DTA Version 11 Released! Advanced AI Online! news - Dawn of the Tiberium Age mod for C&C: Tiberian Sun

Report RSS DTA Version 11 Released! Advanced AI Online!

Observe superior tactics while you still have human eyes...

Posted by Rampastring on Oct 28th, 2023

Dawn of the Tiberium Age Version 11

Prepare for battle, Commanders! A major update for DTA has arrived, and it includes our new Advanced AI! Check out its trailer below!

Advanced AI is a new game option that entirely replaces the base-building logic of the original TS AI engine. To list some of its features, the new AI:

dynamically base-crawls towards Tiberium and Ore fields, places refineries near them and so harvests the map much more efficiently
builds multiple factories when its economy allows it to produce units at a faster pace
places defenses towards the direction where its enemy is, instead of randomly placing defenses everywhere like the original AI did
considers proximity to enemy when placing down buildings; for example, super-weapon buildings and helipads it tries to place far away from its opponent, so those buildings are harder to destroy
cheats less: because the AI plays smarter, we found it can be a challenge even with reduced monetary cheats!

These changes make the AI much more interesting and fun to play against, especially on big maps with lots of resources to harvest!

The Advanced AI checks the direction of its enemy when placing down defenses, which often makes it build formidable defensive lines.

QoL Improvements

The new AI is far from the only improvement in version 11. There's also a bunch of bugfixes, balance changes and QoL updates! There are too many of them to list individually in this news, but we'll highlight one specific item.

The message list, usually shown top-left, is now instead drawn at the bottom-left of the screen, like in most modern RTS games. The top-left message interface simply doesn't scale very well to modern widescreen displays. There is, however, a toggle for this in the client if you prefer the classic behaviour.

New multiplayer maps

Like almost all DTA updates, version 11 also comes with new multiplayer maps! Some older maps have also been remade as improved versions.

New version of [2] Field by Chronoseth. The similarly named C&C Renegade map converted into RTS form.

[3] Top o' the Hill, from Yuri's Revenge, remade for DTA by Chronoseth

[6] Cool Down by BaghiraRTS

[6] Stormy Valley, from Tiberian Sun, remade for DTA by Rampastring

[8] Red Mountain by Rampastring

[8] Arctic Circle, from Red Alert 2, brought to DTA by Chronoseth

Stability fixes

Anyone who has ever played Tiberian Sun or its derivatives know that the engine has historically suffered from severe instability-causing bugs.

Co-Op Multiplayer has been particularly problematic. When playing against AIs, many players have sometimes seen a "Synchronization error!" (also known as "Reconnection error") dialog stop their game. These sync errors have been very hard to debug and figure out, but we've finally made progress and managed to reduce these errors by a significant number.

The dialog above has been significantly less common for us while testing DTA v11 compared to earlier versions.

In addition to fixing desyncs, we also fixed one AI-related bug that could sometimes cause random crashes.

Change Log and Downloads

For more detailed information about changes in DTA version 11, check the full changelog.

As usual, if you have DTA installed already, you can fetch the update by using the client's updater.

Otherwise, you can download DTA from our Downloads page here at ModDB.

We've had great fun playing Skirmish and Co-Op against the new AI, and we hope you will also enjoy it to at least the same degree. See you on the battlefield, Commanders!