Ranks and their importance.

Normally in these games a unit ranking up to rank 4 is a "nice" bonus for a unit, but not a real goal. However in the current build of the mod that will be releasing soon I have been spending a lot of time working on making this a very important aspect of the Mobile Suits.

What this means is a rank 4 mobile suit will be something of a goal for some players. An example would be the Powered GM's. I find I use them as a kind of "fill in the gaps" defensive team during the 3rd timeline. Once I move on to the 4th timeline I use these now more advanced units (for some of them have gained ranks due to all the killing they have been doing) as a hit-and-run tactic. I send them into an undefended section of an enemy base, kill a few targets, then run away.

Why are they better ranked up? Well, in the original game as a unit ranks up it gains some basic level bonus's. Each unit in GDI for example when it levels up gains a bonus to fire rate, health, and reload speed. That's it. What the Powered GM gets is a major increase in speed, taking it from a fast mobile suit at rank 1 to a mobile suit that can actualy out-run most enemy retaliation strikes. For example, the only GDI unit that can actually hurt a rank 4 Powered GM that is running away is the Storm Orca. This is because both the normal orca and firehawk fire weapons that do not track their target, missing because by the time the weapon gets there the GM is already long gone. And other GDI units are just too slow to catch up. The storm orca can both keep up with it's enemy and fire the gattling guns while moving, making it the proper counter to hit-and-run army tactics.

We're working with a number of different ideas at the moment on what kind of bonus's a unit should get. This is our current thoughts.

Direct-Fire Artillery Units should become more accurate as they rank up, so a rank 4 artillery unit will always hit it's target.

Indirect-Fire Artillery Units should be able to fire faster as they rank up, so a rank 4 indirect unit will get 2 shots off in the time a rank 1 gets a single shot off.

Front line units will gain stat increases that help them keep alive as they fight. This means they will gain health, fire rate increases. They will also get a one time auto-field repair when they rank up.

Certain units will gain new weapons at rank 4.

Thats about as far as we've gotten. So yea, we'll see how it plays out. If you have any thoughts about this, feel free to say something.

Almost done balancing.

Whew, a full week and I'm still messing with this stuff? What am I, lazy?

Well, yea, but that's not the point.

It's actually a lot harder doing this than you may think, but I think I'm almost done with it. The major issue on the EF side wasn't just redescribing all the units and rebalancing their health/weapons/armor/cost but modifing the Experence System and it's bonus's.

What we're doing with the EF leveling is different than your typical unit when it lvls. Each lvl a unit gains a spicific bonus in any number of key areas. This could be anything from 10% health and armor boosts per level to gaining new weapons and abilities. Something we're looking to do spicificly for Gundam X is that the Gundam X unit will not be able to fire it's Sat Cannon until it reach's level 4.

So this has taken me a lot longer to do than I expected. Still, I'm almost done, now all I have to do are the Command class units (RX78, Nu Gundam, the like).

Now I'm sure your going "Command Class?" Yes, there are 5 class's of units. These are

• 
  Command
• Elite
• Troop
• Fast Attack
• Heavy Support
  

Looks familiar if your a warhammer 40k fan doesn't it? This is how it will break down.

A command class unit is a very unique unit to see on the battlefield. These units are unique, meaning you'll only ever see one of them out there at a time. This could be because they are so expensive to produce that only one or two were ever made or becuase it's a special charecter unit. Command units also have access to many special powers or upgrades, making them even stronger on the battlefield if a player invests in them.

An Elite unit is a specialtist unit. It fills a very spicific roll on the battlefield, and is very good in this roll. They are more expensive because of this, and if you send them off to do a job they're not designed to handel they will not come out on the winning end. Sometimes they even have access to one or two special powers.

A Troop class unit is a frontlines unit. They don't normally have special powers to activate, but they are well balanced and cheap units. They can fill a number of different rolls depending on the situation.

Fast Attack units are units that have given up armor and health for speed. They are ment for hit-and-run tactical attacks. They can be expected to get the first hit in in a battle, but are not designed for prolonged exposure to enemy fire.

