Please check this amazing guide to RTS AI that I found. Please tell me what you think about the article. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/ps/ORTS-JCIS03.pdf

I flew over it briefly. Looks a bit more like a justification for their project than actual research, but I'll keep it for further reading, thanks for the link.

It's a pretty interesting paper that fairly accurately represents the challenges to RTS opponent AI systems. It's definitely not a guide for programming a solution; it just outlines a system (ORTS) that's being set up to foster research aimed towards finding that solution.

It's also important to note that the author seems to define the purpose here as moving towards the military simulation side of the world rather than the game side of the world. There's certainly a bunch of overlap there and I'd be very interested to see what comes of this work.

The complex vision system they outline does not apply to the ruleset of a typical RTS game. In an RTS game the Fog of War is revealed strictly by radius, not by line of sight.

The notion of having good hierarchical AI is definitely a good one, and something that I find myself relying on frequently. The power of the strategic AI is enhanced directly in proportion to the intelligence of the individual agents, and the intelligence of "squads" of those agents.

-me

Anyone know where I could find a good RTS AI guide, 'cause thats what I eventually want to do. I'm working on a really simple Turn-based strategy now.

Quote: Original post by Possumdude0
Anyone know where I could find a good RTS AI guide, 'cause thats what I eventually want to do. I'm working on a really simple Turn-based strategy now.

I'm not aware of one. I know that AI Programming Wisdom (one of the versions of the book) has a couple chapters on various components to an RTS AI: influence maps and such. Otherwise you can start picking up terms and such to google and find stray bits of information.

More or less it's not a well documented field as AFAIK it's pretty new (at least in the professional world). Most RTS games to date have just had designer scripted AI and didn't do anything really interesting.

Mostly, on my project, we're just making it all up as we proceed.

I find military strategy books to be the most useful tool; it's a field that has been studied in insane detail for the last several thousand years. So go to a library and pick up some military texts and start wrapping your head around what kinds of things go into strategy and tactics. A lot of it isn't really relevant to games, but it will certainly give you a wealth of ideas and methodologies with which to experiment.

-me