BSRAI

BSRAI is the very first AI ever made by BSR, even before the now infamous BAI. Coming with only a Default, Metal and AirBattle profile you may expect them to at least be complete and totally polished. They aren't.

This is an AI very obviously geared for a defensive game. You're not going to get hordes of AI troops down your throat by the tenth minute, you probably won't see them by twenty minutes either. In fact seeing a horde come from this AI is something very rare indeed as it simply doesn't have a game geared towards them. What you will see are rows upon rows of defensive weapons ready to destroy any attack force within seconds.

The problem is that there is a glaring hole in the AI's tactics. Stationary defence in Total Annihilation has always been fairly weak, with the exception of Missile Tower fields which is something a non-cheating AI never does anyway. Because it cannot use Dragons Teeth the AI is put at a major disadvantage, coupled with the fact that it doesn't place defence in an intelligent manner and that the main concentration of its defence can usually be taken out by targeting the Commander who is always at the heart of things, and you have a glaring weakness in its game.

BSRAI doesn't handle its resources very well. It will try to builds factories and defences without having the resources to support such production. On Default maps it never has enough metal. Because it tries to porc it never expands far enough for metal, and yet for some reason will not use Metal Makers which I would have thought of as very important to an AI obviously trying to occupy only a small area. You would expect this problem to be solved on Metal maps. It isn't. Because BSRAI basically uses a copy of its Default profile for Metal maps, it suffers from metal overkill. While the AI will busy itself with getting all the metal it needs, it isn't compensating for the fact that with all this metal around a Default AI never builds enough energy early on. Everything comes grinding to a halt with nano-stall setting in fairly quickly. BSRAI also seems overly fond of Guardians which is usually its downfall because it tries to build them when it cannot possibly afford them, especially with the metal shortages it usually suffers.

What this AI does fairly competently is to represent the ARM. You will see a nice mixture of Flash tanks and Samsons, with Panthers and Merls coming out in support later. The Kbots at level 1 are not so precisely weighted, and all of them seem to be given equal importance, leading to far too many Hammers in each attack force. The CORE level 1 AI on the other hand is fairly terrible. It almost completely ignores Slashers and concentrates on producing useless Raider and Leveler forces which can be taken apart with ease. Only when it reaches level 2 with the safety of Goliath and Morty swarms does it truly get back on its feet.

Overall this is fairly average AI all round. It plays a porcing game and does so with reasonable success. But rather than aiming to win, it simply seems to want to survive. With an over reliance on uncost effective LLT's early on, this is something that can be taken apart with ease. You will need several of these AI's in a game to provide any challenge, and this is more in testing your base busting skills than anything else.

Finally, the age of this AI is beginning to show when it sends hordes of Fleas at you, and the less said about the rather poor ARM only AirBattle the better.

- Quitch