Experiences with 24 player maps and Computer AIs

[heraclius628]

I'm not sure if this is a general question or an editor one. I've been having fun trying out some custom 24 player maps, playing solo or with one other player on a LAN. Example maps: Broken City by ZLY199377 or Leviathan by Zeggsy .

We generally play with 22 or 23 Computers in different team configurations (6 v 6 v 6 v 6) or (11 v 13, 12 v 12 etc). What I've noticed is that after the game gets to be about an hour long the Computers begin to "shut down" and go idle even though there are still open gold mines available. They leave armies in allied bases and never move them. We have also repeatedly having hard crashes of Warcraft 3 when playing on LAN after we get to about an hour into the game. I also noticed that the Computers just stop creeping even if they have low-level heroes and armies left.

I'm just wondering if this is probably just a matter of our the game not being designed for that many players?

Is there any editing strategy for getting the AI players to "recover" from kind of stalling out after maybe emptying out a few expansion gold mines? Is there any hard coded limit to Computers to stop trying to expand?

In general, are there custom AIs that play better in longer games I can try to put in via the editor? (I have experience with map editing, but not AI or scripting)

 

[Ravager16829]

I avoid playing 24p maps specifically for fear that some unknown issue like you are describing occur.

The game engine, whether it's pre-Reforged (1.29-1.31) or Reforged ones (currently 2.0.3), isn't well optimized for 24p maps, even if you played this map on Classic graphics. Your question assumes that you are using the latest patch, which is 2.0.3. One of the 1.29-1.30 patch logs stated that "AI buildings may become stuck in construction" or something similar. Unfortunately, that bug seems to be unresolved by Blizzard for now. Furthermore, bigger maps (higher than 256x256) may cause AI's pathfinding to be broken, leading to unwanted issues like you can't build Undead structures even though you have placed it within Blight radius.

Maps like Acient MegaGardens (1.2) is extremely unplayable if I'm not mistaken due to the some reports about big FPS drops and constant crashes.