itch.io

no problem. keep up the good work.

I have 4 old pending matches from before 5.2. as of now I can only make 1 pending match at a time instead of 5 until those 4 are finished. I figured they would eventually go but that was a while ago. Anybody else have this? I like to leave the game with my 5 pending so I can get as much testing as possible in.

the one thing I've learned to abuse is the 3 second charge for Sniper attacks. you can toggle units in and out of range to reset the opponents attack timer. it could be what balances them out. since I started doing that I've been around the top 5.

My ai for 7 wonders is a modified version of my ai before the Bot classes update, took me roughly a few weeks or a good 100 games to really hammer out. Was my 5th ai built from scratch. it's actually quite complex. 30 to 35 nodes roughly. just changed kiting mechanics and attack commands to fit the range. deleted a small tree that made my bots pick up resources mid fight. that same ai got me to and regularly held a high rank pre-update. however a simple ai is just as effective now as there are only a few real scenarios anymore. Shotgun V Shotgun, Sniper V Shotgun, Shotgun V Sniper, and Sniper V Sniper. shotguns are so easy to Program though. that's why you see them more. it's either rush, or charge and attack. snipers take a touch more finesse.

1. After a lot of testing and some number crunching I think a lot of the balance issues being complained about could be solved with a few tweaks.
2. 
   Lower the shotguns carrying speed to 800 or 750. this allows it to be viable as a combat unit while not so oppressive as a resource rushing unit. you have a movement speed of 1200 on the assault Bot and a 500 carrying speed. A 58% drop. That was the balance Bot for a while. a 58% decrease on Shotgun is 833. that's still rather fast though. it could be a starting point.
3. 
   raise the machine guns close range precision to 85, and medium to 50. as slow as it is, unless it starts the game in medium range it doesn't do anything as it's too slow to get into range before it's dead. this could possibly even use a speed boost.
4. 
   Give the Sniper a 90 precision at long range. force players to make smart ai's that focus fire. I was able to win an obscene amount with a 5 node total ai. attack enemy, if enemies are dead, gather, if carrying resource, secure. that didn't take any thought and won more than half the the time on certain maps. I should be forced to think. my simple ai should not be beating one that has 15 or 20 nodes. pretty Bot class update my ai had roughly 30 or 35 nodes in it with several looping trees and that's what got me to the top 25 on average. I would love it if the ai's took more thought to work so the ladder reflected who had better ai's more than who got luckier.

the amount of damage you loose by having that machine gun counters that. also smarter programs beat that. I have my snipers set to target snipers. so they ignore the shields then blow him up after.

As of the game state right now only 2 bots are viable. I have tried a ton of alterations using others and it doesn't do anything.

I think if the machine gun had less range falloff and the Sniper had some falloff. the Shotgun could live up to its name and have more fall off with a slower speed and more up close damage. make it good for flanks or on small maps. with the speed of Shotgun in rushing and the range on snipers the machine gun is in a useless place right now. can't do enough fast enough to Shotgun and dies before any real interaction with snipers. Sadly assault fits that as well. they have a chance of taking down snipers on certain maps if the snipers focus poorly. but that's not likely in league 4 where most know what they are doing.

To summarize.

1. more upclose damage and less speed on Shotgun.

2. less falloff on machine gun.

3. some falloff on Sniper in the long range.

Those are 3 areas that need hit fast. then tweaked from there. the game is in alpha so nobody should expect balance. that's why we need to play a lot and post feedback.

shot gun needs more power and less speed. I have not seen assault or machine gun bots used at all. Sniper and Shotgun only. Sniper should have some falloff damage in the long range. I find it way too easy to abuse the fact they they 2 shot other snipers. even a 90% damage would force ai's to focus more instead of who managed to fire first.

yes, I also find the map neighbors fight to be annoying and not balanced. it's impossible as far as I can tell for any Bot to kill all 3 shotguns before they rush in 3 of 5 and it's a 50/50 gamble if you also rush on who is able to hit the center first. it also seems like the team on the "top" side of that map usually wins if both rush. so maybe it's a coding thing but this map should be removed as well until the Bot balance is better solved. I think circle of death was more balanced that neighbors.

I can always handle that the old way of just testing. I wasn't expecting a change so drastic for the shotgun. it's health, movement, shields, fire rate, and range were all changed. it would just shave time off if I had a spreadsheet or chart that was already finished to look at and calculate off of. (Yes, I'm one of those guys that enjoys math enough to take it into games)

is there a statistic page somewhere that shows Bot types and things like health, shield, fire rate, damage, range, etc. it didn't make sense to make it when there was a sole Bot type but now that you have 4 it would seriously help for strategy. I looked but couldn't find one.

I was wondering how often you promote leagues. I haven't been on in a few days and am currently within the top 5 of league 1. want to try out some of the new bots. have been waiting on this update for a while.

Also is there a place where we can see what all was changed. I noticed my ai I had used now has glitches that seem to be range related which cause both mine and the opposing ai to "freeze" in a loop between 2 commands that never happened before. I also noticed that the attacks before had a chance to them that now does not exist. for now I'll have to debug as is but being an engineer I like to know what makes things tick so I can plan my ai around that behavior.

No problem. just raised an eyebrow when i saw it.

or i've missed something that allows you to have more wins than games played. I took a screenshot of the leader board with a player named "geekk" who has 83/77 wins or a 108% winrate.

If somebody tells me how to post a picture i will.

did i miss something because that seems like something that cant happen naturally.

Edit by GFX47: added title tag

I just started this a day ago and beat the "campaign" fairly easily. but once i started pvp i had a hard time getting over 1100 rating.

so i took my ai and scrapped it and started over with a generic kill and dont be killed bot ai, added a if enemies are dead gather resources and deposite them line. went back to the "campaign" and each mission i failed with that ai i tweaked without changing it too much until it would beat that mission. then moved onto the next continually adding small tweaks until i had a single ai that could beat all missions. it got rather full fast. but once i finished that i quickly hit 1400+ rating by using the same ai on every single map i saw. i've dropped since then, randomly loosing to a much lower rated player hits hard, but you can watch the game over, see what your ai was doing and pay attention to what you would have done if you could manually control them, then make the ai do what you would have done in that situation.

make sure you keep a generic outlet though. i lost a few becasue i missed a catch 22 i left open and my bots would idle in a situation.

it would be much more effective to build a specific ai for each map,and even more effective if each bot had its own specific ai. i can tell a lot of pvp matches are against these ai's, but i wanted the challenge of beating anybody on any map with 1 ai. its got at least 50 nodes/actions so debugging has become tiring but all the small things add up and its what makes a good ai.

right now my general bot does something like this.

If my shield is at 75-100 move until an enemy is in medium range

if its below 75 fire at closest weakest enemy

if you're close to a resource and no enemies are near take it

if your shield drops below 25 or an enemy gets close drop it

if an enemy within long range gets low shield and health focus them

if your shield is below 25 move back until no enemies are in close/medium range then fire at weakest enemy

if your shield and health are below 25 move back until no enemies are within long range. then attack enemies at long range.

focus priorities are setup like this resource/weak>weak>resource/lowhealth>lowhealth>resource/lowshield>lowshield>closest

if no enemies exist gather and secure resources.

its got a few tiny tweaks in there but in general thats what mine does currently and it works well for almost any map.

its definitely not perfect, but i started playing this about 2:00 yesterday or about 23 hours ago and managed to hit #5 on the leaderboard before loosing a few silly matches.