In recent melee games against AI opponents on standard blizzard maps i noticed some AI seemed shockingly weak on Cheater 3 difficulty, after some investigation i noticed those AI didn’t have any upgrades, I tested a handful of games by putting the AI in an 8 player FFA against each other on a standard blizzard map, no mods, and several of the AI simply don’t get any upgrades, sometimes after 30 minutes or so pass the AI suddenly starts upgrading everything at once as if it suddenly remembers, though even when an AI does do upgrades they still miss some of them, a zerg AI for example never seemed to research any hydralisk or lurker upgrades in these test games, The issue is the same for protoss and terran AI, occasionally a protoss AI will only research warpgate and nothing else, while terran AI’s will sometimes only research stim and combat shield and then nothing else for the rest of the game.
I found the bug easiest to replicate by placing 8 zerg AI against each other on the Alaeni Enclave map (which has a lot of resources available) and letting it play out.
In one of the games the zerg who won actively used ultralisks and banelings, yet while having all 3 armor upgrades done had none of the melee upgrades and no ultralisk specific upgrades like plating or speed.
In a recent post I gave some kudos to the AI team on seeing some Terran drops. However, agreed … I’m noticing that not all AI are equal. Sometimes it takes multiple attempts to figure out how to get a team AI to build a base while the other AI team has half the map.
Only thing I can say that I kinda like about this though is that I normally focus on laddering team games … having unpredictable AI … simulates real team ladder match making. It forces me to pay attention to what my team AI is doing … as you should do in real ladder maps. It kinda reminds me of that feature they used to have vs AI where you could set the difficulty to random … keeps you on your toes and not lazy.
While i agree that the AI has very different behaviours such as doing drops and a large variety of rush builds or expansion heavy builds, each of those normally still obtain their relevant upgrades, at least they used to, but AI doing 0 upgrades at all for 30+ minutes is clearly a bug as this simply makes the AI mostly useless even at its highest difficulty, the variance this creates in difficulty is incredibly large and clearly unintended behaviour, an elite AI can easily beat a cheater 3 AI if the cheater 3 bugs out and doesn’t upgrade properly, the difference in power level is staggering when the bug occurs. In addition some upgrades are simply never researched, even in 1hr+ games the zerg AI doesnt upgrade any hydralisk or lurker upgrades, regardless of how many times i test this, selecting a preset build for them to follow in the lobby does not fix this isssue either. I suspect that some of the more recent balance patches have messed up the AI into not understanding changes that have happened to certain upgrades and this has caused it to fail to upgrade