Week 13

This week and for the remainder until the senior show I as the AI Engineer am going through and waiting for bugs and problematic events that the AI creates. So one of the updates was a couple more modifier values that allowed the difficulty value to be more heavily controlled other than just choice modifiers. Some of these are maximum amount of actions per turn. This will allow the AI to be create their base as well as bombard the player less than normal. With three nuke silos, instead of one nuke each every two or three turns. Now you can limit that to as low as zero for some tutorial levels. This way you can almost control the max amount of damage an AI can inflict per turn. Although now this means the AI will nuke most likely if modifiers are slightly tweaked for it to follow through with a nuke two spots behind. This can impact similarly with a one to follow up. So just by reducing this it has other features that could be avoided. Also, added a modifier on the randomness of an angle the AI will choose.

The angle on the AI has some problematic occurrences when it is it has any. Since it calculates a perfect angle and than we add this similar to noise. We were trying to keep as many hand holding as possible for the AI, however with this noise there is a chance that it will land on the planet. Since increases the max noise angle, if the noise hits that max. If it happens from the backside of the planet, the angles are so close anything over 9 degrees it looks like seems to cause it to hit its planet. However it looks as if it was just going for a trick shot some of the time and barely hit. This is similar to how a players have acted so, it seems to happen on both sides as they get more used to the limitations of the explosions. Early players stay far from even going through their buildings which explosions do not occur on. As they learn that, they test their limitations and will sometimes blow up their nuke on their planet which does happen. This way they can get the quickest and most controlled shot to where they want. As we go through this with the AI a larger noise early and slim it down, it will blow itself up early, and it will tend to happen less and less.

If this causes problems and they don't want it to happen at all, we are just going to happen to through cases in where the noise can only be positive in certain locations and negatives in other. So the top of the right planet and the bottom of the left can be only negative noise. This will take it away from the planet. As the opposite the bottom of the right and top of the left can be positive noise. We can implement this if it occurs to be problematic before senior show. We are trying to test it to see how often it happens, and what specifically are the largest negatives it causes. It's not a change we are hoping for because it is hard set parameter and if the game largely changes this is something that will not be modular and would have to be re-created or taken out if large changes happen.