AI Improvements
One of our major goals for post-release support was to bring up the level of our skirmish AI, especially with hard and expert levels. We recognize that a lot of players enjoy playing offline games against a computer opponent and are working hard to improve that area of the game. While the AI was working okay, it didn’t understand the nuances of the game and frankly, left a lot of room for improvement. The first few things that we focused on were the basics such as economy, capture logic and unit selection.
The AI can now balance its resources much better. Previous to 1.3 it would opt to build power as soon as possible, buy lots of wargear for its hero, and leave little remaining for a standing army. Now the AI will balance its power more carefully, evaluate how important a new unit actually is, review how much its hero needs wargear, and also evaluate whether or not it needs to resurrect a dead hero.
The AI also selects from its potential units in a more intelligent way, building counters to what the player is producing. This drastically changes the current experience where a lot of players are seeing massing of a particular tier 1 and tier 2 units.
Capture logic is much improved now as well. Before the AI would allow you to shoot it to pieces while it tried to capture a point. Ideally its priority should be to keep its units alive over capturing (with some exceptions of course) so the AI now does this. If it is engaged while capturing it should stand and fight if it thinks it can win, or fall back to safer ground if it believes it cannot. We added in some bonus logic to this as well, so if the AI thinks it can finish the cap and take few casualties it should do so.
On top of these fundamental changes we made some very important bug fixes. The most noticeable one will be the targeting of abilities. The computer now knows how to stomp and kill with abilities like jump, grenades, AOE attacks, and even Orbital Bombardment and Eldritch Storm.
As said before, we recognize that the majority of our players play regular matches against the computer and we wanted to renew the experience with patch 1.3. This is just the beginning of a long term plan to improve the skirmish AI.
