Why would you like to play in team with AIs if they don't even care if they are allied with anyone and are not even aware of this?

After fixing a CTD and some smaller bugs (thanks a lot to the bettatesters!), I think it can be released now. It is a new skirmish AI, it's called 'Aivolution'. The main idea was to write AI that would make it more exciting to play with. This AI will coordinate its action with other allies, it will inform allies what it is up to and it is able to understand some chat phrases.

I always thought it was not fair that only humans could collect experience about the map, now the humans don't have this advantage anymore. When playing on a certain map, this AI remembers where oil resources and enemy bases are located, it also remembers good choke points for base defenses, so next time when you play on this map AI is able to recall stuff it learned. So it is a learning, or to be precise an adaptive AI. Experience is gained individually for each 8 players. This AI is also able to communicate with other AIs and humans, for example it will warn its allies when it notices that an enemy started using VTOLs. Based on the warning Aivolution is able to choose a better spot for AA defenses. Aivolution doesn't differenciate between humans and AIs, communication with AIs works the same way it works with humans - through chat messages. It is simply emulating a human player behaviour in an online game.

Ever wondered how AIs could start attacking your base, without even looking for it? This AI uses the same visibility as all humans, so in order to be able to say where a certain player it, it will have to find the base before (in case it doesn't remember) or if another Aivolution AI will find a new player base, it will refresh its vision and other allies will be able to see this enemy as well.

You will have hard time finding any cheats in this AI. It doesn't cheat at all, except for the skirmish modifier slider, but you can decide on yourself if you want to enable it. In this version of warzone.exe if you set the slider to the far left (just before disabling AI), it will deactivate the difficulty modifier.

What else it is capable of:
it doesn't just research random stuff. It knows what it wants to have, then it analizes the research tree to find out what research topics it has to research in order to get a desired technology (humans can do the same if they look at the research tree). Just like humans see a star on a research topic when it is being researched by his ally, this AI knows what its allies are researching at the moment and won't waste power researching the same thing.

Although it's not a defensive AI, it is also able to defend its base fairy well. And when it'll see that there's no chance it can protect its base with its own forces, it will call for help. When attacking an enemy it will ask other allies to join in, so that attack will become more effective.

How do you communicate with AIs?
You just chat with it. Right now AIs are capable of recognizing a rather limited set of messages, here they are:

ally?  - request alliance with AI
go?  - ask if it is ready to start any actions
status?  - ask what it is up to
go x  - send this msg when you are about to attack an enemy and want AI to attack this enemy with you (where x is enemy player number)
go center - ask AI if it can join forces at the center of the map
go  - this is a special message, it asks AIs you are allied with to send its attackers at the same location your units are heading to. In order for AI to carry it out correctly, you select your units, send them to a location and type this command, AI will then analyze the movement data of your units (since it's your ally, I think this is ok) and go meet your army.
help  - my favorite. If your base is in trouble, call for help
i'm ok  - tell  AI you don't need its help in your base anymore
stop  - this message will make AI cancel the any last request you sent (for example after "go" message)
got power? - ...
give vision -if you think AI can see something you can't, ask to share its vision (actually refreshes automatically if it thinks it found something you should see)
going x  - similiar to "go x", but more like a suggestion AIs use to notify allies of its actions. If other allies are idle, they might join the one who sent this message or just ignore it (x is player number)

If you want some AIs not to get your message, turn off the communication channel to it, works same way as with human allies.

This AI will probably not do well in T2 or T3, since I never play T2 or T3, so I don't know what templates to use, but it does fairy well in T1. I haven't implemented VTOL support for this release and AA support is experimental, but I think it does work well so far.

Since all other AIs don't offer alliances to other AIs, they just go on and create them, it might happen that 1.10 or other AI will just create an alliance with Aivolution without asking (if Aivolution wants to ally with someone, it sends "ally?" message) and Aivolution with share its vision with you, even if you didn't want to be allied with this AI. The best solution here is to use the teams feature and lock the teams, so no one will be able to break or create alliances.

To make it really dangerous, a lot of tweeking will be needed, so don't expect too much from it right now. For this release my main priority was mainly team-play, making it deadly will take time.

Aivolution periodically saves experience while playing, but if you want to force it to save experience, you can use following console commands:

saveai - save experience for all AIs
saveai x - save experience for a certain AI (where x is player number)

There are also loadai and loadai x console commands, but you will most likely don't need these.

After about 4-6 games, there will probably be no experience boost anymore, as the amount of things it is capable to remember is limited right now.

Download Aivolution AI here.

Copy Warzone.exe into your main warzone directory, replace the existing file. Or you can copy your entire WZ dir (you can switch WZ dir in WZS if you have more than one installation).

If you use Warzone Starter, copy aivolution.wzai into your "Warzone Starter 2.0\Mods\SkirmishAI" directory.

If you want to use costomization for player 7 and you are getting error messages, get this updated exe

I guess that's it, have fun.

PS: don't forget to use team feature or it can become quite annoying, if you throw some other AIs into the mix with Aivolution.