The Commander -Support Thread-

This thread is to post any problems you have pertaining The Commander. If you have a problem please explain it clearly so that we may be able to duplicate it.
Any Ideas, Praise :) not relating to problems or bugs belongs in the other forum.
Thank You DKSlayer

A bug has been found in the installer. It right now only looks at C so if you have other hardrives with Warcraft III on them you will have to move the map to somewhere on C.
Also the Installer had a problem if try to add a map that was in the root directory of the hardrive. Just make sure the map is not in the root directory, meaning don't have it in C:\ have it in a folder on C like C:\Warcraft III\
I will fix this tonight and provide a download to all those who downloaded the SDK to get only the updated exe for the Installer and fix the SDK version to have the new one in it so everything works.
Thank You
DKSlayer

I dont know if this is a bug or not but it doesent seem to work for me ok i'm try to do this cmd.

Cmd: (Ally) Build A2A (How Many)
so i put..
cmd: 1 build a2a 2

But it says i did it incorectly

How do i get this cmd to work?emote_confused

This has been put the wrong way in the help.
It belongs that way:
Cmd: (Ally) Build (How Many) A2A

The same for the other build commands.

BTW, these commands cause the AI to build only the units and the buildings required for them. It will not build new peons or the like while doing that. Because of that you should not use this command directly in the beginning if you do not want to slow the AI a lot.

My Fault there. I apologize. I will fix this tonight, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
DKSlayer

Heh, the first time I played, one of my Human Allies did a militia expand ;) (on accident I think, because they were chasing a demon hunter that rushed :). Both the rush and the new strats (esp mass spell casters ;) are cool though.

Though one of my human allies which went mass griffons got stuck at one point (just sat in their base) and wouldn't respond to commands (e.g., if I said "attack here" it wouldn't even ping the spot). Though my other 90-supply mass sorc/priest ally + tri-orc heros mopped up everyone else. :)

All in all, its very cool. :) One thing that would be cool is to make the AI strat adaptive, but coming up with a good feedback-loop would be pretty hard. Another nifty addition would be a thread that did some trash talking. Not too difficult to make that realistic compared to people you play on battle.net. ;) Also, the queueing system used by Blizzard's common ai framework is really piss poor from a systems perspective; there should be separate queues with different priorities, because with a single queue you suffer from head of line blocking a lot.

A minor addition might be some status commands. E.G., asking what strats an AI is currently going if you forgot or if you are unsure what you told it to do last. I would also get rid of / use something instead of the "cmd:" prefix and probably just assume that a color/number/all indicates a command; just find it kind of annoying. But that's just a UI issue.

magnus

P.S. The general "mass" strats aren't exactly what I expected. E.G., the mass griff's still build 2 sactums and the mass spell casters still upgrade 3/3/ knights? Not complaining, its just not the usual fast ramp-up that I expected.

Here's a bug, ok even when not ordering the comp to avoid units they dont exspand, i played with all races, accept an ne computer so far... and the undead and orc dont exspand, this can be a problem... when you order it not to attack creeps it wont attack them and eventualy run out of gold, and they dont even exspand somtimes, this should be fixed:D

OK I sat down and fixed all the Commander Bugs. The Incorrect Build Command Structure both in the Readme's and in game.
I also fixed the installer to do the root directory, and also do multiple drives. If the Installer was your main gripe just download the Updated exe and overwrite the old one.
If you want the fixed map and readme's I fixed both the SDK and PV just depends what you want.
I am working on an installer to install the trigger to.

The AI stuff is an AIAndy and Zalamander thing. They are working on it as much as they can, as a matter of fact most of the updates will be AI. I hope when I stop work on Installer and a GUI Version I can sit down and help them. But AIAndy should get on tomorrow and be able to reply on this.
Thanks
DKSlayer

There is a bug in all human strats that used militia expansion and the UD Fiends + Wyrm strat that sometimes makes them just say idle in base for aboute 10-15 minutes in late game, Im trying to fix that somehow with help from AIAndy.

