AMAI 2.2

We had bugs appearing when making themmupgrade them, they sometimes got stuck ina loop and began upgrading every ziggurat and when all was upgraded they started to buy more and more ziggurats to make to spitrit towers.
However they should still now ugrade a few of them I have seen.

The bad thing with computers and defence building is that they don't have any tactical placement of them, usualy it's totaly random and in most of cases bad locations, that means they need very many towers if it shall be worth it but nothing is worth very many towers when you can spend thoes resources on a working army instead. But we sill try to make it better soon by trying to take control of tower placement for the computers I think.

Hello

Thanks for the precision about the not upgraded ziggurats.
I want to add another report, concerning Orc this time.

Today i played some other games against AMAI, in each games i played as an Undead against an Orc AMAI on the same map (Frostsabre is good for quick test).
I noticed on my first game something that greatly helped my army to destroy the Orc buildings , giving me the upper hand more easily than against the Blizzard AI.
This observation has been made on the 2 next games i played with the similar setup : me undead, AMAI orc.

On the 3 games, AMAI di not researched the spiked barricade upgrade, even on Tier 3. That is a problem for AMAI , especially when you attack the orcs buildings with ghouls as an example.

The spiked barricades attack the ghouls health very hard , and a ghoul can even die from attacking several buildings protected by the spikes (that happen against the blizzard AI).
When i harrassed the AMAI orc bases with ghouls , i succeeded to destroy a burrow , and could face the AMAI army that came back for the defense with unwounded ghouls (not counting the ghouls hurted by the burrow full of peons).
Against the Blizzard AI , that research spiked barricade early, such a harrass tactic is very difficult, as even if you destroy a burrow, you have to face the defense army with already wounded ghouls, giving the advantage to the Orc defense army.

Is that the same kind of "loop" problem you are facing in the case of the undead ziggurat upgrade or is this just an unlucky choice of strategy from the orc AMAI ?

Hello again.

I played a FFA on ROC, as a Night Elf with 3 Amai (Orc-Undead-Human) on the Frostsabre map , to see the new AMAI behaviour in FFA.
On the good side , i noticed that the Orc AMAI upgraded to barricade Spike , so after all , i had just no luck to fight 3 AMAI Orc before that never researched this good upgrade.

But there was a problem in this game that happened to the Undead AMAI.
As i watched the replay , i noticed that the Undead AMAI rushed with ghouls and Death Knight the Human AMAI. Several fights opposed those 2 AMAI players during the half of the game.
Then , the Orc AMAI , with a very big mass of Head Hunters destroyed the Human AMAI.
And after that , the Undead player never left his base, never tried to creep, never tried to get an expansion and he finished the game with more than 3000 gold when i destroyed it.
This combined with the never upgraded ziggurats was his doom.

I attach here the replay , not because i won this game as it was not a very good game (i won too easily because of the Undead bug) , but because it is the perfect example of my report, and will certainly help better to understand why this happened.

PS : if you want to see the effect of starfall on an entire army of 60 food ghouls, just watch the 27th minute , near the end of the game, lot of star graphics there :) , but overall this replay is not very interesting to watch for the fun but certainly good for the bug report .

It's nice of you to send a replay of such a "idle bug" as we call it, will be much easier to track it down and fix it this way. Really hope it's a easy to find and easy to fix this time.
Sometimes they are idle becuse they got no creeps left to kill and the enemy army is to strong for them to dare attack it.

But I will test your replay and see if I can track down the problem.

I have ordered orc to upgrades spikes in all strategies unless there is only a night elf as opponent in the game, however the priority for that upgrade is a bit low so they might be busy with producing other buildings and units for all resources instead of making the spikes sometimes. Can try to rise the priority.

Thanks for your concern.
On the replay you will notice that there are several creeps alive .
I hope that the replay will help to track this idle bug.

How does AMAI understand the fact that the enemy is "too strong" ?
based on heroes level , food values, gold values ?

It's not really worth posting but it's a lil naming bug:
There's a strategy which is called in full name: Hunts and Dryads
The strategyname is: MassHunts
I looked in this strategy and it never does any dryads, the key buildings are both the ancients of war and in the code are no dryad buildorders and the key unit is huntress...!

We found the stuck, but we can't fix it, seems it's a very rare kind of stuck that appeared in a small basic part of the AIs attack code that has been there unchanged from the original war3 AI.
It's a native(hard coded function) that is malfunctioning somehow.
I don't think you will ever see this kind of stuck again hopefully.



Yes seems I forgot to change the "Default name" of the MassHuntress strategy when I created it so it was still "Hunts and Dryads"(It's orgin is that strategy) changed it to mass huntress now. Thanks for finding out.

I played some more FFA games today and did not encounter again this same idle bug situation. I will easily live with it, if it is not fixable, as it happened only once since i play AMAI 2.0 and superior.

A positive note is that i did not found anything i suspect to be a bug to report in the several FFA i played with AMAI, it seems pretty solid for the AI behaviour in FFA now, very challenging without being frustrating.

I will begin to play some team game now to see if i find something wrong.

