Ideas for fixing/compensating melee AI for huge (480) maps?

[Verdun]

So from what I heard it's pretty much established that warcraft melee AI cannot handle the really big maps (as of the version I use, 1.29). I made a similar thread before, but this one is meant to be specifically about workarounds.

My own experiments seem to show that some rudimentary use even of basic blizzard AI is possible (they will build their bases and try to kill you) though not ideal performance. Most notably, on my maps orc AI is always utterly helpless, they rarely even train a hero, just spam peons and send them harvesting. Undead AI, on the other hand, clearly performs the best (if you get rid of the blight mechanics). No idea why the huge gap.

Anyway, I have very much not given up on using 480 maps for single player, so I kinda want to learn if anyone has figured out workarounds.

There is a pretty excellent project for enhanced AI, but from what I gather the performance on 480 maps is not necessarily better than vanilla AI.

The most obvious is triggers. Do you know of any good examples of complex trigger use, ideally GUI, that make computer players more interesting?

 

[Verdun]

Anyway, here is a little update from my own experimentation:

I was actually able to get the 480 map with 20+ AI players to be playable in Melee. It's still not the same as a regular melee game. But by using primitive triggers that periodically force the AI players to build certain structures or spawn units and order them to attack other bases, whenever the AI player isn't showing much activity by itself, I got a decent game going. I even got the impression that the triggers had a "stimulating" effect on some AI players, causing them to become more active by themselves once they had structures, units and conflict.

I have been making maps a lot more than I have been playing the game, so my warcraft skills are more than rusty, still I was pleased to find that I actually lost the first test games against the trigger-enhanced AI, with my setup.

I will try to make this more complex, but in theory I already got a playable system.

 

[Gnuoy]

The most obvious is triggers. Do you know of any good examples of complex trigger use, ideally GUI, that make computer players more interesting?

look at my kings and knights map. there are triggers in there that change ownership of heroes from Ai to neutral so that the Cpu's heroes can "craft" more complicated item recipes or force it to spam buy tomes with extra gold. besides that the ai script runs more or less normally on the custom tech tree and units.