Grey Goo AI brain-dead?

[lMarcusl]

A bit late to the party I guess, but lately I've had a bit of an itch for a good strategy game and recalled that I never got around to trying Grey Goo. Bought the game a few days ago, and (mostly) enjoyed my time with the campaign (the final DLC mission is torture though). I knew beforehand that the campaign is rather short, but I tend to get quite a kick out of messing around in skirmish, so I didn't mind. Oh boy was I in for a surprise. The AI seemed brain dead most of the time, no matter which Random behaviour roll it landed on. I did some googling after and was surprised by the feedback. Most people seemed to deem the AI good, to even incredible and unparallelled, saw some mentions like "if you find the AI easy, just wait till you set it to Hard".

Undeterred I went on and played through all the skirmish maps against Hard, then Very Hard, then Heroic AI. The behaviour seemed erratic at best: the AI SPAMs low tech units in the hundreds and just sits on them, occasionally completely ignores catalyst right inside its base and instead builds its Extractors in the middle of the map, builds almost exclusively up to 10 small factories instead of a few large ones etc. But now, I've just come off of a match that just left me facepalming myself to a concussion. Replay file in the link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2vtr3q5syxc0215/%5EP_MULTIPLAYEREX_19%5E601126%5E1%5E113357885907%5E0.Replay?dl=0

For those who'd rather read than watch it, here's a description: The map was Ziggurat, against 3 unteamed random Very Hard AIs with Random behaviour. I rolled in random as Goo, another opponent as Economic Goo, another as Offensive Shroud, the last as Defensive Beta.

The Defensive Beta put up a start that had me scratching my head quite a bit, with two small factories and a Hangar built on its Headquarters. The Hangar was used exclusively to build scouts and nothing else (except for confusing the Goo AI, more on that later). It also inexplicably expanded into the middle of the map with its second Refinery instead of taking any of the two spigots next to its base to the south. All in all though, despite the weird route it took, it eventually built up a force that was only about 50 % smaller than mine when I attacked and killed it. However, the difficulty of the siege (considering a DEFENSIVE AI) is something akin to Medium AI in Command and Conquer Generals, rather than Very Hard AI in a modern game: an AI that is supposedly as smart as can be AND slightly cheats should not be a pushover for a casual RTS scrub like me.

The Economic Goo was content to sit on a total of some 28 population by 15 minutes. You would expect an Economic AI to perhaps utilise its resources for expanding then. No, the Goo spent a good portion of the early game taking its one single Mother Goo diagonally across the whole map, occasionally touching a spigot or two, building a Siphon and a couple of Tempests (the Beta AI had a Hangar, prompting an anti-air reaction from the AI that can see the whole map) and took its damn time building up. By the time I had my 12 Mother Goos and wiped the Beta out of the map, the "Very Hard" "Economic" Goo had four entire Mother Goos, none of them very big. And it wasn't due to harassment from someone Offensive in the match...

The Offensive Shroud AI (keep the word offensive in mind), almost made me puke. It tooks its first expansion after 15 minutes, when I killed the Beta (at that point, the AI dumped some 2500 resources into starting to build up, as if it was dedicating all its focus into the Beta faction until I killed it; at that point the Shroud seemed to activate). Its entire offensive mindset consisted of building one or two Klaxxons to harass the Beta's resource line in the middle of the map and sitting at FIVE population and almost 6k resources in the bank at 13 minutes (what in the actual!!!). The AI had a burst of activity at the start when it built its base, then went completely dormant, then reactivated when I killed the Beta. That was it. A VERY HARD, cheating AI, went AFK for some 10 minutes of the game. An AI that was supposed to be set as aggressive. Seriously??

Has anyone managed to figure out which AI and race combinations actually work? Am I just unlucky, are the non-Balanced AI settings broken or what? Where are the past comments about great AI coming from? Because after playing all the maps against these AIs, I can say with confidence that the only one that put up a memorable fight was a Heroic difficulty Defensive Beta in 1v1 that walled in an entire half of the map and actually played to its AI setting and faction advantages. But I've had Balanced Human AIs sitting on 160 population worth of army in its base doing nothing even when I start destroying their Core and building almost nothing but Revolvers and Tridents the entire game. Is there a setting that works for you? Because I am at a loss. The game has some really interesting factions and units, beautiful effects and graphics, but it seems like the very short campaign is about the best it has to offer. And that's depressing.

[ausfo55]

Try fighting on a small 1v1 map against the easy AI set to balanced.

