Immortal v0.10f

[wattle]

I just noticed that on Discord the AIs have been updated and there is an Immortal v0.10d.

The link to discord doesn't lead directly to the download link, I need another hint

I think it is this version.

A minor update for LN.

[wattle]

And I guess if you speak about a link on discord, it might be the one which leads to the latest AI pack for DC7.

Updated AIsPack with the whole AIs (in their latest versions) stile in the competition :

https://ahp.li/82625f3d22fdef26ec33.zip

[Arpheus]

I did a few 2v2 teamgames today with the standard DE AI on extreme difficulty with the new PUP against 2x Immortal AI v0.10 from the tournament AI pack. Immortal is a great AI and it was a lot of fun to play against it.

The Archer micro is insane. You need a ton of Paladins to kill a ball of arbalests from Immortal.
Also their siege onager attack ground micro with predicting where the enemy units will run along is crazy. Getting up to them even with paladins was rough and with low numbers even impossible when they had massed 10 of them.

Immortal even destroyed my bombard cannons with trebs when I tried to snipe them.
They also attack defensive trebs near castles with their own trebs. This can actually be exploited to win time for castles since they prefer to attack the trebs before they attack the castle.

Immortal in general does a really good job to stay out of Castle and Tower fire. Sometimes they still get hit hard with towers when they try to dive through tower area when 10 archers in a tower (teutons) and while they are under the tower fire I blocked the way they wanted to take with some knights but I guess there is not much you can do with such situations except letting them break walls to take another route which would be the perfect solution.

Keeping the standard AI alive during the games was quite a challenge especially since when they can't get into your base (fully walled) they tend to sometimes both attack your teammate. But I think it takes quite a while until they start doing that and if they did that earlier in team games they could punish players for fully walling by just erasing your teammate 2v1.

The Immortal AI now also attacks gates which is great. If you can manage to make it attack walls it will be an even better AI to play against. In the end being fully walled is a valid strategy and it would be great if it could deal with it.
A first step could be that it attacks houses or buildings that are part of the wall.

DE AI and I lost once and won two games against the 2 immortals - but I had to turn down the game speed later in the game to have a chance to keep up with the insane AI macro and micro in lategame.

The last game I played was so tough that I just couldn't push them or my team-AI would have been overrun so we fought until there was no more wood on the map and then it was an easy win.

It's not important but if you could make them buy wood in the market once wood runs low on the map they would put up an even rougher fight in very long games.

Thank you for making such an awesome AI which plays more and more like a good player would. That mircro...

[Arpheus]

Here are some thoughts on how to improve the Immortal AI even more - most of them are for lategame:

Keep some army near trebs when attacking a castle. It often sends 1-3 trebs attacking a castle but the other units are out of place - especially when it doesn't do a major push.
That makes it easier than it should be to snipe the trebs with some cav or even infantry. Often 1-2 cav or infantry are enough.
Getting rid of castles is a top priority when attacking and having those pushes be more effective would make it a lot stronger.

From the 6 castles I built in the last game I lost only 2 because of that. Often I just had a few melee units in or near the castles to defend them against siege rams/trebs and some hand cannoneers inside the castle to improve its damage and that was most of the time enough to defend the castles except when it did those huge attack waves. Then you need to bring it all to defend and it does those attacks rather well.

If it added 1-2 more trebs even in those huge attack waves it would be very hard to keep the castles up since you'd have to fight their army near the castle and the way to the trebs would be full of enemy units making it really hard to reach them and repairing a castle when 4-5 trebs attack is near impossible - but 2-3 trebs give you time to defend the push.

Having at least some halbs in front of the trebs when it does those small attacks would be a great solution.


Also while the archer micro is god tier having some halbs close to them to make it hard for hussars/paladins to attack them would make the archer play even stronger. I think just a few halbs would be enough.

Another thing is my monks were often surviving even when they were close to a fight and so they could heal up the units and convert some of the enemies. It seems once you engage units that try to snipe the monks they will leave the monks alive as if they were not a high priority. And I think the ranged units also didn't move closer to snipe the monks.

I am not sure if that can easily be changed without also making it abusable by blocking a way and having immortals units not attacking and trying to get to the monks.
Just felt that with some other AIs my monks had a far harder time to survive.


The one thing that would make me lose many more games against Immortal would be breaking walls. If it broke into the Eco by breaking a wall at 1-2 places with rams/trebs/bbc or if you want to cause nightmares with some petards and then flood the base that would be incredible.
The AI would be playing even more like players do.

If you want to implement some of those changes it could become really hard to deal with it once it gets into the late game so I wouldn't add those to the easier difficulties.
Especially if it learns to break walls for eco flooding with AI level of micro and awareness it will be really rough to stop it. Also the 4-5 treb castle pushes will be rough to stop.

[wattle]

Interesting to read your experience vs Immortal and the feedback. And good to hear it does well in the upcoming PUP.

[TheMaximalBeing]

Immortal updated. Changelog and WK version to come soon.

[TheMaximalBeing]

CHANGELOG Version 0.10b

• all build orders have been properly optimized. In particular, the scout->archer and scout->skirm BOs are significantly better.
• the FC->smush and FF->eagle BOs are disabled for now. The FF->scout->castle BO is only available for pocket players.
• FC->UU strategy now works for a generic civ and calculates the appropriate villager numbers
• the garrison new vills bug on DE has been fixed and the gather points and unloading behaviour is more reliable (although still poor due to DE bugs)
• Fixed some bugs where ally/enemy unit arrays were not set correctly. These were causing all sorts of problems.
• Fixed unit counting bugs for Indian civs. If you ever saw Immortal with a huge army but never attacking, this is why.
• fixed some bugs with functions not using function memory leading to memory corruption. If you ever saw random stone mining camps, this is why.
• tower defence has been debugged and greatly improved. Villagers will prioritize garrisoned towers and can attack walls surrounding walls.
• less likely to build unnecessary markets, or too many military buildings.
• fixed bugs with player flank/pocket detection caused by the bugged findNextPlayer command.
• fixed a major bug preventing training of camels or battering rams in DE. If you saw Immortal floating huge amounts of resource without training anything, this is why.
• villagers are placed more intelligently on resources around camps to increase efficiency and to prevent stuck villagers.

[TheMaximalBeing]

WK version is released. As usual, this is stronger than the DE version due to DE bugs.

[MightyRecon]

Despite the DE bugs holding back Immortal from it's fullest potential the latest update is nothing but amazing, there is no other AI that compares to it and I'm just genuinely impressed with your work on it. Great job, and thanks for being such an inspiration for AI scripting in this game.

[kunyi]