AMAI 2.2

Hi! First, gotta say thanks for the amai. Nice work. Definetly a big improvement on the normal ai. :D Got a couple of questions if you got the time.

1. How would I give a very specific build order for a strategy? i.e. for an ud fiend build force the ai to go graveyard/crypt first, then altar then zig. ? similarly to build late altar for neutral heroes, or barracks first for orc

2. How would I for ud fiend build, force it to make 3 ghouls for lumber and not use them for creeping?

3. how would I change skill point distribution for heroes? (e.g. naga always going mana shield for last 3 skills.)

4. Also is there any way to get the orc ai to build and use bats and wyverns appropriately for anti-air? i.e. bats against light air and wyverns against heavy air?

5. Any way to "fix" at 100% a particular hero choice for a strat? i.e. for fiends force it to go dk? or for orc grunts farseer?

6. Any way to force the computer to use units to hit and run enemy bases? Mass gyros seems pretty pointless if you force it to engage enemy units head on and not target bases.

I think thats it for now. again, good work on a brilliant program/mod type thing.

1. That is what the blocks are for. They force a certain order for building. Look in the manual under Initialisation Code.

2. Hmm, currently I think there is no easy way to do that in a specific strategy. I might add one later.

3. Racial Hero Skill distribution can be set in the table HeroSkills.txt and for neutral heroes in NeutralHeroSkills.txt

4. If I get you correctly you want to build stuff according to what the enemy builds. There are two ways to do that. The first is to have 2 strategies that have their strengths set so that they are used in the right situation. But better in your case I think is to use SetBuildReact. That allows you to build different stuff depending on the strength of the enemy in a certain area. Info on usage is in the manual.

5. Yes, one of the strategy specific settings allows you to give bonus priority to certain heroes as first hero respective second hero. By giving very large bonuses there you can pretty much fix the choice.

6. That is what the harass groups are for. With that feature you can set up groups of certain unit types that are sent on hit and run attacks to peons, expansions or their main hall.

If you got further questions after looking in the manual, just ask.

@modidogz: I guess the currently easiest way is to lock AMAI to a certain strategy using the developer's edition.
Or alternatively open up the .ai file of the race where you want a certain strategy and look for the line: set debug_strategy = -1
Change that -1 to the number of the strategy you want. You can find out the strategy number by looking in the function InitStratData at the top of the script. There are lines like set strategy_name[0] = "NormalUndead". Then you know that NormalUndead has the number 0.

I got another question, does AMAI have more "micro" than standard AI?
I would need an AI for my Micro Wars map, would there be a way to implent AMAI or do you know a better AI for that?

I have not played any Micro Wars maps yet. How do they work ?

There are 10 players and 5 arenas, every round each player fights another 1, both players get units and heroes which should be balanced. The first which kills all enemies units wins the round. After some rounds, mostly 24, the one with the most wins has won the game...

@XIID.GT4: May I have the link to download your Micro Wars map? I remember having the RoC version. Very good practice map! :-)

@AMAI Team:
1. I promoted AMAI to my friends. :-)

2. Played latest ver AMAI last weekend -- Very good work guys! I first tried FFA, and the game is not boring, it's very challenging, as if I am playing in Battle.net! I can relate to the "Great Come Back" replays, where I thought I will be lost, but I persisted on taking more expansions, at the time when 1 computer player has dominated. I used hit & run attacks, thanks to the Archmage Teleport!

3. Same with 2v2 and 1v1, and I experienced what FieldMedic said about harass groups as a way to distract me from noticing the _real_ attack on my expo. It keeps my mind busy, and alert. These player traits are important when playing with human opponents. :-)

5. 6 Raiders harassing my base (I was Orc also). Then I ran my peons into my burrows. The problem is, I already researched Reinforced Defenses! That was a bit hilarious. :-) Good thing my army is near my base.

A report: There was, in the mid game, a lag, the game is frozen. Maybe several AMAI threads locked down? The map is Slalom, it was an 8-player FFA. Anyway, it happened only once. Cannot save a replay of it because it's still frozen after 5 minutes of waiting.

