Helios AI Battle Engine Summary

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Reminder - Keep Daily Backups

When working on a strategy game with a kit as big as the Complete Kit - always keep a working daily backup! Save yourself the trouble of rolling-back changes and losing work.

What is Helios?

One of the most complex components in the City Building Kit is the Helios AI battle engine located at Scripts/Helios/Helios.cs. The Helios engine's purpose is to coordinate and centralize, as much as possible, all operations regarding a strategy battle game.

The idea behind Helios was to reduce the processing load necessary for the units and to individually keep track of their goals, since we expected it to become a problem/add up when hundreds of units are instantiated.

This centralized processing script is a powerhouse and fully editable. Plus, editing for developers is simplified with all functions under one centralized umbrella.

Helios handles diverse situations such as:

All About the Helios Engine Functions

As the Scripts/Helios/Helios.cs is a huge engine that controls all of the components of battle, we've added a breakdown of the 50+ functions in Helios with a short description about what each does in the list below.

As Helios is a huge component, we recommend you play a battle to truly understand how these functions all flow together for a seamless battle strategy game experience.

Other functions of Helios...

In addition, Helios performs smaller functions, like processing the loot as the buildings are damaged, keeping track of battle end conditions, retreat orders, destroyed units, ordering cannons to fire when a building is under attack, etc.

There are several optimizations in place:

• Sending the new targets to units is done in sequence, so the units don't look for their path all at once
• All the calculations are done at 1 second intervals.

AITarget Cubes for Pathfinding

Each grass prefab has target cubes and obstacle cubes – to send the units to those grid locations, or to mark the pathfinder grid properly with locations the units can not walk on. These cubes have their mesh renderers disabled, but they can be enabled so you can see them.

The AITarget cubes are necessary for the units to know where to go – to which square in the pathfinder grid - to attack a certain building.

Also there is a “surround” function who makes the units occupy each grid, starting with the nearest.

Unit Lists

The units are kept in lists – one general list, and then individual lists for each group. Most operations require processing only one of the groups, but there are orders that are passed to all.

• DeployedUnits – all deployed units, regardless of their group
• GroupO, GroupI, GroupII, GroupIII

Unit Groups

The position of each group is given by the first element in the list - GroupO[0] – this is a simplification, since the units can be spread on the entire map before attacking a building.

Units will all converge on the same building, chosen as the current target.

The targets for each group are kept in an array -

targetBuildingIndex = new int[unitGroupsNo];

This array will contain the building indexes under attack by each group, for instance {5, 12, 2, 4}.

Since the user can both build and destroy buildings on his initial map, in which case the building index just grows, the building indexes are not necessarily in order, from 0 to the number of buildings.

Since most of the lists in Helios are created on the fly when the map is loaded, there is a translator, who translates the actual building index, stored in the BuildingSelector, to the continuous list index (from 0 to total number of buildings) we have:

GetBuildingListIndex(int buildingIndex)

For more details about PvP Battles...

Please select the topics under PvP Battle Matchmaking on the menu bar on the left, or Online Server Sync. These two sections describe everything there is to know about how the strategy elements work, and how online server sync allows players to challenge other players and how you can manage it all from one simple interface.