Mod: SemiRandom AI

[Gandalf Parker]

Grabbing a random number and making it a unit, commander, or pretender has its pros and cons. I cant see any of the stats.

So I noticed early on that some of the most powerful units showed up as 0 cost and 1 resource. That would not be so good to have an AI get ahold of for some major demons and summons to be ble to recruit the max number each turn. So I randomly assign a cost. I wanted it to be in line with the cost of a big surprise unit, and not low enough for the AI to fill the army with them no matter what they were. And unfortunately I cannot check to see if there already is a gold cost before changing it. So all of the added ones get a new gold cost of 40+(10 * random of 0 to 15) and commanders get a gold cost of 50+(10*random of 0 to 20)

The pretenders gold setting defines their points cost. So they get a random gold setting also. Ive been playing with those amounts.
They also get a path cost of 10*random of 0 to 7
and a dominion of 1+random of 0 to 3

I am truly math-clueless so my testing tends to be to just plug a number in and play it for abit to see if I like it. Feel free to offer up better formulas.

This program might end up splitting a number of ways.
As an addition to the SemiRand program.
Only for creating random nations for players.
Only for creating random nations for AIs.
And server-side to create a change to a MOD file.

The last one I have been testing with mixed results. I can create a series of games on my server every day such as SR_AI_xxxxxx and tell people they must have the stub.dm in their mod directory in order to play. The version they download would be about 4 lines. Just a blank placeholder so the game knows to use it. The mod can be modified at the server end to include most of what I have done. That way they can play any of the games without having to download a new mod. But only certain things work that way. I can add, delete, move around units betwen nations. But I cannot modify them. Same with the sites. So the gold-cost thing would be a problem. I might have to create an extended version which grabs the choices from files listing only the acceptable units.

[Gandalf Parker]

Yes I was also pleased with how the sites came out. This is the list it selects from...

data "Bolivar's Tower of Reflections","Academy of High Magics","Animist's Hut"
data "Assassins Guild","Azure Academy","Bile Marsh","Black Tower","Library"
data "Blood Henge","Castle Arcanum","Caveman Cavern","Ebony Tower","Litter Skull"
data "Citadel of the Lore Masters","Death Mound Downs","Flower Swamp"
data "Forest of a Thousand Streams","Forest of Avendron","Grayshade Forest"
data "High Temple of the Magii","Ivory Tower","Library of Time","Mirrorlake"
data "Mirror Wall Palace","Moon Mages Circle","Moonvine Circle"
data "Navigators Guild","Poison Glades","Telesterion","The Ebony Circle"
data "Temple of the Sacred River","Temple of the Solar Bull"
data "Temple of the Turning Tide","The Crystal Academy","Whispering Woods"
data "Tower of the Golden Order","Tower of the Iron Order"
data "Tower of the Silver Order","Twice Walled Tower","Twin Spire Tower"

That was just a quick grab of some from Edi's database. I got forced that direction because I couldnt make the #startsite work with a number instead of the full name. But I like the results. Sometimes the results suck (though never quite worthless) and other times it totally kicks ASCii.
I might have to go the same route with the rest of the program. Create long lists of acceptable choices. Wide ranged but not insane. Or maybe I will export Edi's database (spreadsheet actually ) into a csv file and use it directly.

[Gandalf Parker]

Ok here is a batch of the result files so you can see how varied it is.
http://www.dom3minions.com/~mmdom3/SRAI/

And the .yab file is the program (dont laugh too hard). Its ascii and displays fine in my browser.

@Stavis_L.
The SemiRand is always on my mind. Originally there was vanilla, then my chaos stuff (maps, mods, programs all using maximum randoms). Then when people complained about it being too random there was the SemiRand project which was my original ideas but I always had too much fun with the randoms to do it. Ballbarian has done an excellent job of running with it.

Long ago I complained that a SemiRand program would do much better with a database to work off of. Now Edi has done much of that. I used to make my living programming databases but now I just dont have the attention span to carry out my initial plans for it.

I do think that it could be worked into SemiRand. Not only randomly placed logical provinces, and pre-created gods with logical scales, but toss in a few randomly created nations on numbers 77-88.

[Gandalf Parker]

OK added another file to that directory. The ChaosMod is an example of where I started. WAY too wild a result even for me to play.