50 year hard AI battle with all slots filled

[Zuu]

Hi,

Tonight I let OpenTTD run for 50 years with the default vehicle set, the default hard difficulty settings except for more than the default 7 AIs. I know the advanced settings matter as well, and those are not strictly default as I haven't reset my config prior to starting this battle. The map was a 512x1024 (or the other way around) desert map.

Almost all AIs from banans has been included starting 36 days apart in alphabetical order starting with AIAI. Some AIs went bankrupt and has started over again a couple of times and some other stayed alive all 50 years.

Top 4 in performance graph:
NoCAB
AIAI
CluelessPlus
AdmiralAI

And then the others who at this scale fit under the same line.

I should say that the vehicle limits are the default and I think one reason why NoCAB is at the top, while AIAI held the lead for long time in the beginning is that NoCAB has not hit any of the vehicle limits yet while AIAI has hit the road vehicle limit. (as well as CluelessPlus has done)

Of course I could have extended the vehicle limits, but I think they are good as they encourage AIs to make use of several transport modes. Though, not surprisingly NoCAB has the most aircrafts of all AIs.

The second graph is the Company Performance graph, and the third one is the Units of cargo delivered graph.

I've used OpenTTD 1.0.1 with no GRFs and the last AI versions from BaNaNaS at the time I started the battle some hours ago tonight. All AIs use their default settings for custom I think. As when I extended the number of AIs to max, it changed difficulty to custom and my guess is that OpenTTD changed the settings to custom for currently assigned AIs then, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

The player cheat was used once to change the company colors of one company to make it visible on the graphs. Possible I should have changed AdmiralAI or NoCAB but they were still not the worst to distinguish even if they are not easy.

50_year_hard_ai_battle.sav

(898.48 KiB) Downloaded 210 times

Edit: And here is a screenshot of the map:

[Kogut]

Great!

[Morloth]

Nice, AIAI is very strong using vehicles and aircraft as well. In my games I usually see AIAI take the lead van NoCAB spending most of the time catching up. But with the introduction of better trains / aircraft NoCAB usually manages to win at the very end, but AIAI is a VERY competitive player, so all bets are up .

But congrats to all AI writers and thanks for testing! Good to see that CluelessPlus got a lot better!

[Kogut]

Yes, mass truck can be better than steamers but not maglevs.

[Michiel]

I see ChooChoo still needs some work in the "getting started" department

[Brumi]

Poor SimpleAI, it always fails in these mini-tournaments But the good thing is that I found a bug in the code which prevented the AI from starting if the inflation has already done its effect.
I wonder why it got bankrupt for the first time...

[Michiel]

Woops, I think I actually broke ChooChoo in the last build. Also, "hard" is definitely hard for train AIs! I'm gonna keep this one around for training

[Michiel]

I think I've managed some improvements
ChooChoo is currently (1961) leading in company value in your scenario, and it's the only one with trains. I'm quite the proud father
Gonna run a few more tests, because it might just have gotten lucky, but still... look for a new release soonishly

Oh, I did enable "build on town roads", because it needs the extra station coverage. Yes, that's cheating, but really, is that too much to ask?

<5 minutes later>

OK, NoCAB took over during the forum database maintenance

[Morloth]

<5 minutes later>

OK, NoCAB took over during the forum database maintenance

Tihihi!

But it's going to an interesting summer as all AIs are getting better and better .

[Michiel]

Indeed! Though I mostly tinker with it at night, this may cost me some hours in the summer sun

[Samu]

Hi. I did something similar, but for 100 years. Version used was OpenTTD 1.0.2-RC1. 14 AIs were battling each other. Map size was 256x256 Toyland with default openttd.cfg file (automatically generated after a fresh install), the seed was 1111111111. The only changes were from 7 opponents to 14 opponents, changed their starting time to 1 day after the last one and used the preset 'Hard difficulty' via the main menu.

