Re: AI nation skills
 

Well go ahead and write it all out. Post it so we can see it (I already have some problems with your examples).

And, the code wasn't designed at all. It was written on an Atari many MANY years ago and has grown in pasted-in code ever since. That is part of what Johan has been saying the whole time. Changes like some people want would involve rewriting the whole thing from scratch. Not fun (and then won't happen)

Re: AI nation skills
 

Don't bother. Somber has gotten that argument many times.
A better AI mod needs to be written by one of these people who feels that the AI sucks and they know exactly what it should do to play better. Various threads have tried to pull out the suggestions. I think there was one for a better Mictlan AI that Somber and someone else did finally make mods from.

ALSO there is the SemiRandom project. It lets us all design gods, scales, equipment choices for the AI to start with. And it will randomly pick from those files when it starts a game. If more people did AI design files for it then it would have a bigger pool to choose from but still all be sensible choices. That is probably easier to go with than trying to get the game code rewritten

Re: AI nation skills
 

*points at sig*

Though I need to update that mod to the one I'm using right now. The currently public one is screwed up. I also need to rename it to "Better Independents"

Re: AI nation skills
 

The "if the code is well-designed" part was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. As I said, code is rarely well-designed if designed at all and I knew enough of Dominions history wo assume it wasn't. Had forgotten the Atari beginnings, though.

Still, I suspect that kind of logic wouldn't increase thinking time significantly if implemented well. Especially since that's already a tiny part of the lag between turns. Impossible to know without looking into the code, though.

I'm not sure what you mean by "write it all out." It's not going to be implemented, not is it moddable, so I'm not sure what the point is in coming up with a complete detailed list. Nor am I qualified. I haven't even played most nations.

All I was saying, is that a few common sense rules could prevent the AI from making broken pretender design choices. Some of which, on further reflection, it probably already does. I think the races are biased towards their preferred temperatures, at the very least.

The rules need not be complete to be useful. Rules that prevented a particular bad design would still be an improvement, even if other problems were still possible.

I am curious what problems you have with my examples? I was going for obvious and non-controversial.



Hmmm. catgod reads pretender files, right? Does that mean we know enough to write them? That would let us play with tweaking random pretender design. Couldn't get the AI bonuses though.

Re: AI nation skills
 

I will help get this ball rolling. I will have a minimum of 10 AI pretenders by Nov. 1st. If everyone chips in 5 to 10, there should be a substantial number of pretenders available.

Now I need some guidelines:
1. Should they be generic or nation specific pretenders?
2. Do you stay within the game points limitations or is a lttle cheating acceptable? (IE, if another 10 points or so are required to give an additional level 4 bless, will that be considered acceptable.
3. What format is required for the submissions? I would think a text format that works with map editting would be good, because it allows flexability. But I have 3 different editors that work on map edit and while all 3 are compatable with the game, I do not if they would be mutually compatable with some central compiler.
4. Where do I send them? (I am not computer knwledgeable enough to serve that role.)
5. Any other guidelines or suggestions?

Re: AI nation skills
 

Wikd Thots:

I've never heard about that Semi Random project but it sounds great. I wish it was posted as a big sticky so people would know about it. Any more info on it? It should have pretenders divided by map size too [at least small and big map].

Re: AI nation skills
 

For those wondering about the NI (or actually BI, as of today) mod, it's been updated.

Re: AI nation skills
 

Edi, does this mean that I should not start making pretenders for AI or is that a seperate issue?

Re: AI nation skills
 

That's a separate issue. These mods only prevent the AI (and players) from recruiting hordes of indie archers, light infantry, militia, light cavalry and other crap that the AI generally likes to use and forces one to rely much more on national troops. The nice indies like crossbowmen, the good heavy infantry, heavy cav etc are still available, as are specials like amazons etc and you can mass archers if you get woodsman provinces, but it makes the AI nations far more interesting since they don't all use the same horde tactics with the same units under different flags. The mods do NOTHING about the AI still designing crap pretenders on auto.

Re: AI nation skills
 

It started as a way to change Gandolphs random maps to something more sensable. Instead of just wild things thrown everywhere people are supposed to design logical provinces. Where the pop, sites, guards, extra equipment on commanders made sense. Such as a province where a magic site allows you to recruit sorcerors should have sorcerors in the province defense. And then a map is randomized from all of those province files to have really cool surprises all over it.

But recently they added sensable AI gods also.

You can check it out in this thread
RanGen program