The mass gryphon is´nt realy a mass its more like a human that makes lot of gryphons a safe way and also keeps master trained spellcasters below them to make them more useful.

We might add a better "Mass" gryphon strat in later updates and some other strats, and we will of course try to make the current strats better all the time.

There seems to be a bug in the soo called chat at the moment when messeging aboute how large the creep group it´s going to attack. it says "Attacking heavy creep group" to every creepgroup if it´s army is the size required for attacking heavy groups. Will fix that as well.

@magnus99: The militia expansion is no accident. Most of the human strategies do that when the expansion is near enough.
The human getting stuck is probably due to getting caught in a loop. I will fix that.
I already thought of making it adaptive. Unfortunally the information you gather cannot be saved in multiplayer games. But it could be done for the attack choice. It might help.
If you would like to help improving the AI like changing the queuing system or making it adaptive, you are welcome to join the team.
The status commands are a good idea. I will add them soon.
The mass strategies were actually started by me as real mass stratregies. But some units and combinations are more effective than others. So when Zalamander optimized the strategies he added units like Sorceresses to Gryphons and the like to improve it. There is actually one real mass strategy left, Mass Kodo.
Some Massings unfortunally do not work alone. The hard coded AI flees immediately in a fight when it e.g. only has spell casters and heroes.

@AfterShock: The No Creep Attack command is strict at the moment and does not even allow attacks on expansion foes. But that could be changed or another command added that still allows him to attack creeps at expansions.

Ah. Yeah, just looked at the code. I like how commands are used to communicate between AIs at the beginning. That could probably be exploited more.

I seem to remember that the tactical AI did pretty poorly with non-mixed forces when I made a mass-shaman AI over the summer also. Guess there's not much you can do about that.

By adaptive I actually meant within a single game. Though there's probably not enough training data in < 15 min games, games that last for 30 min or more would almost definitely require changing strategies or at least adapting in a real ladder game. Of course the hard thing about this is that it would have to be pretty ad-hoc and would rely heavily on the current war3 patch (since "irregular" strats usually change). I wonder how hard it would be for Blizzard to make cpu vs cpu games scriptable and run "in the background"; that would make for a cool way to train AIs. Though the tactical AI still limits it -- like it wouldn't be able to do the mass-ancient thing that people sometimes do now. :)

magnus

Actuly I think that AoW rush is as possible to do with the computers as the militia expansion, but it takes some time to code and test all the new functions needed, but I realy want too see more of these soo called "cheese" strategies by the AI in the future soo I will try my best with the help from AIAndy to make the computer use them, that will make them look less "Computer". :)

Maybe we shuld give them random names as well instead of Computer (Normal) all the time if there is a way for that, soo it will be possible to call them by theire name in the commander as well :)

It's wierd apparently some of you had been having problems with the installer I fixed those problems last night. And posted the link for the new AIInstaller in the other forum. SO download it there.
Thanks for your patience, and thanks for bringing these problems to myattention. It makes The Commander Better.
DKSlayer

Having problems with the cmd: (ally) no players options. Here's the output as i don't have the time to go over the code myself.

Myself: Red, Ally: Blue, Opponent: Cyan, Purple

If i type:

"cmd: blue no players" Returns an Incorrect typing message.

For testing reasons i tried the following:

"cmd: no players" Returns error cannot type in your own color (i'm assuming this is the expected output)

"cmd: cyan no players" Returns you wish i was your ally (once again i'm assuimng this is expected output)

Would be real helpful if this command worked for larger maps in particular!

After a quick search of the code it seems i've found the issue;

elseif (NoWhat == "All") then
set Command = 15
set Msg = "I will not Attack Enemies."
else

Gave it a quick try substuting "players" for "all" and what do you know, it worked first time! You might want to update to code or the read-me sometime in the future!