Heavy Support units are the big monster units you see on the battlefield. Sometimes slow, always heavily armored and equipped with powerful weapons, these guys are great fire support units. However, they are also very costly.



So thats how things break down here and thats what I've been working on. I've also been working on making certain types of weapons more unique. This is how that chart is breaking down.

• 
  Gun - Machine Gun type weapons, typically used for anti-infantry usage.
  

• Grenade - Grenades are great anti-infantry weapons, doing decent blast damage and used to clear buidlings.
  

• Cannon - Kenetic based weapon, strong vrs vehicles.
  

• Missiles - Rocket based damage, small blast radius but strong impact power.
  

• Rockets - Rocket based damage, larger blast radius than missiles but the blast damage is gernade based.
  

• Beam - Beam based weapons are typically used by Mecha, they are high damage output with long reload rates.
  

• Laser - Beam based weapons, typically low damage but fast reload rates.
  

• Indirect Artillery - Cannon/Rocket based, does an even number of points of each in damage and has a high blast radius.
  

• Direct Artillery - Cannon/Grenade based, does high kenetic damage and decent blast radius damage.
  

• Flamethrower - Beam/Grenade cross weapon. The funnel effect is grenade based, but the center line of fire is low damage beam based.
  
  

So instead of 5 different types of weapons we now have 10. Makes things a bit more interesting doesn't it?

State of the balancing

So I'm currently working with Doug on a class system for the units. We've been working on this kind of thing for awhile now, basiclly it breaks down to a few important things.

We need to keep it balanced.
We need to keep it feeling right.
We want to make things fit the actual cannon of the units better.


If we can do this I think things will be fine. The biggest problem though will be the fact that we are mixing 3 drastically different Sci Fi Universe's together. CNC, Gundam, and Robotech all have advantages and disadvantages to each other so it should work well in the end, but at the moment we're having issues getting Gundam to fit properly.

And last night I think we figured out why. What it comes down to is we're trying to use CNC's system and make everything fit to that. But that would not be fair, this would give CNC an advantage as the system is theirs to begin with. So what this means is we're going to have to come up with our own system to try and get this to work, and that means overhauling everything.

Unfortunatly this means we have to go back and change the stats on the GDI/NOD/Scrin too. Ugh, extra work.

But we're making progress. If we can get something down things should work out for the better, and that's what matters right? I mean, in the end, the most important thing to us isn't the models or the material that we're pulling from, it's a balanced game with many different options given to a player.

Design ideas and the AI, the process.

As many of you know we call this an alpha of the mod. We do this because we're constantly trying different designs out as we go, changing things quite drasticly at times. Now that we have the AI in the game we're learning just what designs that we came up with work and what ones won't cut the mustard.

A few examples of ones that have to go away would be the Madea fly in delivery system for the Mecha, it just won't work. There is no way to get the AI that I have found to understand that when it wants an RGM79 to build the RGM79MadeaSummon unit and that will give it the RGM79. There reason why is because the AI works off of the idea of "kill teams". It looks at the situation on the board and then based on that it looks at what teams it can build and what will be the most effective against a priority target. Problem is if I tell it that it needs 5 summons to make a team it will just keep building the same thing over and over because the summon doesn't stay around long enough to get 5 of them together for a team, the unit it summons does. And if I tell it that it wants the 5 units that the summons drop it just doesn't do anything because the AI doesn't understand that the summon has the unit inside it. So that's got to go.

Another example would be having the Timeline research and the War Factory put together. The AI won't do any timeline research simply because it doesn't have the time, it would rather pump out units from the warfactory than shut a factory down for the 3+ minutes it takes to do an upgrade, so again we have to leave this idea behind.

But for every "design flaw" that we have to remove/replace new ideas that we didn't even consider pop up. Take this for an example.

