Brotherly Wars and AI

[Repo Man]

The links and downloads are really helping understand the AI politics and anger. If all goes well, and time permitting, I’ll be submitting an article on how the AI politics works, (or at least how I understand them to work). However, based on one day of reading and some preliminary analysis, I think I may have found why brotherly races still fight.

To begin, I have made one assumption; that the anger scale (brotherly to murderous) is the anger scale referred to in the AI texts. If not, then someone please ‘splain.

The most common quirk and complaint on the politics is why brotherly races never make peace. For now, I’m limiting my thoughts to why they never accept peace .. offering will come at a later date.

The accepting treaties algorithms is found in the politics.txt file, and runs from the 3rd line “Highest Allowed Treaty” to the 16th line, “Accept treaty score percent … Protectorate”

The line which determines if an AI accepts a treaty is “Accept Treaty Minimum Anger Chance.” From what I have read, this is the percentage of accepting a treaty if the anger level is low enough to accept that particular treaty. From what I can see, this is a paltry 5 percent. So in theory, it would take 20 turns before a peace treaty was accepted. Perhaps raising this number would remove the quirk of brotherly races staying at war. It would no doubt open up other problems, but one step at a time.

This theory does not explain why AI accept other treaties so readily, since AI accepts trade treaties far more than one out of 20 times. I think that may be found at the end of the AI politics, under the Accept Trade lines. These seem to indicate an automatic acceptance of trade if the trade values fall within certain percentages.

Any insight would be appreciated.

[Repo Man]

No comments? Either I'm way out in left field or I'm breaking new ground here.

I had some time over the weekend to play with the AI and digest them a bit more. As soon as time permits, I'll share my thoughts in detail; but for now I'll say that there seems to be a lot of unlocked potential in the AI scripts.

By using extreme numbers, I have been able to make the AI do what I want and confirm that most lines do what I think they do. However, there does seem to be a bug in the peace routine ... no mater what I do, including changes, waiting, whatever, AI will never ever accept a peace treaty. I don't recall AI every accepting a peace treaty in any game, and others seem to be finding the same problem.

One possible fix I haven't tried yet is changing the AI "accepts treaties from enemies" to true. It might be rejecting the peace offers since the offer is coming from an enemy.

For a preview of what I'm working on, I have some rough ideas for honorable races which act more honorable, especially towards weaker powers, aggressive races which exploit weakness, giving some races a personality of 'long to anger and long to forgive,' a psychotic race which really acts psychotic, a barbarian horde mindset, a trader AI which the AI aggressively seeks out trade alliances, and possibly some political bluffing by the AI.(My thought there is using general Messages to mimic true demands, thereby making human players decide whether or not it is a modded general message or a real demand).

Hopefully I will have some nuts and bolts posted by the end of the week.

[Master Belisarius]

Hey, but where is placed the setting "accepts treaties from enemies"?

Also, I believe that the setting: "Turns Since Last War Before Friendly Treaty" is very important to determine the AI behavior.

[This message has been edited by Master Belisarius (edited 22 October 2001).]

[Repo Man]

quote:

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Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
Hey, but where is placed the setting "accepts treaties from enemies"?

Also, I believe that the setting: "Turns Since Last War Before Friendly Treaty" is very important to determine the AI behavior.

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I was referring to the end section of the AI Politics file; there are a slew of lines which toggle on or the AI's ability to accept various treaties and proposals. While there is no specific line for non agression treaty, I thought that perhaps it was somehow tied to other types of treaties.

Unfortunatly, even when all are set to "true" the AI still refuses to accept peace treaties.

With respect to turns before Last treaty et al, I tried the following.
1- I raised the percent chance for an AI to accept treaties to 100%. This would remove any random factor in testing. For all treaties when the AI is not at war, it performed as expected and the AI accepted each and every treaty.

2- I lowered the number of turns before a peace treaty to 1. Even after 20 or 30 turns of attempts _after_ brotherly was reached, the AI still refused every peace offer.

3- I left the number of turns before peace to the default 15. AI still refused to accept treaties.

I made sure the AI was brotherly before trying.

I have never seen an AI, standard or modded, either offer a peace treaty or accept a peace treaty.

Has anyone **ever** seen an AI make peace?

[Master Belisarius]

"I was referring to the end section of the AI Politics file; there are a slew of lines which toggle on or the AI's ability to accept various treaties and proposals. "

But there, doesn't exist a line to accept/reject treaty proposals...
I don't think that lines like reject to leave a system, or reject to give a gift, or reject to remove ships from a system, could determine that the AI never will accept a peace treaty.

"Has anyone **ever** seen an AI make peace?"

Sure. I saw it several times, in my test AI games. But only peaceful races, and no, I have not any example now!