After posting my first two AoE2 AI scripts up on Age of Kings Heaven, Rubberman invited me to enter an AI into AOKH AI Scripting Ladder. First off, the personal invitation to join the tourney shows just how awesome the AOKH community is. Second, it was cool to have the guy who wrote the tutorial I followed for my first couple of AIs be the one to invite me. Sadly, that tutorial has been pulled down temporarily until he finds a new server.
I put together a Gothic AI to compete in the tournament. After getting the bones of it together, I smashed it against a bunch of the lower AIs in the ladder to ensure it was at least competetive. This testing really helped improve my scripting abilities. In fact, I'm kind of embarassed I put my first two AIs up for public display. The new AI can currently beat about a quarter of the AIs in the ladder, but I don't think I've pushed its framework's abilities to the max yet.
This is the first AI to use an extremely modular system I put together. Each AI is composed of modules that handle different tasks (military, unit training, building, etc.). The idea is that I can put a bunch of modules together in less than an hour to create a whole new AI. After finishing the first iteration of the Gothic AI, I created a Teuton AI that also used the modular system. This AI still required a bunch of new modules so it would play the way I liked it to, but still took about half the time as the Gothic AI. It's also nice that fixes and tweaks in one AI automatically get applied to the other AI.
Anyhow, I hope I can push my Gothic AI higher up the ladder, but I have a feeling that if I want it to compete in the top league, I'll have to build it on a different framework. At least the highly modular system will take most of the drag out of that.
