Improved AI: How?

[Mooseman]

I'm looking for ways to improve AI.

Picture this situation: West (Player-Squad) ambushes an East-Camp (AI). West can easily conquer the camp if there are mashine-gunners in squad or worse g36- or steyr-equipped soldiers in the squad. West has just to stay away 200+ metres and let mashine-gunners or g36 / steyr-equipped soldiers do the job.

Problem: East will react not too clever: They will take cover, crouch etc. but they will not take counter measures such as fire at or seize West.

Question: What would you recommend here in order to improve AI's behaviour? Is there a script for it?

[Josef]

Have some Spetz Natz with Bizons/Dragunovs and give them a guard waypoint, set the behaciour to combat, formation to whatever you like and combat mode to open fire engage at will...



That should make em go for you...


Also give them full skill...

[macguba]

You don't necessarily need a script, but you do need is a decent system of waypoints and triggers.   Josef's suggestion is a good one, and  you can expand on it with other groups and waypoint types.     Type switch triggers are very useful in this situation.     A patrol group can move round a patrol route until the enemy is spotted, then move onto a different route.  For example

MOVE
MOVE
MOVE
CYCLE   <------- synchro the trigger with this waypoint
SEEK + DESTROY
CYCLE

or

MOVE
MOVE
CYCLE   <------- synchro the trigger with this waypoint
GUARD

The more sophisticated your waypoints and triggers, the more sophisticated the AI groups will be.

[RP]

Hi Mooseman,
i usualy don't use scripts for that, but i guess there are a few guys out there making pretty good ones.
You can try this:

1- Place a trigger in the East camp with 200m (or more if you like, if it's open terrain), activated by West, detected by East. You can call it Camp Alarm or something like that.

2- Place several small groups (4 to 6 men), insted of few large ones, and make shure there are some machineguners in them.

3- Assign "Move" Waypoints to all groups, very close to their Leaders, and select "Safe" in the Behaviour tab. Synchronise this WPs with the alarm Trigger (select the synchronisation tab, and drag a line betwin the WPs and the Trigger, till they are connected with a blue line).

4- Next assign another waypoint to every group, and select "Hold" for some, and "Seek and Destroy" for the others you want to hunt you down. Experiment with "Combat" and "Aware" in the Behaviour tab, and "Engage at Will" in the Combat mode.

Now it would be nice to have a couple of 2 men patrols arround the Camp, so they wouldn't be caught with their pants down

5- Place somewhere a 2 men group, and assign some "Move" WPs arround the Camp, and then a "Cycle" WP next to the first one. Select "Safe" for Behaviour, and "Limited" for Speed. They will move slowly arround the Camp with their weapons in the back, but will react when engaged (if you give them the time).
You can create as many patrols as you want this way.
You can also use the alarm Trigger to bring reinforcements to the Camp, the same way you use it to make the AI react to the attack.

Now, the Camp will react from the moment the patrol spots you.

This is what you could call a basic alarm setup, there are more complex ones discribed in some of the excelent tutorials available.

Sorry for the long post, i hope this can help you.

EDIT: oops, 2 more replies while i was writting this! There you go, they're all good sugestions.

[macguba]

Another subtlety that is worth doing:

Before the enemy is spotted its better to have lots of small groups.    That way they can have different patrols routes and it means theyy are likely to spot the enemy sooner.    However, once the battle starts, the AI is better with larger groups.  Otherwise you get lots of groups with only 1 or 2 loons in them, who tend to run away (unless they are allowfleeing 0).    So in some cases  you would have

MOVE
MOVE
CYCLE  <------ synchro with the camp alarm trigger
JOIN    <----- synchro with other JOIN wps and a JOIN AND LEAD
GUARD

[RP]

Yeah, that's nice. I'll trie to remember these WP configurations to improve my own alarm setups!
Oh, and another thing, if you use Guard WPs, you may want to place some "guarded by East" Triggers. The AI will decide which groups to send there, and this can add some randomly placed units in the cenario.
And if you assign Sentry WPs to some units or small groups, and sync them to the Guard WPs of other groups, you will have the sentry dudes runing to call the guards when they spot you!
Cool eh?
And hey Mooseman, if you're sort of new to editing in OFP, and this sounds a litle too complicated, don't feel disencouraged, because it's not as hard as it may look.
Just take a step at a time, and start building it up with a few elements and see what happens.
You can allways add more at a latter stage, and belive me, after a while, the sense of achievement will drive you to do it better.

[Mooseman]

okay guys, sounds very good; I'll check that...

long replies are welcome since I'm no mapper veteran

(btw. I always thought mashine guns suck - now I know what they're good for!!!)