Aiedit suggestions and recomendations

Renu48 · Cyborg Soldier **Joined**: 11 Nov 2018

Due to me finding base game ai way too easy, i am trying to rework the ai in skirmish and in game in general. Could you please give me suggestions and ideas for the mod i am trying to create.

What makes an extremly difficult, smart and well balanced ai?

Are huge teams better than small teams?

What examples would you give of a powerful ai attack?
What examples would you give of a powerful ai defence?

What support teams would you give an ai attack team? (Harvester attacks, base attacks, infantry and tank hunters)

What differences in terms of attacks and base defences would you have in easy, medium and hard game difficulties?

Nero7O · Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2025 6:22 pm Post subject:

Depends on what you want. See old C&C are about 2 different kinds of tactics:

1 is medium tank spam

2 is cheese

Cheese is stuff like APC with Engineers rushing to the conyard. Or a helicopter with a Tanya.

You can't teach the AI how to play with a big mass of medium tanks. At least not without heavilly scripting it in a singleplayer mission and even then its a horror.

The most important edits are actually made in the rules.ini not the ai.ini. There you can control how many unit teams the AI builds and how much delay there is between them.

You can do some tricks too.

For example, give the AI different units than the player. Create a second Rhino and make it cost way less then add that one to its attack teams.

The difficulty settings have sadly been removed by westwood. It only makes the ai more aggressive and maybe gives it more money and more attack teams.

I also gave the ai more buildings, several base defense structures that it would build on top of the normal ones. You can use prerequisite=sandbag or whatever its called. The AI ignores prerequisites.

Finally yes you should go into the ai.ini files and add some more and some custom units. But don't overdo it. No team should be bigger than lets say 9 units. The AI doesn't work well with bigger teams.

In singleplayer a good trick is to have multiple AI's fighting you. Age of Empires also does this.

I like to play bay of pigs against 6 AI's and with 1 friendly AI.

Oh and if you ask yourself why the AI is so weak, its because of old computers struggling.

Renu48 · Cyborg Soldier **Joined**: 11 Nov 2018

Where in rulesmd would i find that under?

Can you please elaborate what you mean by giving ai different units which would cost less?

In section you mentioned team shouldnt be bigger than 9 units, what if i have a custom APC that can fit 10 soldiers in, say i want to create an attack team with 3 apc's filled with troops, is it still doable without having any issues. Also does same logic work with landing craft or helicopters?

Also i have a quick question about aiedit.

So heres an idea. Say i was to attack an enemy base/ harvesters and they currently dont have any units or vehicles left. How would one go about coding an ai so they would go into overdrive and create an emergency response team to counter my assault team?

Nero7O · Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2025 7:25 pm Post subject:

TeamDelays=2000,2500,3500 ; interval between checking for and creating teams, by difficulty level (easy, medium, hard)

BaseDefenseDelay=.25

SuspendDelay=2 ; minutes that suspended teams will remain suspended
SuspendPriority=1 ; teams with less than this priority will suspend during base defense ops

MultiplayerAICM=400,0,0 ;Multiplayer AI Coefficient of Money (Genius, Smart, Easy) ;was 400,300,200

FillEarliestTeamProbability=100,100,100 ; (by difficulty level, from hardest to easiest)

MinimumAIDefensiveTeams=1,1,1 ; (by difficulty level, from hardest to easiest)
MaximumAIDefensiveTeams=2,2,2 ; " "
TotalAITeamCap=30,30,30 ; (by difficulty level, from hardest to easiest)
UseMinDefenseRule=yes
DissolveUnfilledTeamDelay=5000 ; how long to wait before dissolving an ai trigger team that has no members (multiplay only)

Nero7O · Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2025 7:31 pm Post subject:

You may want to use modenc website to further understand what these do and I am not sure if all of them work in YR as I am primarily a TS modder.

I mean you create a second tank that is a duplicate of the first but give it to the AI only with lower cost and maybe more health if you fancy that.

9 was just a guess, 11 will probably work fine too especially with infantry since they take up less space. The problem is when a AI team gets too big it can't control them well anymore, like moving from waypoint to waypoint becomes problematic since the force is so huge it doesn't register as completing the arrival. Its hard to explain.

advanced AI behavior like the one you mention here at the bottom and in your PM is only possible with singleploayer missions. The MP AI is very limited.

Also don't forget that each unit has a threat indicator and the AI I think uses that to determine its options against it to some degree. Maybe.