LOUD AI & Game Speed Improvement Project

[Sprouto]

S! Janus and thanks very much for your kind words.

Your question about the Sorian AI is a valid one. Initially, when I first began this work, I had thought that it would be possible to have LOUD as well as the original and the Sorian AI. As I got further involved, it was clear that many of the AI's problems were built upon functions that were common to the game - not just the AI. So, it was clear that any work I would do might cause the existing AI's to cease working properly. So the short answer is - no - we cannot re-integrate the Sorian AI at this point.

Now, you seem to think you're alone in only playing against the AI, but I assure you, you are not. In fact, considering how many downloads LOUD is getting, we have come to realize that there is in fact a large number of players who, like yourself, are not so keen on the PvP aspects at all, and prefer to play against the AI. It's very rare that they speak up on the subjects that you are, so it's helpful, not only to us in terms of making LOUD better, but for those that would like to ask similar questions but don't. So - it's not just you.

LOUD has several 'mods' included with it. Aside from our subsets of Total Mayhem and Black Ops, we have a few of our own, featuring not only additional units, and a large slew of unit upgrades, but some that alter standard gameplay quite fundamentally. One of those, the EVENFLOW mod, was designed to give factories and engineers consistent mass and energy usages - specifically to allow players to predict what the effect of building something would be on their economy. It does this by standardizing build times with build power - so that any engineer or factory will always use a consistent amount of mass or energy - no matter what they build. Obviously, if you are more comfortable without it, you can turn it off, LOUD will be unaffected by it. Initially, it was questioned by a great many of our players, but over the last two years, I don't think I've seen a game without it - and some of the most vocal opponents will now admit that it allows them avoid building swarms of engineers that they cannot effectively use without crashing their economy. In fact, some of our most active players eventually convert over to SubCommanders entirely by the late mid-game.

LOUD does indeed have a somewhat more imaginative nuke behavior - and in fact, it's built around the same ideas that make him more dynamic as an AI. He's very threat sensitive. Unlike previous AI's, he's not really all that interested in your base - while he does pay attention to it, he's actively watching the movement of your units, looking for opportunities to strike your weak points, and annihilate your assets when it's in his favor. Simply put, the longer a group of units sits in one spot, the more likely it is that LOUD will work out just what he needs to destroy it.

There may indeed be some interest in pushing all the experimentals back into the T3 realm. Aside from the AI and performance aspects of LOUD, one of the project goals was to 'stretch' the game out, primarily to give much more breathing room to the early tiers, but also to allow T3 to have it's own life, without experimentals. Now, honestly, this long game is well suited to the other goal of the LOUD project, to take advantage of the large maps, and it does a good job of creating an environment where you can have a 'strategic' plan and a 'tactical' plan as well, it's just that large. But, having said that, it's not so well suited for the quick and dirty small map experience. So, it's clear, there may be a market for a mod that would take LOUD back in that regard. If you would like to discuss it further, or anyone else would like to explore it further, by all means, let us know.

We do have a Teamspeak server if you want to talk directly to us (PM me for details), and we will soon have a Discord server to make it even easier to do so, but we also now have our own home over at ModDB;

http://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supre ... d-alliance

You might wish to pose your question about the Paragon over there, and the short answer is yes - it can be modified.

[aaxlleex]

Greatings all!
Sprouto has set up a discord server for everyone to come in and ask questions and discuss anything and everything LOUD.
While you are there please feel free to stay a while and play some games!

here is the discord link: https://discord.gg/nwR2whN

[mingley]

This is an awesome mod - finally the game actually runs at a sane speed.

Below is some feedback based on a few play-throughs with the January version. (Just updated to the latest Feb edition.)

Bugs
-----
* Mavours were targeting a Paragon. When I loaded from a save game the % health they were showing for the target was -2147million% (I.e. an integer overflow). I "stopped" them and re-pointed them but they were still at -2147... ; this happened again later when I loaded the a save from the same game but later on and the mavours were pointing at a different paragon.
* I built a (UEF) heavy artillery early on. It has never fired a short. I tried manually targeting but it doesn't do anything. Just sits there expensively. Other T3 artillery for other factions was the same for me.
* I somehow got a large metal maker into a confused state. It now says "upgrading" when I click the upgrade button (I'm using the upgrade buildings mod), and it always shows the "off" icon, even when on. It operates when on/offing, but it never actually upgrades (nor shows the upgrading bar). I think it's because I stopped it after turning it off after clicking upgrade.
* Playing against 7 AI's in three teams. Two teams of three, and then me on one island and my ally on the other. The ally had built 23 Fatboys and two FB2's. They were just sitting around his island, not doing anything.
* Similar to the Fatboys, I played a 7 AI FFA game with pure land and no air. Each AI had tens of GC's/KK's, fatboys as appropriate at the end (2.5hrs game-clock time) loitering in their base. They'd not sent a single one my way. One had about 50 of them - no exaggeration!
* I set a game to "No Air":
* * I was still able to build Air plants but no aircraft could be built with them; they'd just infinitely try and build the queued aircraft.
* * The AI still built air plants
* * The AI still built AA


