I noticed even on a naval only map, the naval AI doesn't necessarily beat a Normal AI. This makes it much more likely that it will.
- Drop number of ore refineries and ore trucks. As Naval AI is mostly suited for islands I haven't found a map that really needs as many as the other AIs.
- Reduce number of ground based base defenses - and delay Tesla coil a lot.
- Reduce number of migs as yaks more useful if they just get blown up.
- Add Flak trucks and v2s for base defense for Soviet
- Add Jeep and Arty for base defense for Allied
- Add delay for building ore truck so now chance of building one first from War Factory
- A service depot is not useful for this AI except for building an MCV so delay it a lot.
Tested with Ukraine and Germany and can consistently beat normal on island map.
- Add prefixes to all message keys to provide context
- Use messages with attributes for some UI elements (dropdowns, dialogs, checkboxes, menus)
- Rename some class fields for consistency with translation keys
Activated with the '/path-debug' chat command, this displays the explored search space and costs when searching for paths. It supports custom movement layers, bi-directional searches as well as visualizing searches over the abstract graph of the HierarchicalPathFinder. The most recent search among selected units is shown.
Teach HierarchicalPathFinder to keep a cache of domain indices, refreshing them only on demand and when invalidated by terrain changes. This provides an accurate and quick determination for checking if paths exist between given locations.
By exposing PathExistsForLocomotor on the IPathFinder interface, we can remove the DomainIndex trait entirely.
Replaces the existing bi-directional search between points used by the pathfinder with a guided hierarchical search. The old search was a standard A* search with a heuristic of advancing in straight line towards the target. This heuristic performs well if a mostly direct path to the target exists, it performs poorly it the path has to navigate around blockages in the terrain. The hierarchical path finder maintains a simplified, abstract graph. When a path search is performed it uses this abstract graph to inform the heuristic. Instead of moving blindly towards the target, it will instead steer around major obstacles, almost as if it had been provided a map which ensures it can move in roughly the right direction. This allows it to explore less of the area overall, improving performance.
When a path needs to steer around terrain on the map, the hierarchical path finder is able to greatly improve on the previous performance. When a path is able to proceed in a straight line, no performance benefit will be seen. If the path needs to steer around actors on the map instead of terrain (e.g. trees, buildings, units) then the same poor pathfinding performance as before will be observed.