This "design issue" is getting the AI to expand. EF doesn't use tiberium as a resource, instead they get their resources flown into them. The problem is that the AI is hard-coded to use Tiberium as the determining factor for expansion. So as EF doesn't ever touch the tiberium, it doesn't ever need to expand. Except it does as EF is designed to take up a LOT of room. We've tried to use this as a trade off. Yes their buildings take up a lot of room, but they also do alot on their own. A solar powerplant now produces 30 energy, thats huge! A nuclear powerplant produces 100 energy, so even though it's the size of 2+ solars it outproduces them. The "Frontline Troop Depot" takes up more room than a regular war factory but it produces infantry, vehicles, and has 2 defenses built into it. You get the point I hope.

So my first idea to fix this was to tell the AI that if needs a ton of tiberium in it's "home" to be considered "resource safe". This leads to the AI expanding like it should but it only does so once. I need an AI that will expand as needed more than once. Also if a player kills off the EF's resource gathering structures they won't build any more, the AI doesn't consider it a nessesary structure.

This leads to my creative idea to fix the issue. First, make the Tiberium Refinary a "Tech" structure. The AI will build one if it doesn't have one because every building requires it. It will only build one, but one is enough to get the job done. The second thing to do was have the resource refinery spawn more than 1 harvester at a time. I changed it to 3 at first and it was such a dramatic change in the AI's behavior that EF won every battle I put them in. 1 on 1's, 4 way free for alls, it just wasn't funny. So I lowered it to two and tried again, this time EF was a bit slower but still walked all over the Scrin, GDI, and NOD.

Wow. What happens if I change GDI and NOD to 2 each also and turn Scrin into 3? AI on crack, thats what! The Scrin tore threw tiberium fields like a plauge (which to me looked proper. They are supposed to be Tiberium based, so it just made more since to me to give them more resource gathers) and GDI and NOD threw up troops like mad. EF now got its ass whooped in a 4 way game. The EF AI built the wrong defenses (built guns instead of AA so scrin had a field day with them) and that was that. In the end it was an awsome battle, and its something I plan on keeping.

Another thing I'm changing is the refinerys abiltiy to regenerate the harvesters. I'm trying to set it up so that if the harvesters die the refinery will rebuild them in 2 minutes. Idea here is that the AI will re-boot itself after a bit of time in case it gets stuck. This is something I'm doing to all 4 factions. This will have the added ability of mitigating NOD's super weapon a bit too. Cool huh?

All of this leads me to the real topic of todays post. I have come up with a way for EF to advance through the timelines other than through researching them. I have not implemented it yet, I wanted to hear what you guys thought first.

The idea is that when a timeline 1 unit ranks up to lvl 4 then the player automatically advances to timeline 2. When a timeline 2 hits rank 4 it auto-advances to timeline 3, and so on and so on. This semi-automated system would be sweet because it would give players 2 ways to advance, through research or combat. It's really up to the player on how they wish to do it. You would still need to have the Tech Center built for it to work, but what do you think? Let me know. And if you have any creative ideas that you think would be cool for the game also let us know.

Sunday, Jan 30th. More of the same.

So now that we have a working AI I've been redesigning the game so that the AI works properly. Now this isn't as easy as it sounds. The redesigning part I am enjoying, that I can not lie about. But one of the things that I've been asked to "fix" I'm finding impossible to do for some reason. That's the Resource Dropoff point.

Now the way the game code works is this. The Resource building "spawns" a drone, which is the beacon. This beacon lives for 5 seconds then it dies. When it dies it summons in the Madea to the place where it died which has a unit inside it. This unit drops and then kills itself, replacing itself with a structure that looks the exact same. Finally this structure has a 3 second lifespan, but 2 seconds in it uses the tiberium spire code to give the player 2000$. Can you see where my problem is?

The problem is that every time one of these units dies to spawn the next bit the games "audio information delivery system" lets you know that you've lost a unit that you didn't even know you had. It's retarded! So at the moment I'm trying to figure out how to get this to stop, but I'm not having much sucsess.

