable and supporting units. For example, if the AI has lots of infantry but 0 artillery then it'll give full value to the artillery support attachment where as if it has 0 infantry but lots of artillery then it'll give almost 0 value to the artillery support attachment.
I think the simplest solution is just having an AI option that only looks at TUV, air/land/sea, and movement then assumes attack/defense, support, and AA options are balanced for the unit set.
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been playing some more games, and have some notes; I also often play as just one major nation, leaving all others to ai to make it more of a challenge.
general observations on ai play in the big world 2 maps (both rise of the axis and balance of power)
if you set all nations to ai, the axis reliably win. I don't know what hte maps underlying balance point is; but i'd say two particular factors that often hurt the ai allies play is that britain and US often fail to apply enough pressure.
If I play as just one of the majors: as russia I generally can't pull off a win; I can hold well for awhile, but eventually the pressure from germany + japan becomes too much, and they aren't distracted enough by the other allies' actions. playing as the US or britain, it's closer and I usually win. moreso in the rise of the axis map where the effect of my presence seems to have a larger effect.in the rise of the axis map, the axis have the typical ai difficulty of failing to expand as fast as they should, especially Japan; but they still seem to win anyways. the US in particular seems to project force quite poorly in this one; it's early buys are often pure fighters, with no way to get them somewhere they'll help. sometimes a stack of 15 fighters just sat in britain no accomplishing much.
nothing I can think of in particular to change how the ai plays; just observations of its behavior.
there's also one more specific bug I've noticed today:
in the Rise of the Axis map, on britain's first turn, they often let a plane or two die because they left them over the sea (to go on a carrier presumably, but I can't be sure that's why it does it), but didn't place the carrier in that location (which they clearly weren't planning to anyways cuz they moved their fleet elsewhere and it's an unsafe location). so they end up just lettin 1-2 planes die that they easily could have moved to land. this occurs in SZ 10.
with all nations set to ai this occurs fairly often on britain's 1st turn, maybe half of the time as I just ran 6 or so tests in the background. they buy a carrier, attack the german BB in sz 10, then leave a plane or two behind in sz10; usually when a plane is left behind, it's a tac bomber.when I tried getting the behavior to recur from an autosave during the turn, the ai got weird somehow: it didn't even place its carrier. but since it occurs often enough from the start, that should suffice.
that reminds me of a side note: is there an easy way to pause the game? if I set all nations to AI, they just keep going, which makes it hard to read through the history. i'm no taware of a good way to pause the game so I can look over it without my place getting interrupted whenever the ai makes a move.
edit addendum:
I have one change from the default map options: I set it so that bombard casualties CAN return fire. the default is they don't return fire. also, in terms of those settings done by those checkboxes at greenland, I don't use national advantages, and the transport/sub rules are set to "no" as well, which means it uses the old (revised?) sub/transport rules. I do that because if the first nation is ai controlled, it always moves them there. -
@zlefin not sure of a "good" way to pause it. I just hit save then quit and switch everyone to human on the restart. A pause button would be nice.
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@zlefin Yeah, on most maps, Axis tends to do better than Allies since they are more centralized and need less naval forces. Naval AI is just plain difficult to do well. There was actually an old AI attempt (Dynamix) that only ever did land/air because naval was much more difficult to implement.
If you have some save games showing particularly poor purchases, I'd be glad to take a look at them. I'll see about running a quick Rise of Axis simulate for UK's first turn to see if I see that behavior.
There is no way currently to pause the AI but could probably add something so that it say stops at the end of the current AI players turn. Also, not sure if you autosave partway through the AI's turn but if so then that will cause weird behavior when you load it up as currently the AI doesn't persist any state to the save game so recalculates everything.
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@zlefin I took a look at Rise of the Axis UK1 and the problem is the AI doesn't currently support 'friendly' relationship so it tries to move its air units to land in Russia and that move fails so they are left to die in SZ10. You can see this in the AI logs:
1-britishNonCombatMove: could not move [bomber owned by British] over Route:Finland -> SZ 12 East Baltic Sea -> Novgorod -> Western Russia because: Not all air units can land 1-britishNonCombatMove: could not move [tactical_bomber owned by British, fighter owned by British] over Route:SZ 10 North Sea -> SZ 6 Norwegian Sea -> SZ 7 Barents Sea -> Karelija because: Not all air units can land
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