Incompetent AI
Whilst playing a noob in a 2v2 custom game recently, I had a crazy idea. Why not try to win a game attacking with nothing except the worst unit in the game, the mech marine? I briefly considered trying to win an online game this way, but I decided against embarrassing some poor guy who has never played a match before.
Instead, I decided to test out my idea against the supposed “Supreme” AI. So I loaded up SupCom, and started a skirmish game against the AI on Winter Duel. As I expected, I was able to win fairly quickly, simply by getting up about 8 factories and sending waves of mech marines at the AI. First, I crippled its power generators, then I destroyed its factories, and finally I killed the enemy commander.
It was actually a little bit harder than I thought it would be. The AI almost got up a point defense tower, which would have made my victory much harder. I’m still pretty sure I would have been able to win with just mech marines, though. After the match, it occurred to me that it would probably be easier to win with mech marines on a somewhat bigger map. So, I played my next match on Open Palms. I set my first factory to build endless engineers, then I started expanding with those engineers and building as many factories as I could, all of them pumping out mech marines.
It wasn’t even close. The AI barely got out of its initial 4 mass spots before I was on top of it with swarms of mech marines. I quickly stifled its expansion attempts, and then went in for the kill with several hundred mech marines. The AI had a couple point defense towers, but these were quickly overwhelmed, and soon I had free reign of the AI base, with only the commander left alive.
In fact, this sort of match is very easy to imitate on pretty much any of the land maps. Simply expanding at a reasonable pace and building as many mech marines as you can will ensure victory, typically in under 10 minutes. This begs the following question. Where is the decent AI? On a small map, the Supreme AI will surely select the “horde” AI, which I would expect to be able to expand at a rate to compete with a decent player who is giving himself a severe handicap. In these games, the AI rarely even attempts any sort of harassment, and only occasionally does even a single engineer slip through to build more than 1 or 2 expansion mass extractors.
Luckily, the single player skirmish is definitely not the focus of this game, so its not a big deal. With all we heard about the AI before shipping, however, I would expect a somewhat better showing. As it is right now, even imposing on oneself a rather severe handicap can still make for a very easy win.
Download a replay of the AI being spanked by mech marines here.
April 10th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Heh, now you should try killing everything except there ACU with only egineers by reclaiming them. Now that would be a challenge!(I hope it would anyways)
April 10th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Weird, I get desync errors with “beat #xxx” and a 3 digit number that goes up by 50 every time, every 10 seconds or so.
April 10th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
It ran just fine for me. Are you sure you’re running the latest version of Supreme Commander, v3223?
April 10th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Where is the decent AI? Are you joking? Sorian and giskard have both released rather excellent AI updates for SupCom. Go try them out and I guarantee they put up a better fight than the AI that comes in the box. =)
(Well, unless you do something silly like select a Naval-focused AI on a land map.)
April 10th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
btw I justr tried the replay and am getting the desync error as well. either Grok is running a mod we aren’t or vice versa. The only “mods” I’m running are sorians v1.3 AI and a UI mod. v3223 if that helps.
April 10th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
This is quite the mystery to me. I am not running any mods, and am running version 3223 of SupCom. It plays back fine for me. I can’t imagine an AI mod could affect replay playback?
April 11th, 2007 at 1:57 am
Wouldn’t sorians AI replace the AI of Grokmoo’s game?
April 11th, 2007 at 5:01 am
As I posted in another thread or whatever you want to call these…
“You can beat the Supreme AI with three T1 PDs positioned just outside its base. Don’t build any units except a few engineers to get your economy started, then walk your ACU over to the other side of the map and put up the PDs. After many of its units get killed, the AI will send its ACU which will then get plowed by the PDs. Awesome. D:”
I actually beat the Supreme AI (on Ambush Pass) with just two PD built within radius of its base. The first PD got built and the ACU came over while the second was building. It attacked my ACU instead of the first PD, then killed the second after it was up and shooting. The third never made it up before it was destroyed, so I started rebuilding the second. The first was still shooting without being attacked at all as I attempted to rebuild the second and BEWM! Didn’t even take five minutes. :(
April 11th, 2007 at 5:03 am
The normal AI can be beaten by running your commander to its spawn location and building a PD just outside of its base. No economy required. This even works on 81X81 maps where your commander has to run for 15 minutes or more of game time. 9 times out of 10, AI dies, you survive.
April 11th, 2007 at 8:21 am
“Wouldn’t sorians AI replace the AI of Grokmoo’s game?”
No it doesn’t replace it, however, there is some code that affects all AIs including the stock AIs as far as giving the commander the brains to retreat when his health goes below certain levels, etc. I am guessing since the only difference with this replay and all the other ones is that this one includes an AI where as the others posted were all live players, that must the be issue. However everyone should be running Sorian’s latest merged AI .scd do I will politely (and jokingly) claim this is grokmoo’s fault. ;)
April 11th, 2007 at 8:21 am
er “do” / “so”.
April 12th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Mech Marines are good.
September 25th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
This thread looks a bit dated, but anyway:
“Heh, now you should try killing everything except there ACU with only egineers by reclaiming them. Now that would be a challenge!(I hope it would anyways)”
I actually *had* to go try that. Easy. Too bad I couldn’t also reclaim his ACU lol. As an interesting sidenote, killing everything by reclaiming it made for a very powerful economy :D
July 8th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
I can’t get the replay data to load, but I bet it was epic and slightly dissapointing in a way.