Another thing that we've been thinking about is how do we want the special powers to go. A lot of people have complained that they don't like that EF's powers are all just "summon gundams". They want more. One person's suggestion has lead me to try something, but again I'm not sure if I can pull it off. Basically, what it is is an area-of-effect ability that boosts the attack speed and health of the select units that are "caught" in this boost affect area. It's basically a "free" promotion to becoming an elite unit. I was going to do this for UC, but now am looking to use this idea for AW and call it "Trigger Newtype Abilities". So that means I still don't have any good ideas for UC's special powers. I may just make them "off screen attacks" like artillery bombardments and stuff, if I do anything at all.

Which brings me to something else that I'm finding interesting while doing all this recoding. We've been updating the buildings while doing all of this and one of the big issues that is still creeping up is "size vrs. ingame size". All I can say to this is please, just give it some time. Trial and error is the only way I'm going to get that stuff right.

But something that is comming up is the quality of the models. Since I'm already working on the new redesign I'm also redesigning the models. As people following the MODDB sight might have guessed by now, I go threw quite a few different attempts at making models before settling on one that will work "for now". I say "for now" because it keeps comming up. I do something, I like it, I put it in, it's fine for a month or 2, then I see a better idea that fits better and we restart all over again. :p So when it comes to the quality of the models, I guess all I can say is "Sorry, but they do progressivly get better right?" A good example will be the pics of the new Powerplant that I'm going to be posting up on MODDB later tonight.

So thats it for now, not much of an update but after getting the AI working there's not much going on other than me plugging away adding things back in and checking to make sure the new stuff works. Time to get back to it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

I shouldn't have worried.

So you know that big artical I posted up on sunday going on about how to get the AI to work?  I shouldn't have worried, I managed to get a working AI for a new faction.  Lol.  We're all good people.

CNC3 and it's AI.

Well now that I'm moved into my new apartment and have begun working again on the Xenoforce Reborn mod I thought I should tackle that one thing that everyone wants to see. God did I not know what I was getting myself into. You see, I have been messing with CNC3's AI for the better part of 2 years now. Not seriously mind you, and not in the way that I'm now working on it, but just looking at it and reading online what others say can and can't be done with it.

I have recently started doing serious moding on the AI within the last 2 releases of the mod, more spicificly I've been working on making the GDI/NOD/Scrin AI more of a challenge. In some cases I would say I was sucsessful, in others not so much. But it has been a good learning process and I have made good progress.

So the next logical step would be to add that infamous AI to the Earth Federation faction. As the Earth Federation will be the most complicated army out of the 4 we are adding in they are the ones we wanted to start with. Now for a bit of information that you guys may not know about editing the games AI. If you edit the AI and make even the tinyest mistake, the game will crash. However, it will not crash the compiling of the MOD, it only does it once you try and load up a map with the new AI active. Also, for the AI to work the map must be edited so that it will apply AI Scripts to the new faction! This isn't nessicary on maps for new AI's based on the original 3 armies as all the maps have already been set up for GDI/NOD/Scrin players but this leads to a unique issue for a new faction. Is it a problem with the map that's causing the crash or the AI scripting that's doing it?

And of course when the game crash's it doesn't tell you why, just that it's sorry and it needed to close. So I have been working on a seperate mod simply called XenoforceAI which is just a new faction (Clone of GDI) with only one AI choice (xenoforce) with a single opening move set. Why did I do this? A few reasons actually, the first being that as long as I'm using an existing force's models and playset I can take my own units out of the equation as to why the game is crashing. Also by trying to make it as simple as possible and with as few changes a possible I take a mod that takes 15+ minutes to compile and do it in less than 5 seconds. This means I spend more time trying different things than sitting around doing nothing.

So that's where we stand now. I've been doing slight modifications to the game trying to get the AI to work in some form (heck I would settle on it just not crashing when starting at this point). I will know within the next few days weither this will be a plausible choice of if I should start looking at other ways of getting the AI into the game.

Now I know what your thinking. "Wait, he knows of another way to get the AI into the game and isn't just doing that?" Correct, I do. On top of that if I choose this path I would be garunteed a working (if not fully functional) AI. However I do not want to do this as for all of its advantages the major drawback is a big one to me.

What I would have to do is add the EF force into GDI.

