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Comment by egeozcan | Hacker News Reader

When I was a teen I was mostly writing RA2 custom map scripts and rules/units for my friends and watch them battle with my rules in internet cafes. When that was not possible, I was creating custom RA2 AIs, but it was very hard.

These days, I'm having incredible fun developing good old AI scripts with LLMs, for my own vibe-coded RTS game. Just choose all AI players here to make them battle each other: https://egeozcan.github.io/unnamed_rts/game/

I even let the LLM generate a tournament script to make AI scripts from different LLMs battle (headless): https://github.com/egeozcan/unnamed_rts/blob/main/src/script... GPT-5.5 leaves all in the dust currently. I cannot beat most in the game I set the rules myself :)

If you are like me, you can just make LLMs create your personal RTS game and also develop custom AIs. It's so much fun.

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Huh. You know, I wonder. The API provided to AI scripts must have enough info for limited strategies, but I've never seen what's what. You have.

What are the possibilities for just giving Claude that each turn. Yes, insane over kill, but in a couple of years Claude level AI will run locally on laptops...

I'm really not sure about the timelines, but I can easily speak to the state of things for today: LLMs are very wasteful and slow for real-time decisions. The "thinking" ones have no chance and if you disable thinking, they really struggle with querying the context with the right calls. For the once in a moonshot scenarios that they have enough context and ample time to react, they are great!

Developing AI scripts, however? They are crazy good! I try to re-balance the game to give a little edge to the humans, then it takes a single iteration for your not-even-sota LLM to destroy me. I mean I'm not the fastest RTS player but for the lack of skill, I have the advantage of being the designer of the game :)

About the RA2 AI scripts: You can react to enemy faction, composition etc. but it's impossible to program it to pull back its tesla tanks when they are under threat from a bunch of rocketeers. Those things are hard-coded in the game engine. I think the only exception was the DeeZire mod which patched the game exe, if I'm not hallucinating.

I recently tried playing OpenRA with GPT-5. Didn’t have enough time to put into it properly, but the solution I reached would plan future actions in batches based on game state, including decisions to make based on conditions/thresholds being met.

Maybe something like Gemini Flash would do a much better job.

IMHO, this is a very good idea. I suppose it would help a lot with the macro, but again, "decisions to make based on conditions/thresholds being met" is the definition of the good old AI script :)

Even if it worked, it most likely wouldn't be fun. Game devs have talked about the fine line one walks with AI in strategy games: your goal is to challenge the player, not to beat him. It's not impossible to make AI which can beat the player, but that wouldn't actually be fun to play against. So the challenge becomes trying to create something which will hit the sweet spot of challenging but beatable for most people.

I think the issue is less winning and losing, and more feeling and seeming real. Game AI opponents do absurd things that break the immersion; suddenly, you realize you're just playing a dumb game on a machine.

I suspect LLMs might be able to do that better. Even their hallucinations are less frequent and more convincing, very generally speaking, than game AIs IME.

Were you familiar with my modding site RA2Factory?

Yes! I downloaded a lot of shps voxels and map packs from your site! I think it was the beginning of 2000s? Anyway, a very delayed thank you!

Amazing! You're welcome. Yes it must've been around 2000, I was around 13-14 when I built Tiberian Sun Factory and then RA2 Factory.

To be honest I didn't play with mods much myself because I was consumed enough with the joy of building tools (such as for INI editing and voxels) and the websites, and connecting with the community and other site/tool builders. I did play the vanilla games a lot though.

I contacted the community manager at Westwood Studios and was granted the chance to visit once during a trip through Vegas. I remember him and others being very friendly, giving me a tour through the office, seeing the reality of the life of game testers, having some time with the Yuri's Revenge expansion before release, and being given some merch - a Dune II box, a C&C poster, which I still have in storage. Just to share some more of what I can recall from those days.

You are awesome, thank you for being such a magical part of my childhood

Ha glad to hear it! I was also a child, I made Tiberian Sun Factory and then RA2 Factory when I was around 14.

I left some more details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48703769

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