6. Computer using Staff of Preservation and Sanctuary -- cool and surprising!

7. That's all. I'll give more feedback around next week. Thanks for this great work of yours!

This doesn't seem to work when I add it to initialisation code.

call AddBlock(1, ORC_BARRACKS, false, 0, ORC_ALTAR, 20)


Ok thanks, will try not queuing any ghouls at all and see if it ai adds them as needed to wood.


Thanks, guess that was easy. Thought so but was worried about removing defaults. Just have to remember to make a backup I guess.


From what I understood though it tends to regard all air the same rather than distinguishing between heavy and light air. For instance, countering gargs would be make bats, and countering frost wyrms would be make wyverns.

Can I use SetBuildReact to counter specific units e.g. I make a strat with massive bonuses vs UD air (so very likely to be chosen in that specific circumstance) and use SetBuildReact to define ratio of bats and wyverns according to the number of gargs? That would be a very specific strat though and would quickly inflate the number of strats available if you have to counter each race separetly.


I've tried with massive bonuses, from 30 to 30000 and it still seems to use heroes from the profile. Or random neutral heroes. Quite irritating really.


call AddHarass(1, 36, COPTER)

added to the init code. and then in tier 3

call Harass(1, HARASS_TARGET_????? , false, 30, 0.5, 0, true, 30, 0)

(that the correct false to ignore towers?) Hmmm... have I got the wrong manual because I can't see where possible harass targets are listed in it. Are they listed somewhere else?

Thank you very much for your reply. I understand that some of these are pretty basic and apologise for that but not sure where else to ask. :(

@thenonhacker: There are many TFT versions but they are really no fun, they are old, imbalanced and always the same armies, there's nothing more random...
I'll continue my version when someone has helped me with one trigger which doesn't work, I posted it in trigger section, I could finish the first version this week if I get help soon...

I have some issues that I was reminded of by a game I played today. I appreciate you guys continuing to work on the expansion loaction selection, but today I had an Undead AMAI player haunt a gold mine that was right in front of my base. Again, this is on the 12-player Emerald Gardens Blizzard bonus map where you have expansion gold mines in front of each base, and the expansion mines are unguarded by creeps. I'm very surprised the AMAI would do this in view of the fact it knows where my base is from the start of the game. This isn't the first time an AMAI player has tried to expand to the gold mine in front of my base either, and keep in mind this is a 12-player map with many, many expansions to choose from.

Since it chose the expo in front of my base, I was able to see another quirk of AMAI. When the AMAI has a base area to protect, whether the base it starts from or an expansion it chooses, it seems to try to defend that area and make awful decisions about how to defend it. Such as, send a stream of units toward this area one by one even when I have my full army there. Can the AMAI be told it's time to give up on a base area and focus on developing other bases?

Also, today I had yet another issue with a Night Elf AMAI player getting stuck behind its buildings after town portalling home. Is there anything at all that can be done about this? It's really a shame to win a game because the AMAI can't move 75% of its army out of its base. In a circumstance like that, I've actually gone in to destroy a few buildings in the front to free up the AMAI's units and pulled back, just so I can have a longer game, only to find the Night Elf AMAI will build moon wells right where they were before and get stuck again!!

Another thing...on my Emerald Gardens map, I've added a few creeps to the mercenary camp that are from other tilesets. There's only one campaign unit, the Dranei Seer, but all the others are regular creeps from other tilesets (such as Razormane Medicine Man, Forest Troll High Priest etc). The AMAI only ever seems to buy the Makrura Deepseer (or Makrura something) which I left in the mercenary camp and is from the map's Sunken Ruins tileset. I've never seen the AMAI buy other creeps. Is the AMAI able to detect creeps that have been added to the camp and buy the new ones? Could it be taught how to do that?

But, I'm having many excellent games against the AMAI and I'm as grateful as ever for all the work you guys do to continue to improve it. Thanks again!!

We really had trubble with that map, it's the formula for selecting expansons that get screwed up results becuse there is no creeps on the expansions there. We at least got it a little better in 2.10 but still there is large chanses that they expand a bit crazy on that map.

