So yesterday I played again after the last matches in October / Nov 2017.
First I have to admit that I was long time against unranked matches, as they don't provide competition. But they are great for casual play without pressure! Especially if one has to fix a ton of stuff.
Second, my Ai was barely compliant with 9.x and now I have to update it to 12. THERE ARE A TON OF CHANGES all quite interesting!
I love the new debug window, it is pretty easy to find which branch is executed.
The node colors are not so clear, but I'll figure out eventually.
I love the new filters! I already feel that the tactics can be super ultra refined compared to before.
THE NEW MULTIPLE SELECT, COPY, CUT, PASTE, CLIPBOARD IS THE KILLER FEATURE. Finally it is inside the game and it, together with the matchmaking bound of +/- 400 points (plus aother thing that I'll mention shortly) I guess can help a ton to manage complexity.
I love the random maps, although they are not that random in unranked, they are great.
I love the fact that one can play with ghosts. There is a ton of activity for a casual gamer (for an hardcore gamer, it is likely that one sees always the same guys).
Surely ghost will mess up the score system. But if the gain/lose points and expire after a while, I bet there will be not so many problems.
Moreover the ghosts gets quickly outdated (for hardcore gamers that keep improving their AI) so they are good as "gatekeeping" new players that have to improve over a certain point, plus they are good to avoid losing track of past optimizations that where winning some time before.
Said that, I feel that I need to do some 10'000 fixes to bring my AI compliant to the 12.x (for example the "exists enemy at range" messed up a bit) and I will tackle them slowly with unranked games. After that, I will refactor some modules thanks to the copy and paste, still in unranked games. Then I will finally bite the new filters and the instant tagging (instant tagging makes obsolate my previous usage of tags), this one playing ranked. The cleanup will be unranked only.
So I can play my 2-3 games per day and be happy. One fix at time (plus all the bugs introduced by a fix). Really nice.
I will write in this topic shortly too:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=823