Mod: Better Independents

[Foodstamp]

NP at all, glad I could help. This idea was worth the little time trouble shooting to get to use. Nice job thinking outside the box when it comes to helping the AI.

[MaxWilson]

So far I really like it. I hadn't realized how annoyingly stressful the provinces full of militia were. I notice that Atavi are still recruitable, and perhaps I'll use a Chieftain to lead my Umbrals. Much as I like the NI maps, it's nice to have the option to recruit the non-boring commanders.

(Of course the Atavi are still there because of Bandar Log, but if I really wanted to I could #copystats Bandar Log's version and change the resource cost on the poptype one. Maybe I will later. Agartha shouldn't really have access to shortbows with decent precision, or worse yet Sticks and Stones with Strength of Giants--worse than longbows. )

-Max

[Foodstamp]

I have been playing a pretty massive game as well with this mod. Here are my observations so far.

The AI builds less units, but atleast the units it build are useful. I think the AI gave me a harder time before, because he would hit me on so many fronts.

Now the attacks are normally concentrated in a few armies instead of a gazillion militia forces taking provinces left and right with me having to chase them down all over the map, one province behind them the whole time

It may be my imagination, but it seems like my load times have gone way down now that the AI has to use it's forts to produce units. I am at a point in my current game with around 35 nations on a medium sized map where the turn loading would reach a point where I would call it quits. With this mod, the turn processing seems fairly reasonable, and I think it is because the AI does not have to figure out what to do with all those trash units.

I like the mod, I will probably use it for now on in my single player games, or atleast until someone comes up with a more elegant solution to the junk indies and the AIs <3 for them.

[Edi]

Thanks for the comments, guys!

The reason it decreases hosting time for turns is directly related to the number of units that have been recruited in the game. Each one of those units takes up memory, requires appropriate calculations in battle etc, which slows the game down. That's why the hard limit for units that can be on the map at the same time was only tripled from Dom2 instead of being maxed out. Maxed out, it would bring any system, no matter how top of the line, to its knees.

[Sombre]

I like it. I still prefer the NI maps, partly because I like non-site indy mages being absent.

This mod has a big advantage over NI maps in the respect that it can be used with random maps.

[Foodstamp]

I found a bug with this mod. When you conquer keeps formerly held by the AI, if those forts are able to recruit units that have had their resource costs raised, the AI will still try to create those units.

This causes the queue to back up with 800 resource commanders and units that will not allow them to recruit their national units from the keep. So the only place the AI can build units at are their original capital keeps. If we can find a fix for this bug the AI would be more challenging.

As it stands right now, this mod makes the AI less challenging I have noticed in my single player games. I still like the mod though because I get tired of fighting indy zergs.

[Edi]

Damn. So much for that idea then. I suppose the AI makes its recruitment decisions based on the original cost of the units, using the original values, since mods are just an overlay on it.

Looks like we're back to square one or using NI maps. Highly annoying. Thanks for letting us know.

[Ballbarian]

Edi, couldn't you just raise the gold cost instead of resources, then the AI wouldn't be able to even add the unit to the queue unless it had too much unspent gold. (Might be that you already discussed this and I just missed it.)

[Edi]

The problem with that is that you can get upwards of 50 militia from events. If each one of those costs 800 gold, the upkeep will wreck the economy.

And even then, it is possible that the AI would make purchasing decisions based on the original values.

I suppose it's worth a try, just so long as I do not change the militia type (monster 30) you can get from unit events. I'll post a modified mod later. Right now I do not have the luxury of time to test how it works, so I would really appreciate it if somebody played a test game or two to see if the gold alteration helps. I'll test enough to see that we don't get "bad mongold" or similar errors.

What we really need is to be able to mod existing poptypes so that we can reassign different units to them. That way it would be easy to disable any necessary units. Especially if you designed a good poptype mod that disables the problem units, then start a game with a blank NI mod where you copy the actual NI mod contents, so the units that appear as indie defenders will be according to vanilla game and then the problem units only get disabled after that.

[Edi]

IF the bloody attachments work, this post should contain a new version that replaces rcost 500 with gcost 9000 (10k or bigger is ignored as invalid value but does not crash the game).

EDIT: So, they do NOT work. Again. Just a moment and I'll upload it to my own webspace.

EDIT 2: File uploaded, link in the first post, and for good measure, here as well.