Suggested mods to add
--------------------------
* No crash - aircraft do no damage when crashing.
* No tactical missles.
* reduced-cost anti-nuke missiles. They're VERY expensive, especially against a AIx.


Balance
--------
* Square Shields are *very* expensive for something that's a mini-nuke waiting to go off with only double the shields of a regular heavy shield gen.
* Carpet bombers are too strong. Even 1 is a pain, and I struggle against two with "complete" air coverage, but when the AI sends four at once, it doesn't matter how many AA and shielding you have, their target is going boom-boom. And then when they crash they do a further 5k+ damage to whatever they hit and shields don't help.

Installer
-------
* Have you considered using bittorrent for the installer? It's ideally suited to this and you'd save a fortune in bandwidth. I believe that's how WoW does it.
* Unit-tests for the installer. I get the feeling there isn't much coverage presently.

[Sprouto]

Greetings Mingley.

Your comments are greatly appreciated.

Many of the items you've mentioned here are now repaired, in particular the artillery targeting. The oversupply of experimentals I have to take the blame for, I left some debug code in place that turned off the platoon definition that would have given him something to do with those experimentals. (Actually it's just my evil plan to lull the humans into a sense of complacency and then crush them all at once).

The 'No Air' restriction should also be addressed, but you are correct - while the restriction prevents you from building the aircraft, it doesn't prevent construction of the factory - that's intentional. Without them, LOUD would barely be able to function in some conditions, since his opening sometimes starts with an air factory. At present, he's not aware of restrictions so he's unable to compensate for them ahead of time - also explains why he built AA. We'll get there.

Air wrecks and falling damage are somewhat reduced using LOUD - in particular, only some T2 and higher tier aircraft actually will do that - and the chances of total vaporization (no wreck at all) are quite a bit higher than they are in vanilla. This is a performance tweak, but air wrecks are considered a staple of the game. A mod to disable it is, of course, possible, but there's a lot on the list ahead of it.

Eliminating tactical missiles (I assume you're referring to the static T2 missile launcher) is something we've heard before. You might want to come onto our Discord server ( https://discord.gg/nwR2whN ) and make a case for it, but it could be enacted thru unit restrictions.

Anti-nukes in LOUD are much less expensive than the nukes they have to defend against - but what most people discover is that in LOUD we have three different things going on. First, Nukes and Antis don't appear in the game until the SubCommander makes his appearance. This decision was made to push the nuke portion of the game deeper into the gameplay. Second, the relative build power of both the nuke and the anti-nuke are dramatically higher - this substantially reduces the value of assisting them. Third, nukes and anti-nukes get no adjacency bonus. At a result, we find the 'position' of the nuke options sit very nicely in relation to the choice of experimentals or heavy artillery.

The Siege Shield, included with LOUD, while it's a massive shield, should never be considered a replacement for a standard shield matrix. In fact, we suggest that it's the last part of your shield plan. You'll notice that the shield actually sits lower than the full size T3 shields. That's intentional so that together, they form a proper layering effect. This allows the combination to weather very substantial continuous artillery bombardment or massed carpet bombing attack. The shield was originally intended to be just that - an anti-artillery umbrella.

As for the carpet bombers, can you be more specific about which unit you're referring to ? T3 strat bombers or an experimental ?

Concerning the recent installer issues - yes, we most certainly don't have enough unit-tests, and the same for project in general. Fortunately, we have folks like yourself, that report the most annoying ones in a useful and positive manner, and we're not only happy, but eager to get them resolved -- better for us, better for you, better for the entire community.

Thanks again.

[mingley]

Thanks for the reply. Quite comprehensive.
Air wrecks - well my problem is the T4's. If you have poor AA, then the T4 bombers will annihilate your base. If you have great AA, the T4 bombers will get destroyed and... annihilate your base when they crash! I just had this happen a few times in my last play-through - in fact they're more dangerous when crashing than when bombing because they cut straight through shields. Several chunks of my base (fairly well behind the front line) went bye-bye as a result.
There's already a no-air-crash-damage mod out there; I have a copy but don't know where it is online.

