How to make an ai mod for DE?

[The_Night_Panda]

Does anyone have experience with making an allready working ai available as a mod on DE? If so I’d love a detailed explination for a technical noob as it’s a bit tricky to jump into for someone with zero experience in the field of modding Feel free to contact me on discord - The Knight Panda#0005

 

[T-West]

You create a few nested folders mirroring the game's relative filepath to its AI folder, zip them, and upload them to the mod website.

That is:
1. Create a new folder named `resources`.
2. Inside of that create another folder named `_common`.
3. Inside of that create a folder named `AI`. (In total you have `resources\_common\AI`.)
4. Place your .ai and .per files inside of the AI folder.
Then right click the outer resources folder and select Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder.

There are some AI mods on the DE workshop already. I'd suggest subscribing to one in game, then clicking on the "browse local files" button. Then you can see an example of how to structure the files.

Log into the website at ageofempires.com/mods, and click the "Submit a Mod" button. Fill out the form and attach your zip file.

Then go to download your files using the in-game mod manager to test they're uploaded correctly. If you see a red exclamation instead of a check mark when you download them, then there's something wrong with the file structure. Most likely that means you zipped an outer folder containing the mod and need to zip just the resources folder directly.

 

[Baron Icey Harkonnen]

love the 5 minute streamer help


If you really want to learn how to do this
we will show you in detail
Discord.gg/citadel

 

[The_Night_Panda]

You create a few nested folders mirroring the game's relative filepath to its AI folder, zip them, and upload them to the mod website.

That is:
1. Create a new folder named `resources`.
2. Inside of that create another folder named `_common`.
3. Inside of that create a folder named `AI`. (In total you have `resources\_common\AI`.)
4. Place your .ai and .per files inside of the AI folder.
Then right click the outer resources folder and select Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder.

There are some AI mods on the DE workshop already. I'd suggest subscribing to one in game, then clicking on the "browse local files" button. Then you can see an example of how to structure the files.

Log into the website at ageofempires.com/mods, and click the "Submit a Mod" button. Fill out the form and attach your zip file.

Then go to download your files using the in-game mod manager to test they're uploaded correctly. If you see a red exclamation instead of a check mark when you download them, then there's something wrong with the file structure. Most likely that means you zipped an outer folder containing the mod and need to zip just the resources folder directly.

Thank you both for taking your time to help. Chrazini was around to help as well and it works now

 

[Snizl]

I saw your AI perform in the tournament vs the Barbarian AI and was quite impressed, took it on myself to beat it in a 1v2 (managed after like 20 attempts with full wall cuman 2 tc boom, massing skirms in feudal age then producing three stable knights and wrecking at least one archer army before they are upgraded, then raiding both AIs) took me a solid ingame hour to defeat both of them. (im 15xx elo and this was a nice challenge, trying to figure out the best approach)

So if you dont mind I have some comments on this AI. I have no experience with AoE AI scripting, so I dont know what may/may not be possible so these are just some rough suggestions.
Before I start: Great job! Really good work!

First of all:
The archer micro is insane!, it's great to see but I think if you want this to be an AI actual people play against it would be a great idea if the overkill avoidance (targeting multiple units if one or more will be oneshot) would be removed on hardest difficulty. No other changes, just that. Because the way it is right now it basically forces you into knights, as its just obnoxious to deal with. Maybe one could reduce the maximum amount of targeted units to 2 on hardest, 1 on hard or something like that as well for a more nuanced difficulty increase.

The AI is quite weak to m@a rush, that is not necessarily because of their build, but because they will not look for alternative gold sources. It will keep sending the vils back to the gold over and over again. One can just let the m@a attack the mining camp and every 5 seconds go back to them to pick off a vil, sending all the vils back to the tc, going back to attack the camp and do the whole thing again. It would be 10 times harder to beat, if alternative gold sources were used as long as army is visible at the ressource side.

Also, while I was quite happy that archers bug out once you are full walled:
I guess you have some piece of code that prevents archers from attacking walls, as the normal AI definitely does. You also have a trigger "full wall detected, will likely bug out". You could probably use this trigger to allow archers to attack palisade walls, no?

Thats pretty much it, Of course it would be great if other civilizations were usable, and different builds would be played, but I understand that that is a lot of work to implement.

 

[The_Night_Panda]

I saw your AI perform in the tournament vs the Barbarian AI and was quite impressed, took it on myself to beat it in a 1v2 (managed after like 20 attempts with full wall cuman 2 tc boom, massing skirms in feudal age then producing three stable knights and wrecking at least one archer army before they are upgraded, then raiding both AIs) took me a solid ingame hour to defeat both of them. (im 15xx elo and this was a nice challenge, trying to figure out the best approach)

So if you dont mind I have some comments on this AI. I have no experience with AoE AI scripting, so I dont know what may/may not be possible so these are just some rough suggestions.
Before I start: Great job! Really good work!

First of all:
The archer micro is insane!, it's great to see but I think if you want this to be an AI actual people play against it would be a great idea if the overkill avoidance (targeting multiple units if one or more will be oneshot) would be removed on hardest difficulty. No other changes, just that. Because the way it is right now it basically forces you into knights, as its just obnoxious to deal with. Maybe one could reduce the maximum amount of targeted units to 2 on hardest, 1 on hard or something like that as well for a more nuanced difficulty increase.

The AI is quite weak to m@a rush, that is not necessarily because of their build, but because they will not look for alternative gold sources. It will keep sending the vils back to the gold over and over again. One can just let the m@a attack the mining camp and every 5 seconds go back to them to pick off a vil, sending all the vils back to the tc, going back to attack the camp and do the whole thing again. It would be 10 times harder to beat, if alternative gold sources were used as long as army is visible at the ressource side.

Also, while I was quite happy that archers bug out once you are full walled:
I guess you have some piece of code that prevents archers from attacking walls, as the normal AI definitely does. You also have a trigger "full wall detected, will likely bug out". You could probably use this trigger to allow archers to attack palisade walls, no?

Thats pretty much it, Of course it would be great if other civilizations were usable, and different builds would be played, but I understand that that is a lot of work to implement.

Glad you had fun playing vs Rehoboam.

All your anti exploit suggestions are allready on the todo list though many of them will probably be a few updates down the road. Generally the current exploits like not being able to handle walls or being weak to man at arms are simply due to the fact that I havent gotten around to working on it yet. I didn't even have time to finish the ranged unit micro update before the tournament

As for the suggestion of making the anti-overkill be something that can be tuned down as an option that seems like a good idea. Not sure if I would make it just target the closest units like stop micro rather than setting a maximum number of units to target as that would also be something a human would be able to do as well. Maybe a combination of that and hitting 1 unit maximum.

 

[Snizl]

Good to hear those fixes already are planned. one more thing i realized and forgot to mention earlier: the scout seems a bit too hard coded to push deer. if you find the ais deers you can just kill the scout without it fighting back at all