{"id":1492,"date":"2011-10-12T16:58:01","date_gmt":"2011-10-12T15:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=1492"},"modified":"2011-10-12T16:58:01","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T15:58:01","slug":"programming-ai-in-a-tower-defense-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2011\/10\/12\/programming-ai-in-a-tower-defense-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Programming AI in a tower defense game"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is not an easy task. It is for most Tower Defense games, because they are simply scripted. The level has a set number of enemies of certain types and times, and they appear as attackers. And of course, most TD games don’t let you play as the attacker, so programming the defense AI is not needed. I need both of these to be non-scripted for Gratuitous Tank Battles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I need attacking AI that ideally adapts mid battle to your decisions, and this is harder than it sounds. The first approach I took was to have a system with 3 types of placement timing mode (steady placement, or hoard points for a big attack or spam the current unit) and two types of unit selection (random, and select the one that has been most effective so far…with some variation).<\/p>\n

The AI would switch randomly between these combinations and it looked pretty convincing. Sudden waves of identical units followed up by who-knows what. The problem was, it obviously did so with little care as to what it was up against.The ‘most effective unit’ code was good, because it meant totally useless designs which charged into a hail of bullets would not see much repeat business, but something major was lacking. That was the anticipating of future events.<\/p>\n

If the defender has placed 6 machine-gun turrets (rubbish, but devastating to infantry) you shouldn’t place down infantry, regardless how well they did earlier in the battle. If they have lots of laser turrets, place down shielded units to get past them…etc.<\/p>\n

So today, at the end of a long day of video rendering and editing, and tweaking, and bug fixing, I’m starting work on a more generic system for opponent army composition analysis, that can take snapshots of the enemy forces and realise that its 63.2% anti-shield units, and thus we should de-prioritise shielded unit selection etc.<\/p>\n

This is annoying, fiddly, long winded code that nobody will ever see, as such, but will make Gratuitous Tank Battles<\/a> a convincing challenge, which is well worth spending time on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is not an easy task. It is for most Tower Defense games, because they are simply scripted. The level has a set number of enemies of certain types and times, and they appear as attackers. And of course, most TD games don’t let you play as the attacker, so programming the defense AI is<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Programming AI in a tower defense game<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,114,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design","category-gratuitous-tank-battles","category-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1492"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1494,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions\/1494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}