But, meanwhile i enjoy playing AMAI a lot, and i am always impressed by the AMAI tactics ingame and the "not always the same" strategies it can use.
Thank you a lot for coding this AI.
AMAI is exactly what someone like me, that is not interested in battlenet, was looking for and the 2.10 version is very pleasant to play.

FieldMedic! Just in time when AMM was messed up, right? ;-) AMAI solves AMM! :D

To AMAI team: Is it possible to program the Warcraft III AI to "Hero-harass"? This will be a good training area, because Tinker harass, Warden or Farseer harass, etc... are viable strategies.

But prior to this, the "kamikaze shop-buying hero bug" must be fixed first. I've seen this in the AMAI beta version I apparently have at home. I'll provide a replay that demonstrates this soon.

Finally; To everyone in the forum: I'm not a Paypal user, I only heard that I should have a residence in the US to be able to use it. Are there other ways people outside US can donate to AMAI team? Thanks!

@thenonhacker.

Oh, you know the last time i played on battlenet was when W3 was at version 1.03 , so the new AMM is for nothing in my interest for the AI in warcraft :)

@AMAI team

I had great fun in the team games i played today, it seems that the AI is more interested by coming back to defend his base than in the previous version, so it makes games more interesting (as it was really too easy to destroy enemy buildings without caring of counter attacks in older AMAI versions)

Problem Report :
But i noticed something in the middle of the battles , while i micro managed my units and heroes.
I already noticed the same thing in the other games i had with AMAI 2.10 (in FFA and 1vs1)

When you are in battle , AMAI (at least in normal version, i did not tried "insane" yet) does not focus your heroes, and does not send some of his troops especially to try to kill him.
Blizzard AI liked to focus the heroes in priority during some battles, i remember that i had to buy potions very often and make them to retreat in the middle of a battle when they were heavy.

I made 2 quick 1vs1 on Frostsabre again to test this potential problem.

On my first game i was Human versus AMAI Undead , i went to Paladin first.
The ghouls+crypt fiends never forced me to use his Shield ability in the whole game. And because of that i killed his heroes quickly (as i was focusing/surrounding them and used the Holy Light a lot on them)

On the second game i selected Undead versus AMAI Human , i went to Death Knight first and massed ghouls.
I killed the Human Archmage several time in his base , despite the fact he had a lot of militia and riflemen , but as no one tried anything against my DeathKnight , it gave me the freedom i needed to kill the Archmage easily.
And when i produced the Lich as 2nd Hero and switched to crypt fiends (as i noticed that AMAI was teching) , it was easier again, as even the Lich was not focused.
So i killed easily the Archmage again and the Mountain King without having to care about my heroes life.

I do not know about Frozen Throne, but in Reign of Chaos the heroes are really what can make victory or defeat.
And if AMAI does not even try to kill them , it gives a heavy advantage for the human player in the battles as he can easily use his heroes to remove the AI army heads : their heroes.

If you want to see replays of the problem i am reporting , i can post them as i saved them.
But i think that you should be able to notice the problem by watching the first replay i posted up there (the one i posted because i was happy of my first crushing AMAI game ;) ), i watched it again and in fact i won because of that too as my Blade Master was not really dealt with by AMAI.

It is a difficult problem solve i can imagine, as if you order AMAI send all the units from his army after the heroes of the player , by just retreating them the player can lure the enemy army to an ambush he had prepared, or he can send his unfocused units to attack freely the enemy base.
So maybe it would be better to order AMAI to use a certain % of an AMAI Army to attack the player heroes.
This way , even if the player retreat his heroes , there are always a % of the AMAI army left to fight the player units.

Well in AMAI we took control over the fire focus becuse they focused fire on heroes too much with original AI, they actualy focused only on the hero there so it was very easy to trick the AI the other way around by letting it chase the hero around while your army took care of the computers army.

We just need to find a balance to it, I guess we need to focus a bit more on heroes then, especialy the weaker caster heroes.


Im not exactly sure what you mean by the "kamikaze shop-buying hero bug" but if you mean that they ran away with a lone hero to buy things in earlier version that is fixed now in 2.10 they only go to shop with the army nearby. We have a distance setting for how far away from the army they are allowed to go shopping now. However there seem to be another strange bug that makes them stuck at the goblin merchant for longer times. that might be a problem but we will solve it as soon as possible.

@Zalamander: Thanks for the reply! Yes, I was referring to the hero putting himself in danger to go to a shop. Glad that it is fixed. The Hero Harass would be a next interesting strat to apply to the harass-heroes then. Even if it requires a special button (e.g. Orc Tower Rush) :-)

yeah I forgot to answere on that.
It's unfortunatly somwhat impossible to do :/
The hardcoded AI directly orders lone heroes to go home again, if we order a hero to go alone and attack it will just go there and make one hit on something and then go home again.
Might be possible if we try it with some kind of direct control like we do with harassing units but then other problems might occur since the hero is a key unit in the army that all the other units usualy follow around.

We might come up with something, but since it's much more work than it's worth to get this working it's not exactly anything in the top of our priority list.

How I choose a specify computer strategy which I would like to play against ?

Good work at all Zalamander and AIAndy and I hope you can do the thing with the building position because it's really shit when the comp builds the graveyard in the front and the ziggurat behind the mine...
Also they could use tower rush then which can be very good if you build it right^^