AMAI on Insane Difficulty

I recently downloaded the DE of amai. Is there any way to make AMAI follow its "Normal" setting strategies when in Insane mode, instead of doing exploitive tri-barracks unit massing? I would like to use amai in a local FFA and give some sort of handicap at the start over human players, but setting it on insane makes it mass tier 1 and rush a player with a large unit mass right away, which kind of spoils the format.

Mainly, I've been trying to make a custom FFA bot. In FFA, it's important to creep and expo as much as possible for most of the early-mid game, stay under upkeep, and attack late-game with an edge, but AMAI tends to harrass and attack a target player early, which puts it at a big disadvantage. I've tried to lower its aggression significantly in its AI profile, removed solo strats from its list, but I can't get it out of its 1v1 mentality.

I was thinking a simple way to go around it might be to restrict it from attacking anyone until at least tier 3, forcing it to creep and expo until then and play mainly defensively. I'm not sure how to implement this idea though, as my programming knowledge is limited. Any help on optimizing AMAI for this specific format would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

@cvd44: Not really as its really built into its system to build as optimally as possible (well what it thinks is optimal). Only thing i can think of is using 'normal' AMAI but using the built in game handicaps at the map screen to set either your units to have less health or give AMAI more health. That would up difficulty but still keep the normal gameplay.

Harassments and distractions are declared in the strategies "call AddHarass(1, 1, )" so it should be simple to remove those to stop those going on.
Ensure you include removing those from the race global build sequence as well.

To outright prevent the AI from attacking you will have to modify the core common.eai file in the main AMAI folder. What you want to look for is the SingleMeleeAttackAM function.

On this line "if not no_player_attack then" you could add the condition check for the tier here to become "if not no_player_attack and tier == 3 then"

That should hopefully be a start. :)

Thanks for your helpful reply, StrategyMaster; I've added that line to the code. I've been working on adjusting AMAI to this format some more, and so far it is doing quite well. I have another observation:

Often in FFA, it's a good idea to stay under high upkeep, say at 80 food, and to collect more gold for late-game battles. AMAI currently jumps to 100 food rather quickly and stays there, which causes it to go broke quickly relative to the other players. A way to remedy this would be to force AMAI to stay at 80 food if it's collecting gold from several expos, and to jump to 100 food only when it has no more mines or when actively targeting another player. I would also like to make it so that AMAI will expo more frequently and more aggressively; I've tried adjusting this a bit in the bot profile, but it tends to stop after it has one or two expos, delaying its third expo quite a bit even when there is an unoccupied mine nearby. Again, I would appreciate any help on how to implement these changes in making AMAI more resource oriented. Thanks.

That would maybe be some kinds fo way to make AMAI adapt more to the enviroment if its some kind of specialmap with way more free expansions in than most normal maps.

Add some kind of detector scanning for different mines within a certain walking distance and making the AI use this oppertunity if it detects it.

let say if it can detect 5 free mines that are closer to the AI it self than to the starting positions of the opponents, why not use them.

@cvd44: The strategies themselves also control how quickly the computer expands. You may want to play around with the upkeep.txt file and experimenting to see if that helps create the desired changes.

@Zalamander: AMAI has alot of the assumption of only ever owning 3 mines connected to alot of the code. Makes it difficult to control its expansion to more mines beyond 3. I'll have to look into it though.

Well, I just get started on DE, thank you for discussing, this can help me a lot!

And of course, thank you for your hard works on AMAI.

lol