No you can't expect AMAI to buy any customly added mercenaries since it only detects what kind of default merc camp is located on the map then it buy from the kind of mercs it knows exists in that mercenary camp.

It actually fakes buying it dosn't it, because if no units can be brought from a mecernary camp as its made empty the amai will still buy what is expected to be default creeps in the camp, and creep appears. Something that can be useful i found for custom maps.


I am pretty sure it can be taught using the developer edition. I am sure i saw the text document that allows them to be changed. EDIT: Yes mercs.txt allows mercaneries to be changed but 4 is the maximum amount of mercenaries that can be listed it seems.

hmm, it should not build the altar until it has started a barracks or 100 seconds have passed then. If it does not work, then something is strange.

You are right, light and heavy air is currently not distinguished. I guess that should be added.
Computing the number of gargs at that point is also not easy. Now that I think about it I guess I will add a function to compute the number of a certain unit, all enemies have together. Then that should at least be possible.

So the hero you chose to add priority to is there and available and still not chosen? That is strange.
Note though that the heroes are chosen by the first strategy that is used so if you manually change the strategy with the commander it will still use the hero choice of the old one.

That was forgotten to add in the manual.
The current possible targets are HARASS_TARGET_PEONS (try to attack workers), HARASS_TARGET_EXPANSION (try to attack an expansion which is probably what you want in your case) and HARASS_TARGET_MAIN_HALL (try to attack the enemies main hall). More will be added in the future.

No need to apologise. You are free to post any questions.


@XIID.GT4: Since most of the functionality of AMAI is unneeded in Micro Wars, you are better off writing a special AI yourself there, best with triggers and not with AI scripts.

@MurphGuitar: Yes, the defensive behavior of the hard coded AI is horrible. So I guess there needs to be a new module of AMAI written to deal with defense and especially prevent such suicide runs into an already lost expansion. I just don't have the time to code one currently so if anyone wants to help, contact me.
The building placement is hard coded too and unfortunately so bad that it often blocks itself. Replacing that with own code is very hard though and it might be pretty costly in terms of performance so I don't think that is possible at the moment except maybe tower placement (although the danger is there too to block oneself in).

@Strategy Master: No, AMAI does not fake buying. It really gives the order to buy and if there is no unit of that type available then it won't be able to buy one.
It would be nice if you could actually check what is really sold in the camps but there is no way to do that in reasonable performance. That is why AMAI checks what type of merc camp is available on the map and then assumes that it contains the units it normally does. That info is in Mercs.txt . So yes, you can add new camps or change the existing ones with the Developer's Edition. Note though that AMAI currently does not support more than 1 type of merc camp and one type of dragons lair on the map. If there are more than one, then it will use the one found first.

So how does this explain what happens when a change a merceneary camp to not sell any creeps at all. The AMAI still gets the merc from the camp but players cannot as no mercs are sold there. Its not really important though as it only affects custom development and altered melees.


I have recently found that sometimes in custom AMAI it will fail to build the only hero available for some players and will never do so for the rest of the game. It may be related to this except the hero is standard blademaster. The blademaster is though built at the barracks. Normally it builds fine. It just sometimes happens. This is bad though for those players as they will not attack and so get mutilated by some other AMAI player. lol.

Thank you!

You're right I was using the commander to change the strategy not realising that the hero choice was already determined.

Thanks for the harass info. I'll see if I can come up with a really nasty gyro strategy.

Another question if I may. Is there any way to "force" the computer to expand? Expansion time under strategy, if I understand corretly, allows it to expand but doesn't force it to.

@Strategy Master: I'd be very surprised since it only issues an order, it does not create any unit.
As for the lonely hero, did you asure that the blademaster is the only hero in the script and that it always ends up with a relative probability > 0 ? There are some rp altering steps so let it start with a high rp.

@Smoking_Bananas: After the expansion time has come he will definitely expand soon if he has a strong enough army to defeat the creeps at his chosen expansion site.