@Ultraling:
by no unit micro I meant that weakened units do not retreat, and by not repairing I meant that scvs do not repair weakened scvs (which i think they can). I already mentioned that attacking a building could lure out repair scvs.
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I've played a few cooperative 2:2 games against very hard AI, and there's an overwhelming AI weakness that i'd like to point out to anyone making an AI or battling comps. It cannot defend well against an air harass. This is something that most players cannot do well, myself included. But the computer does this poorly to the point that it's exploitable. I might add a replay next time I'm in my starcraft environment.
player Attack: mutalisks attack workers
AI response: flees workers and sends entire force to the back of its base to deal with the harass, ABORTING ALL ELSE.
player response: flee air force, wait 15 seconds, send air force back in.
AI Response: troops have deserted the command center and workers are undefended again. workers flee and entire army runs back to base.
player response: repeat. the computer will never do anything differently
There are two problems here. First, the AI never splits its forces. Instead, it sends its entire force to deal with a few mutas. Thus, a few mutalisks in the base allows me to pin down the entire army and, in 2v2s, both AI armies. This stops their attacks against me and lets me pick off their workers and waste their resources.
Secondly, the computer is very very hesitant to build static D and does not respond to air harass with air-to-air. It did put up exactly one turret, and eventually it got a few vikings, but I got the impression that the vikings were part of its normal attack force rather than to counter the mutas.
Air harass can be very nasty against players, but the best solutions are static D, small defense forces, and air-to-air counters. Sometimes it's even best to sac the base and take out the enemy who is weakened by its force split.
I haven't tried this against insane, but I assume it's the same. What an insane (or custom) AI should do differently from a very hard AI is more intelligent counters to these sorts of things rather than just a huge mineral advantage. I think for very hard, these weaknesses are exactly how they should be. These are effective strategies against players; there's no need for the 2nd best AI to do better.
I saved a replay I played last night. I'm not able to open this file currently, but I've just switched to a mac environment and can't log onto bnet due to a bug, so idk if it's a problem with the replay or with me.
Anyway, this is a simple zergling rush against the terran insane ai. I played a number of these, so I don't know which one this is. Nevertheless, there's not that much creativity in a 10 supply rush, so I'll point out a couple of weaknesses in the comp ai that i've noticed:
•It's good that the scvs try to defend against attackers, but they're only attacking when I attack scvs by minerals. When builder scvs are attacked, they don't attack. They can even be lured out in some cases by attacking a building. edit: probably better that if the builder is attacked it flees rather than letting me lure scvs out.
•The marines don't micro at all nor focus the weakest unit.
•If any scvs aided the marines, my lings would die, but the scvs ignore the lings when I"m not attacking scvs.
•No unit micro nor scv repairing at all.
•Most importantly, the terran didn't block the ramps with supply depots and barracks the way every.single.terran.play.ever(!) does.
With this patch, three of my units have become unselectable.
Has anyone else had this issue or does anyone know what might be causing it?
Two are hero units, and the other is a mineral field. They show up okay ingame and on the minimap, but cannot be selected. The unselectable flag is not set in Unit if that matters. Two had some of their unit flags incorrectly set after the update, but those have been fixed.
The rest of my custom units do not have this problem.
Did the update corrupt these units or have I done something wrong?
edit: Found the problem. Unit- Subgroup alias, unit- select alias, and unit- revive type had not been correctly set. I think some of these were blank by default last patch when making a new unit or the correct values weren't showing up on the list, so I had had to set random values for these. It worked last patch how it was, now it needs to be set to the correct unit.
Changing the associated unit of an actor via
Token: Unit Name
to (none) and then back to the unit does not update the events+ birth/death/construction events. Changing it from one unit to another works fine, but once it goes to none, there's no way to get it back without manually reselecting the unit for every event. I can't think of a reason you'd want to change it to none, so changing it back is all the more important. I think this is new to patch 16.
My guess is that changing the unit now causes search->Replace of the unit's name.
The editor seems a little inconsistent over the use of the word 'deplete'. In the behavior tab for harvestable Vespene geyser Gas, deplete means when it's low on resources and will play a warning message. In the actor for the refinery, however, it becomes apparent that deplete is a substate of a Resource type behavior which means exhausted because it's using that status to control its color change.
One workaround would be to set up something with Behavior-Empty Unit.
I successfully had a depleted geyser become a new geyser. You could make a new one that had a lower default harvest. You might need to play around with it a little because there is both a refinery and a geyser to worry about. I had a placed refinery correctly change to a new vespene geyser when exhausted by setting it to remove when empty and to create a new geyser there. However, when I built that same refinery on top of a geyser, exhausting it did not produce a new geyser.
I'm looking at whether I can set a behavior by triggers that would make the regular depleted one harvestable. I'll post again if i have some luck.
@YiffMaster:
I'm also having a hard time detecting if a unit carrying resources has died at all because the buff expires when the unit dies, so while other triggers return that it has the buff, death triggers return that it does not have the buff.
I need to know this too. I need to be able to figure out the resources that a unit is carrying when it dies.
So far, no luck. There's a buff called Carry Mineral Field Minerals that is placed on a unit carrying minerals, but I don't think that the amount is tracked through that because the buff seems to have no effects other than to act as a status flag, and the max stacks of it are 1, so the game is not tracking held minerals by the # of stacks of it.
@Zetal
I think that Unit Resources is for resource nodes.
Play forever does not make it loop.
Play forever means that when the animation finishes playing, it just stays there in its final state. The Animation is not considered finished, so the next animation does not start nor is the Animation Done event fired.
I think I used a timer solution when I needed one. I always eye the Animation Baselines field, but I haven't managed to get anything working using that.
I've seen weapons (or as someone suggested as a workaround, autocast effects) suggested as proximity detection. I don't have a link to the thread, but the gist of it was to create a weapon with an effect that does 0 damage. Then use a trigger on Unit Takes Damage, specifying the effect.
I'm not sure what hurdles there would be in putting this on an active unit (e.g. if it were doing something else, it wouldn't atk/autocast). I think there are threads on making an attack use both weapons at once.
Just noticed you said you weren't familiar with the data editor. I think Riley has a quick guide on custom trigger hooks (which is what this approach is), and there are plenty on creating custom weapons and effects.
@Aztron:
In the Unit tab, there's a field called Behaviors+. Add the behavior to the unit there, and it will have it when it spawns.
If you want to make the passive ability noticeable by the player, add a button to the command card and label it passive.
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