The carpet-bombers I'm referring to were the T4 one's of that name.

The most recent play through was going great until it crashed during a save. I sent you the crash record in a private message. Only one issue:

I was playing with one allied AI against a bunch. Resource sharing was on (I assume; it usually is by default). I'd built the T4 resource storage, and after a minute or two I glanced up and saw it said +40,000 for mass for a tick or so, before going back to something sane. Then my mass storage was full. I'm reasonably confident this wasn't me mis-judging resource filling-up-ness. I thought at the time it was a bug with resource sharing, but in hindsight it could also have been from a reclamation - but they're supposed to go slowly, not all at once right?

The aeon T4 guardian (hover shield) thing seems a little underpowered. I guess part of that was because I had no-nukes in the game (though it still built an anti-nuke) so it was less useful, but still, it doesn't *do* much other than function as a ridiculously expensive shield.

No problem on the bug reports - as a developer myself I'm aware of how useful they are. Thanks for the great work!

p.s. - Oh yes, one last thing minor - the end-game score window can't handle the number of players in the game. The three buttons to switch between "tabs" end up floating over the results.

[Sprouto]

- It sounds like you're having a good time. If you can direct us to one of the mods you are referring to, I'll gladly look it over for inclusion.

I'm tracing the crash to the unit restrictions so hopefully I can narrow that down.

That's an interesting observation about the T4 resource storage. I've never really seen it in that context. I'll have to investigate a little - and - you are correct, the resources are reclaimed over time - not all at once.

The Angel (T4 Guardian) is, as you've surmised - primarily a mobile anti-nuke - and other than that - a support unit with excellent radar and what is essentially a mobile T3 shield. With nukes turned off, yes, it's not a valuable unit.

You're correct about the end game screen - it doesn't support enough players to display properly. At some point, we'll get around to addressing that issue.

[ColdScout]

* I built a (UEF) heavy artillery early on. It has never fired a short. I tried manually targeting but it doesn't do anything. Just sits there expensively. Other T3 artillery for other factions was the same for me.

I noticed the same.
Had it fixed by modding Weapon.TurretPitchRange to 45. Other numbers might work too, just needs to be higher.

The Seraphim T3 arty always falls short by about the width of a factory.
I don't know how to fix this, changing projectilespeed and turretpitch does nothing.

Other (T3) arty work fine.

Oh, btw, great effort this LOUD mod. I'm really enjoying the smooth gameplay. Thousands of units on the map, letting the game run for 10 hours and still get a +2 gamespeed is awesome. Thank you very much for doing this.

If I could make a request: an aggressiveness setting for the AI for the late/experimental game.
Like many others I experience the AI having an army big enough to flatten my base several times over, he just doesn't send it in.
Instead the ai builds 50+ experimentals, then sends in about 5 at a time.
Just have the ai send them all in at once please.

Other then that, keep doing what you're doing. Its awesome.

[Sprouto]

Greetings ColdScout !

Thanks for your comments. The first thing I should ask is have you checked for updates recently ? The artillery issues were dealt with about 2 weeks ago and they should all be good in the current version. Let the updater check for updates as we update almost every week.

As for the experimental attacks, those too had been under review and you should be seeing attacks larger than that with his experimentals. Essentially - if he has more than 8 experimentals in a base - it should trigger what we like to call 'the kitchen sink' attack. He'll take all the experimentals, and a good deal of whatever else he has at that base - and make a play. If he's not doing that, then we do have a problem and I would dearly love a replay so I can debug it - let me know.

Since most of our public dialog is happening on our Discord server these days ( https://discord.gg/nwR2whN ) there are some previous issues that have also been cleared up. There had been an issue with a rare crash issue related to unit restrictions - that too has been cleared up, and recently we've expanded our unit restrictions list to include some of the more common requests that our players seem to enjoy.

Also, we recently had some issues with the FTP service that our installer package uses to deliver files for installation and updates. This commonly resulted in a number of files failing to download. We've since moved to a much more globally friendly FTP service that offers worldwide mirrors so most all of our previous download issues should be resolved. If you had problems in the past, and are still interested, try again.

Thanks to everyone who is participating.

[MandeR]

Is there any chance we'll get some of the cosmetic effects back that were initially removed as part of the project, such as enhanced graphics, explosions, etc? Or is it necessary for these to remain scaled back for performance reasons?

[Neojacques]

How do I add 1 friend and try to play this mod in multiplayer.
Is it possible via Hamachi or Tunngle? Direct ip?