I'll let that sink in a bit. All done? Good. I already know how to manipulate the exsisting AI, it's really not all that difficult honestly. What I would have to do is modify the exsisting GDI AI's opening moves and change the starting building for GDI. The new start building would simply be a building with 2 upgrade choices, GDI or EF.

You would select which side you want and the starting building would transform into that factions starting building. On the AI side the Opening Moves would have to have what "side" the player wanted as the first option to do, then everything would move on from there. In theory this would work fine. Another advantage to this idea is that the AI would work on all maps with no modifications needed by us. That makes things all the better for people who have a favorite map that they want to play on.

My issue with this solution should be fairly obvious. It's a serious pain in the butt to go back through and make the changes for this to work, and on top of that it's a fairly "blunt force" way of getting a working AI for EF into the game. I mean honestly, making a player jump through that many hoops just to get to play as UC for example, it's a bit more complicated than it should be. First you have to pick GDI, then EF, then build the required buildings to pick UC. Not that it's that big of a deal, it's just thats one step too many for my tastes.


Another thing that's come up about the AI recently is getting a unit to use it's special powers. We were sucsessful in getting the AI to use the upgrades that are located on the Devistator Warship (Scrin) and Avatar (NOD) recently, but only slightly. The Devistator works all the time just fine, so no problems there. The issue comes up with the Avatar using it's ability to upgrade itself. If you play the game on medium the AI will only use the Avatars ability to upgrade just before it's about to be killed. On Hard it does it after it's taken half damage, which is fine to me, but on medium it upgrades and dies almost at the same time. I'm trying to find the bit of code that controls this but so far have had no luck.

But this brings me to my last point on this topic today. The different difficulty settings. The game currently has 4, Easy - Medium - Hard - Brutal. The honest to goodness truth is that there are not a lot of differences between these settings. Easy has all of it's timerates turned to high so it takes forever for the AI to go from one build list to the next. Medium has all of it's times turned to low, so it only takes 3 to 5 seconds inbetween the AI switching to another build list. I suppose this could be seen as a normal player taking a few moments to decide what to do next. Also the Medium difficulty has a 25% chance to deviate from it's build order. So it has a chance that while it's supposed to build say an Orca it will randomy pick a different air unit (Orca Stormshell or Firehawk) for that team. This gives the AI a bit of random personality that I like.

The Hard AI is the exact same as the medium except they took out the time delay inbetween build orders and removed the chance to deviate from it's plan. The way I see it the Hard AI has a plan and it simply sticks to this plan, the consiquences be damned. A good thing and a bad thing at the same time. Finally the Brutal AI is the same as the Hard AI except that the game cheats on Brutal with all units costing half of what they normally cost and building twice as fast as normal. Not a good thing.

To me you have 2 choices. You can either make an AI smarter or make it unpredictable. If you have to have the AI cheat to win then you fail as a programmer. So with saying that I plan on making the following changes to the AI.

Easy will stay the same. Medium will have the same time delays as normal, but with only 2 different starting build orders and with a 20% chance of a build deviance. Hard with have 4 different build orders but will have a 0% chance of a build deviance. Finally Brutal will have 5 different build orders with a 40% chance of a build order deviance.

Thats right, Brutal AI will be the most random AI I can make it so that you will never know what to expect from it.

It will NOT have a cheat bonus. I will also be modifiying the "Kill Teams" that the Ai will choose to build, a good example of this would be our current NOD AI. It has the ability to build Scarab teams to seige the enemy instead of Beam Tanks, and it will do this 66% of the time if NOD gets into the position that it needs to lay seige to an enemy base. A good idea here would be to add in something unexpected for a seige attack on Brutal. Say, a kill team made up of 1 Scarab, 3 Avatars, and 8 Stealth Tanks. The Avatars and Scarab would be a good distraction (because they are visible the enemy will see them first and attack them) while the stealth tanks can get way up close and do what they do best (be evil).

So those are my thoughts on CNC3's AI, what we're trying to do, and possible solutions to exsisting problems with the AI. If you have any thoughts yourself, feel free to post them. Have a good Sunday everyone.