[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Alneyan:
An idle technical question: how did you manage to tweak the AI behaviour? I don't ask you to get really technical, but merely what kind of programming/editing/coding/scripting you did.

I didnt really change the AI behavior. I cheated. As APoger properly deduced I just gave it access to things people said they thought the AI should have. Its really just the same sort of random scattering I used in my Dom1 maps with a couple of the new Dom2 commands added.

The AI's get an added commander randomly chosen from the 1010 possible. That commander has a high chance of also getting a random magic item. Also some troops assigned, and some personal bodyguards. Of course the way I do this is to give every province an additional commander etc etc. You also get one when you start. The random equip command doesnt seem to work the same in Dom2 as it did in Dom1 but its in there anyway.

Someone COULD do a map making sure that JUST the AIs got the additional armys and proper units for that race but to do that you would have to lock-down the starting positions for each AI which would take down the replay on it.

The AI gets more castles/temples/labs because I scattered a bunch over the map. Of course you get that advantage also but thats as close as I can get unless someone wants to do a manually edited map where only the AI's get this.

Since the provinces all get that surprise additional army you will find that the map must be played carefully even on indep of 2. Ever tried to take a province guarded by monoliths?

Avoiding stupid moves? Well the only thing I could come up with there is that there is a bunch of ally commands tossed in. Im not even sure who is allied with who. But it means that some of the AI's wont attack other AI's. Maybe that way by the time you get there they can have something more challenging waiting for you instead of banging against each other.

As for what programming was used..... I use BASIC to run these maps. YABASIC to be exact (Yet Another Basic). Its free and available for nearly any operating system. If I get bored of this map I can double-click the basic file and it generates a completely new .map file for me to play on with all new scatters.

If you want to try your hand at manually making a more challenging map by purposely giving the AIs what you feel they should have then go for it. The mapedit docs are part of Dom1 or can be downloaded with the preview mapkit for dom2. The .map files are just a text file and can be edited using notepad, or wordpad, or word. The images of the map (the .tga file) can be edited with many paint programs. You could download GIMP (a free paint program but possibly too powerful for most people to really want to play with).

If anyone requests it I can quickly re-generate that map to scramble things again. Or make my sloppy basic code available. Thanks for all the nice comments, I really just tossed this off thinking it wouldnt go over well.

[ November 04, 2003, 15:08: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]