Contestants in order:
- AdmiralAI (version 22)
- AIAI (version 15)
- ChooChoo (version 348)
- WrightAI (version 3)
- CluelessPlus (version 21)
- Convoy (version 11)
- Denver & Rio Grande (version 1)
- NoCAB (version 480)
- OtviAI (version 312)
- PathZilla (version 6)
- Rondje (version 313)
- SimpleAI (version 4)
- trAIns (version 2)
- Trans (version 100307)


Longest surviving company without going bankrupt (if I could count the number it would probably reach over 1000 bankrupties):
1st - trAIns (but never built a single vehicle) since 1950
2nd - ChooChoo (could only build at early stage of the game) since 2029
(3rd) - NoCAB (struggled to boost off early game, then it was able to lead first, until late game where it started bankrupting) since 2034

Most bankrupts:
1st - Rondje (almost never profited)
2nd - OtviAI (started good, then same as Rondje)
(3rd) - PathZilla (was struggling to survive at start but then it went bankrupt and ever since it was constant bankrupts)

Least vehicles used:
1st - WrightAI (never built anything, not even a station)
2nd - trAIns (same, looping looping looping and nothing)
(3rd) - Denver & Rio Grande (made some stations but then 'still alive' for an eternity, no vehicles)

Most vehicles used:
1st - Trans (althought it had about 30 ships stuck somewhere in the water and went bankrupt because of them)
2nd - NoCAB (also had some ships stuck, less than Trans though, but it still went bankrupt because of them)
(3rd) - SimpleAI (was being the best company for a long period of time until it slowly started to sell its vehicles one by one and went bankrupt)


(Spoilers ahead), and the winner is....

[Brumi]

SimpleAI (was being the best company for a long period of time until it slowly started to sell its vehicles one by one and went bankrupt)

Huh? Going bankrupt after years of success? And it is even more surprising that all AIs which had vehicles got bankrupt after some time. Was it because of the heavy competition?
I think this is the wierdest AI battle ever played. I wonder what made the game that difficult... most probably the map was too small for 14 companies.

Anyway, thank you for the test!

[Kogut]

Maybe inflation caused problems? 100 years

[Samu]

Most of the AI's were saying their vehicles were unprofitable, others were waiting for money to replace or even to prevent bankrupt. There weren't more than 100 vehicles for a single company, and that was only for 2 or 3 companies.

[Michiel]

LOL, definitely the weirdest battle yet
Could you post a savegame?

[Samu]

I decided to keep testing. I'm doing some kind of a tournament "bracket". Right now I picked the 7 worst companies according to the last game ranking. AIAI wasn't in those screenshots because it was currently gone bankrupting. From these 7, 2 will be picked for the winning bracket and 2 others will be picked for the losing bracket.

After this second game, it will be the 7 'best' (*cough*) companies from the first game playing, picking 2 for winning and 2 for losing.

After these three initial games, I will have 4 losing companies and 4 winning companies. Both will battle again in their respective games in a 'medium difficulty' preset and 4 will be picked from these 2 games for their finals, the absolute worst and the absolute best companies.

The finals will be played in 'easy difficulty' preset.

Good luck, lol! Such a nerd I am.


Here's the savegame from first game:

[Michiel]

My eyes!
But yeah, I think I see where some of the difficulty comes from. It's very crowded, and the trains are severely underpowered, crawling uphill at 9 km/h, which means they make little profit.

[Yexo]

Samu: why are you starting with "hard difficulty" and ending with "easy difficulty"? The other way around would make more sense to me, as that way you have the "good" AIs compete on a "hard" map in the finals. Now your first map was too hard for most (even good) AIs so you got a lot of failures of AIs that would do very good on a somewhat easier map.

[Samu]

Samu: why are you starting with "hard difficulty" and ending with "easy difficulty"? The other way around would make more sense to me, as that way you have the "good" AIs compete on a "hard" map in the finals. Now your first map was too hard for most (even good) AIs so you got a lot of failures of AIs that would do very good on a somewhat easier map.

I know, but it's maybe because the AIs have different settings for each difficulty preset. When I used 14 opponents, it changed to 'custom'. Now I'm testing with the real 'hard' preset, 7 opponents, 'medium' with 4 and 'easy' with 2.

Or you can put it in this perspective, "if you are really good, then prove it right now!"

I can't try a larger map, the first game took 12 hours in fast forward.

[Michiel]

It's difficult to decide what settings to use when the player selects "custom". Currently I'm using the same values as "medium", but for tournaments, I'd prefer "hard". What are your ideas, guys? Maybe have a separate "tournament" boolean in the settings which overrides the others?

Edit: what I mean is, for example, on Easy ChooChoo starts with 3 cargo lines (clean, slow growth), on medium it's 5 and on hard it's 10 (make a mess of the map, but generate lots of starting income). What would be a good choice for custom?