This is a post to introduce and share an AI that is very dear and near to me. It has been in development since early October 2020. I (Kimberly Azula) am not actually the scripter, it's CheeseOnToast. But I am the one who decides what is fine to add and what not and what strategies seem "realistic" and old school enough for this AI. And I am the one who came up with the idea and yeah. Anyways, more to that later.
- Promotional picture created by RPGKurga
- MAI_V5_A.jpg (610.37 KiB) Viewed 9048 times
General Features:
- Only plays the Celtic, the Roman and the Mongol civilization
- Micromanagement for some units
- Is up-to-date and will be kept that way
- Is not a competitive AI, only written for fun and to have my random strategies from years ago implemented into an AI
Why did we create this AI?
The Morrígan AI is basically the manifestation of my playstyle from years and years ago when the HD version of aoe2 was just released and I played a few ranked matches. Back then I had only ever played against the old AI. And I only ever used a few strategies.
And I always loved the Celtic mythology and love the idea behind the Morrígan. CheeseOnToast offered his help and we began working on this AI. I mostly did testing - a lot of testing actually.
The other reason of why this AI came to be was, that I never saw many pros play the Celts which made me quite sad. And I was sick of seeing all those boring archer-rushes and archer-micro as well as scout-rushes basically every single game. Which by the way my AI does not do.
What is the story of "The Morrígan"?
The story behind Her, or rather behind the Celtic Tribe fighting in Her name, is, that one of the female druids who is very close to the Morrígan received a vision from Her, foreseeing the victory in an upcoming battle. The vision was then found to be true, as they won the bloody conflict.
And the druid then prophesized, that as long as they would worship the Morrígan and kept asking Her for assistance, they would win any battle and every skirmish that would fall upon them.
How could their tribe ever lose, if the Goddess Herself always foresees their victory? How can they ever lose heart, how can they ever be defeated by their foes? How can the Morrígan's prophecies and visions ever be wrong?
- Credits to Esty for creating this one
- icone_Morigan_2.png (35.22 KiB) Viewed 6195 times
How strong is the AI?
Again, this is not really a competitive AI, but I would argue it is pretty okay on the arabia map. It can beat the DE AI on the extreme difficulty (with very rare exceptions). It loses against basically every AI other than good old petersen on water maps. It can have difficulties on land maps other than arabia. In teamgames it also underperforms compared to 1 vs 1.
Updates:
October, 9th, 2197:
- Included a first iteration of deer pushing
- More farms
- Improved on a few other aspects
October, 12th, 2021:
- Tweaked spearmen-line production, especially in team-games
October, 13th, 2021:
- Tweaked the scouting a little
- Fixed monks being lazy and not picking up relics in teamgames
October, 17th, 2021:
- Fixed a bug with palisade-walls
October, 24th, 2021:
- More likely to train rams under certain conditions
- Fixed some suicidal behaviours of villagers
- Animals can explore the map now (e.g. horses)
- Fixed mining-camp spam in lategame
- Loads of other small things
October, 28th, 2021:
- First version of enemy strategy tracking
October, 30th, 2021:
- Early game scouting improved
- Drush scouting improved
November, 14th, 2021:
- Temporarily disabled walling on maps other than black forest
- Fixed m@a getting stuck on tower
- Fixed some message text
November, 26th, 2021:
- Adjusted and fixed several smaller things
December, 20th, 2021:
- Added WK compatibility (WK version does not build walls around the towns)
December, 23rd, 2021:
- Fixed a bug with scorpions moving to corners
December, 24th, 2021:
- Fixed the Morrígan going m@a only when in a flank position (forgot to remove debug code)
December, 25th, 2021:
- Fixed an issue where the Morrígan wouldn't assign builders to additional TCs
- Fixed an issue with targeting walls of dead players
- Fixed the Morrígan not building houses sometimes
January, 8th, 2022:
-Added a very early build for "standard victory" win condition - this will be a separate download for a while
February, 6th, 2022:
-Added unique unit compositions on standard victory win condition
-Fixed the Morrígan not reacting to enemy villagers in town
-Fixed a drush targeting problem
-Fixed a bug with deer luring
-Fixed some inconsistencies within the resign messages and welcome messages
March, 11th, 2022:
-Updated the current version to be WK compatible and adjusted difficulty settings so the Morrígan can perform in full strength at Davis Cup VI
-Removed the separate downloads - the Morrígan works on both WK and DE
-Added Cartography research
March, 12th, 2022:
-Fixed an issue with the DE/AoC/WK check
March, 14th, 2022:
-Fixed a crash for aoc
-Other tweaks
April, 17th, 2022:
- Added a new strategy for both flanks and pocket
- Fixed an issue with monks that annoyed us A HEL OF A LOT
- Fixed other issues
April, 19th, 2022:
- The Morrígan now tributes all Her remaining resources to a random surviving ally when resigning
April, 20th, 2022:
- Fixed villagers attacking enemy TC foundations
April, 22nd, 2022:
- Fixed several little bugs and a rule that was too long for UP
April, 24th, 2022:
- Fixed an error with emergency mining camps
- Improved defensive tower positioning
- Some more tweaks to different other stuff
April, 25th, 2022:
- More improvements to defensive tower positioning
- Improved reactions towards enemy feudal aggression, especially from skirmishers
- Some more tweaks
- Hotfix for enemy tower rushes
April, 26th, 2022:
- Another fix for enemy trushes
- Fixed a scouting problem
April, 28th, 2022:
- Updated for the new DLC
- Less debug messages
- Changed strategy chances around for pockets
- Fixed a bug where one strategy wasn't able to be chosen for pockets
May, 14th, 2022:
- Improved scouting behaviour
- Adjusted strategy chances and some strategies can only be chosen once for all pockets / flanks
- Updated the slinging strategy to be more inline with what I had in my mind from the beginning
- Plenty of other fixes and adjustments
June, 5th, 2022:
- Actually adjusted the strategy chances and some strategies can only be chosen once for all pockets / flanks
September, 19th, 2022:
- Restructured the code and split it up into multiple files
- Changed the way the Morrígan plays full-water maps, this strategy is in it's early stages though
October, 17th, 2022:
- Improved on the full-water strategy
- Added support for migration-type maps (Islands, Migration are tested), also in its early stages
December, 31st, 2022:
- Improved upon migration gameplay
January, 7th, 2023:
- Fixed some bugs related to stone mining and standard victory
January, 22nd, 2023:
- Added some shared goals (position, attacking, under-attack, ID = 795)
- Some tweaks and fixes
March, 5th, 2023:
- Added a new strategy to the Morrígan
- All strategies have about the same chance to be chosen now
May, 21st, 2023:
- Added first support for Romans; more to come in the future
- Celtic the Morrígan can now research gambesons
July, 23rd, 2023:
- Made Romans fully functional
- Improved upon various other strategies
- Disabled the slinging strategy for the time being, it needs more work in the future
- Romans can now counter mass cav archers as intended
July, 6th, 2024:
- Added the Mongols
- Added a first version of diplomacy to the Morrígan
- Fixed a lot of bugs and improved several aspects of the AI
Thank you all for your interest!
Kind regards,
Kimberly Azula
P.S.:
Please don't edit the Morrígan without asking for permission first.
