Communicating with AI Allies

Here's my idea about how they could make working together with an AI ally a more strategic experience.

Most importantly, the AI should tell you what their basic strategy is and what is going on at their base. They should send you simple messages in chat when they do something important or when they require assistance. Some examples of things the AI would say on their own:

- "I'm expanding here" *ping*
- "I'm being attacked!" *ping*
- "I'm going to attack here." *ping*
- "I'm going to try a raid." *ping*
- "They're heading for you!" *ping*
- "I'm going to try *tactic*"

You should also be able to give the AI some simple commands, but the AI should be able to disobey them, say, if they're being attacked and can't afford to send forces. It'd probably work best with a little menu of commands, but letting you say them through chat too would be fun (you can also specify which PC player you are talking to by color). Some examples:

- "You should get _____ " (blank would be something like a specific unit, ex: lurkers)
- "Focus on defense/offense/expansion"
- "I call this base!" (to mark an expansion you don't want them to take)
- "Help me!"
- "I don't need help." (so they dont waste time backing you up against an attack you can handle)
- "Gather a light/strong army here." (so you can plan an attack or have them send units to back you up on defense, light would mean a small force and strong would mean most of their standing army)
- "Send a light/strong attack here."
- "Scout this area."

A simpler version could be using a technique like in Halo Wars, where you can hit a button on an area of the map and it gives you a couple choices to send attack/scout/gather forces flares.

 

i like it.. but to long. it should be like -raid "ping" -attack "ping" -expansion "ping"

 

Yeah, I've always wanted something like this. Every time I play Unreal Tournament and issue commands to the AI I think "Damnit! StarCraft 2 should have this!"

I don't know how complicated it would be to implement though. But, it'd be really cool!

 

Thank you Necromas !! This fact you are pointing is important because we can"t play with alled AI in Starcraft 1. I talked about this question over 1 year and a half ago and I finished to forget it.

I played to Homeworld 2. In multiplayer you could play against one AI and you could choose its level of difficulty. You could also play against 8 computers, from easy to very hard level each.

ALSO you could play at 2 vs 1 AI : the allied AI was controlled by itself. You couldn't control anything. Iy just created its defensive and offensive units and attacked you enemy( enemies if you played against other AI factions).

I don't remember but is it possible to control 2 or 3 (or more) bases in personalized game ?

 

A system similar to what Battlefield 2 uses would do fine imo. Just have a seperate minimap where you right-click and choose an order for each team. Or click on-screen with, for example, pressed alt. Then choose a command with your mouse. Hotkeys should be perfectly doable as well, I guess.

 

Age of empires 3 had something like this, you could ask it for resources, to feed you resources overtime, to focus on infantry/cavalry/artillery, be offensive/defensive and probably more and it would tell you what it's doing, if starcraft 2 does this without your AI allies constantly asking you to gg when it thinks your losing it would be good.

 

Wow, this is a great idea, though I don't have any more advice/related topics to say I will try. It would be cool be cool because I have never played a game were you could control/give the AI allies any commands.

 

A separate minimap wouldn't work with StarCraft 2 melee.

Are you ******* kidding me?

 

lol, i remember all the constant gg'ing the ally AI did in AoE3. I always had too much fun with mass cannons and walls and create defences to see how long i could last, thus I wouldn't help the ally AI. Always was fun to see bodies flying away from the blasts.

I would like there to be an AI like this in SC2. Would be nice if the enemy also talked to you like it sometimes did in AoE3.

 

--facepalm--

You have a good point there. But the regular minimap will do fine for placing flares and stuff like that.

 

I somehow doubt this gets included out the box. but if your playing with AI anyway then your prob playing offline or on lan. and a simple AI pack that could be imported into your favorite maps would be simple and sufficient. I keep thinking I saw somewhere that the map editor would interface with C# for trigger and AI coding. If someone can confirm or refute this it would be appreciated. Assuming we can code in C# or some other variant (C++ please please please.... 20mb maps and all lol) implementing this feature is painfully easy. Blizzards AI will already contain the functions for the NPCs to expand/attack etc. So adding the ability to prompt the AI is literally 3 lines of code per action.
All the basic functions could be added with roughly 30 lines of code and about 3 minutes of work.
Prompting them to do things the AI doesnt already account for... which i cant really imagine... maybe if you wanted them to do something really specific. For example the "Build x of y unit" would require a little more code. But i wouldn't expected writing this function from the ground up would take more than 20 minutes. and from there it could just be imported into any maps you wanted.
We will know more once we get our hands on the editor anyway. It seems un-blizzard-like to add a feature like that, but you never know. IMO its so simple that it doesn't make a lot of sense not to implement it if there is enough demand.

as for the talk about an alternate minimap, that also comes back to just how powerful the editor is. If it is as powerful as we're being led to believe then theres no reason a custom overlay cant be created for a right click on minimap interface. alternately ascertaining ping location should be possible. If you wanted to do it in wc3 you needed to use a dummy unit but hopefully sc2 will be a bit more sophisticated than that. Anyway, time will tell I suppose. There's no doubt that whatever language the editor uses there will be restrictions to what can be done, or there would just be thousands of maps that produce memory leaks circulating to crash your comp when you run it(which while mildly amusing is not how i want to spend my time with sc2). Lets just pray we don't have to use something like JASS anymore ><

 

yea, good idea i'm sure alot of people thought about it just totally forgot. good stuff!

 

True. But, hopefully, if implemented, you would be able to input commands directly on the map

 

@Tychus: Lets hope karune hasn't been misleading us on exactly how powerful the editor is. If we can use C to code triggers I guarantee it will be possible to set up even a custom menu for issuing commands. From what has been said about the editor so far, I have no reason to believe that we wont be able to do things like this. I mean even in WC3 it was possible to create custom menus. So just slightly more sophisticated, right click on minimap opens a small command window and you can give orders relative to the spot you clicked. Very easy to do if we don't get a gimp editor.

 

Yes, let's hope so. If It can make you breakfast then something like this should be child's play

 

Personally I think it's a pretty decent idea, just so long as its kept simple. Id just have either a few buttons alongside the minimap for it, or have a small right-click menu pop-up on the minimap.

 

That is a good idea, but AI is a hard thing to code, the best way to increase difficulty for a computer is really handicap (giving them more base HP or more resources).

The commands is a decent way to get your comp to sync with your attack, but i doubt you can make it do stuff like make certain units or attack a certain way, you could probably at most tell him where to go.

 

As for the AI making stuff you need: not that hard to code. The computer now scouts way better, and actually builds units that counter yours. This has been confirmed by official Blizzard posters at b.net and in the batches. So the AI should also know what you have, and combine that with its own forces. The programming is already there. Also:

--points at sig--

Hehe. It can do pretty much anything.

 

Hey, I think you might be onto something here... The original SC AI was so horrid for co-op playing >_<

 

The allied AI will play individually against the enemy AI, as it was in Homeworld 2. I don't think the allied AI will propose a strategy to you. maybe you could propose a strategy to it.