Make the AI respect BuildLimit

Thos damn AI cheats! Too many of 'em, must all be sorted out, not just this one!

The AI ignores all Prerequisite settings, unless it has an Prerequisite in the trigger like: AI must have at least 1 Tech Lab

If you play against an Allied AI it builds spy's before it has a Tech Lab

Yes, but that can be fixed by setting up TechLevels correctly.

@Marshall
I find this hard to believe. As far as I know the game is always on Tech 10.

What you say is this:
AI builds refinery = tech 2 so it can build tech 2 units.
AI builds barracks = tech 3 so it can build tech 3 units.
AI builds radar = tech 4 so it can build tech 4 units.
etc.

~ZeroMD

Yeah, thats how it is.

The AI does not build units based on TechLevel, it builds units because an AI Trigger was executed that told it to build the units.

In the unmodded aimd.ini, all the Spy triggers are TechLevel 5. It's a simple matter to change these to TechLevel 8, the TechLevel of the Allied Battle Lab - then the AI no longer 'cheats' in this respect.

However, adhering to the BuildLimit is something that would require a change to the executable.

I would LOVE it if the AI considered buildlimit beofre it constructed ANYTHING, to stop my "elite" Tanya being built 6 times when it's got a build limit of one.

IMO this should be completely optional, as some modders might want the AI to cheat. You could also make it depend on the AI difficulty.

AI.RespectBuildLimit= [0 = not at all (default), 1 = easy mode only, 2 = medium only, 3 = hard only, 4 = always]

You should also be able to stack these, like...

AI.RespectBuildLimit=1,3

That'd mean only in medium mode would the AI cheat.

There could probably be a better system for this, but its just an idea.

I don't think it needs to be optional. If it is, then the default should be "AI respects build limit" as I think most people would want this.

In fact, we definitenly don't need it to be optional. It already is - the mod author can simply create a clone of the unit that has no build limit that only the AI can build.

Code related to this issue has just been checked in; DCoder wrote in revision 581:
Related to issue #318 - [GlobalControls]AllowBypassBuildLimit=yes,yes,yes ; easy, med, hard
will prevent the AI from abusing BuildLimits in most cases. Note that due to a parser limitation it only recognizes "yes" and not other known truisms for now.
Related to issue #340 - rewrote the code to use Valueable and Customizable where applicable, some debug::logs might be broken as a result. Also improved nearest tower search. Will be quite surprised if it works right!
Related to issue 318,340 .
SVN: http://svn.renegadeprojects.com/listing.php?repname=Ares&path=%2Ftrunk%2F&rev=581&sc=1

nice ;)

Code related to this issue has just been checked in; DCoder wrote in revision 599:
Related to issue #318 - Reordered difficulty values so that it's really e,m,h now.
Fixed issue #946 - AlphaLights should work correctly now. I have no idea how they worked so far, since the code was really wrong!
Related to issue 318,946 .
SVN: http://svn.renegadeprojects.com/listing.php?repname=Ares&path=%2Ftrunk%2F&rev=599&sc=1

I'm marking this as resolved - the AI will ignore a teamtype which involves a taskforce with unbuildable units. The proposed addition of letting the teamtype decide for itself will be implemented in the future (0.6, with other AI enhancements). This means that now it's your turn to test this.

shouldn't "AllowBypassBuildLimit=yes,yes,yes" be "AllowBypassBuildLimit=no,no,no" to disallow the buildlimit from being bypassed?

not that it matters to the game, but reading it is slightly confusing.

Woops, good catch. This flag defaults to no, which means the AI will obey the limit by default, and setting it to "yes" will revert to old unlimited behaviour. Now that I said this I wonder if that's the right approach for, say, CannisRules, which is not likely to be updated to co-op with Ares...

i'd say keep the default behaviour to allow the bypass, if a modder wants the AI to not cheat, he can disable it pretty easily.

This is a yes and no, working and not working situation. While the AI obeyed BuildLimit=1, it ignored BuildLimit=0.

yeah, thats because 0 is "no limit"

You obviously haven't tested this. BuildLimit=0 is documented to disallow players from constructing buildings while giving them to the AI, as in this tutorial: http://forums.revora.net/index.php?showtopic=78580

that's very odd, wonder what the default is, because 0 is usually "no limit"

Default is 2147483647 , or 0x7FFFFFFF.

So how will the magical DCoder handle making the AI obey BuildLimit=0 structures?

Tested in 0.1.886

So what I did was to put TANY in every single allied task force in aimd.ini.
First, I tested with adding AllowBypassBuildLimit=yes,yes,yes to [GlobalControls].
The result was that AI builded all the task forces and there were tons of tanya on the map.
Then I removed those two tags(default is no), and there was never more than one TANY on the map.

This can be closed.

Closed as per comment above.