[lMarcusl]

Well, just played two against easy balanced and one against hard balanced (i.e. the one without complete map vision). They definitely put up a better fight than the pathetic scenario I described above but that is not saying much. They generally leave me mostly alone and if they build up a sizeable army, they only ever spam light units (if not for a few Siphons or Gladiuses), and then just sit on it in their base until I come crush them. I don't even have to bother harassing them and they will stay at 2 refineries for 15 minutes and just build Stalkers into their base. They usually end the game with not even half of my resources even when I make the conscious effort to not expand greedily at the very start. Simply by virtue of leaving me alone, I can get away with building 3 refineries as my first buildings and they don't bat an eyelid and sit on 5 predators and 3 stalkers + 8 commandos in their base and do nothing with them.

EDIT: Ok just played against Hard Human Balanced AI and have to say that guy did actually try. Attacked my resource lines from various directions, held back some forces for defense, attacked where my main army wasn't, and built a lot of Gladiuses and some Lancers instead of the usual light unit spam. Now I'm wondering if it is faction based or map based. The previous 3 games were against Beta and Goo, with Beta seeming the most passive (sitting in base with an army) and Goo being really slow economically, but each were on a different map.

[MasterBlaster]

AI sometimes is completely broken. Does anybody has a clue what exactly breaks it? I would play GreyGoo more without this issue.

[Fate (-{SoH}-)]

Grey goo's army is abit on the stupid side for sure it mainly go's for all resource spots while lightly harassing you until either a mass army or epic units done then charges in and rince and repeats,
the only thing that made it seem hard is it could go over mountains and the mothergoo's were programmed to stay out of a fight so those that didnt focus on air scouts had issues ending a fight.

If you want a smarter ai try supream commander:forged alliance forever it's got it's own community and with the ai mod it puts up a decent "not good/great but decent" fight.

If you want the smartest ai on a rts game play emperor battle for dune the ai learns and adapts to how the player does things.

If you start attacking their refinerys with air units they will start constructing anti air next to all refinerys,

If you do stealth attacks it starts to do scouting patrols around the base since on physical contact stealth is disabled.

Focus on a specific defence type and after afew test assualts it uses the unit thats best suited to breaking the defence.

That was on easy difficulty too.

Good ai is rare to find in rts games because it needs to change and adapt which takes alot of time and money to do and very few companys are willing to put money and time into it if they can get away with a stupid swarm one.

Almost every good ai was in the 90's funny enough since then it's always the rush or swarm type.

[MasterBlaster]

you forgot a game: just play "Planetary Annihilation: Titans". I love it, has a nice A.I. and many mods!

[Fate (-{SoH}-)]

pa:t is brain dead i'm sorry it's useless at defending it's commander.
Often i have to target every spot exept where the commander is to prevent ending the battle earlie thats on mods max difficulty too which is far harder then default difficulty.

[XIII]

Originally posted by Fate (-{SoH}-):

pa:t is brain dead i'm sorry it's useless at defending it's commander.
Often i have to target every spot exept where the commander is to prevent ending the battle earlie thats on mods max difficulty too which is far harder then default difficulty.

Most AIs in RTS have trouble, found PA + mods is still on the strong side. Bit smarter than SupCom, and performance scales better in late game. The two reasons why I think PA works better as a large scale fun RTS than SupCom.

Company of Heroes AI' can be quite challenging to fight against, although that's less because of the AIs smartness than unit spam and a more tactical system.

[MasterBlaster]

Originally posted by Fate (-{SoH}-):

pa:t is brain dead i'm sorry it's useless at defending it's commander.
Often i have to target every spot exept where the commander is to prevent ending the battle earlie thats on mods max difficulty too which is far harder then default difficulty.

i agree with that. I always wished there would be a mod for the commander too. Maybe something like a strong shield which makes him durable but still better than the GreyGoo AI !

[Fate (-{SoH}-)]

That would be awesome snoopy or something that makes sub commanders count too then the ai makers can have the ai's spam sub commanders to make the game hard to win not just fire 5 nukes at one spot to bypass the anti nuke congratz you win or send in 100 bomber bugs or 200 nanites congratz you win.
Or just have 10 space lasers appear above the commander and fire directly downwards upon spawning.

[Something Dry]

Grey goo is a total pice of crap compared to games like COH, MOWAS2, SUPCOM2 and a few more. the ai of AS2 is quite challaging, and a game i always come back to.

[TheEffectTheCause]

just play pa:t online........

[Fate (-{SoH}-)]

@theeffect issue is people like myself hate pvp as everyone always uses the cheapest and quickest methods to win such as earlie game zerg rushing.

[TheEffectTheCause]

its easily counterable, also easy to do to your opponents,need to invest a bit of time in multiplayer before you get good, ai promotes abnormal play

[Blackguard]

Back in Feb, you werent just late to the party, you missed it entirely

Party was over and done with ages ago.