PPM AI Plans
April 07, 2003 - 15:14
AI in PPM will be differently than the common AIs made by Westwood. We have the knowledge that it's a waste of time to send 2 light infantry to the enemy base and thinks that it will annoy him. Obviously, even the hard AI in TS knows that, so they send 4 Disruptors, which for us is still weak. A strike must have a condition, a clear objective and how to do it. AI in PPM will have it. It's not just a matter of chaging taskforces, but we will create hundreds of new teams, taskforces, some new script types and a lot of new ai trigger types.

AI will focus the economy, defense and mainly the factories of the enemy, however, things won't be done stupidly like sending bikes (weak units) against the enemy defenses. Harvesters will be hunted by fast units which are effective against armoured units. Attacks to the enemy base will be composed of one ore more types of demolition and offensive units which have the same speed, so the group will attack together instead of splitting in small groups. If the group is bigger, it will have more strength, but it obviously depends on the type of unit (5 Mammoth Mk2 would exterminate a group of 10 light infantry). AI may use forces with both infantry and vehicles, because it would speed up the building time, since it would have 2 factories building instead of only one. Factories would receive strategical attacks by air or land or even subterranean. The important in these kind of strikes are to avoid the base defenses, since the factories have much more priority to be destroyed than a single obelisk, so it needs to be destroyed fast and the base defense are dangerous obstacles to that. Skilled GDI players usually brings disruptors to the enemy base in carryalls, which would be something good for a PPM AI, but we still dont know how to make it work (still being researched). Use of transports is vital to avoid defenses and it will be used as well. And PPM will also have the "hunter teams". The hunter teams will basically fight against any source of enemy which is near it. It will be obviously composed by strong and expensive units. Forces with both infantry and vehicles might also be used here.

AI economy will have more harvesters and maybe more refineries built. PPM also improves the AI with rules.ini, basically by adding lines ToProtect in strategical units of the battlefield, tweaking starting settings to AI behave smarter at the defense and offense, etc.. The AI defense will have much more AA units than it had, but also strong land units. It still unknown if TDL and Cyborgs will have AI, since we've not found a way to do that keeping the current GDI and Nod AI.