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