AI nation skills

Zeldor · #1 October 22nd, 2007, 11:19 AM

I play SP when I want many turns a day, I won't get that in MP.

Some nations are weaker in SP not because they are made weak but because AI cannot handle them. I don't think mods can change it, unless you can rewrite a lot of AI mechanics.

Morkilus · #2 October 22nd, 2007, 02:27 PM

If you'd like to see some huge armies - which the AI is better with than mages, for sure - set the Supply and Resources multipliers to 300. Setting Gold to 300 will give you so much you'll be able to build a couple castles every turn by the second year, which changes the game drastically. Between this and the No Indies mods, you usually have quite a bit to deal with pretty quickly.

Taqwus · #3 October 22nd, 2007, 05:54 PM

It's possible to handicap things by adjusting nations' starting troops or sites, or doing things like giving them modded immobile monsters which serve as gem generators or so forth.

Modding an AI's nation-specific commanders to all have a supply bonus would go a long way to preventing mass starvation without freeing the human player from the same constraints. Giving a research bonus to its mages might also help.

You can't block it from going Turmoil/Death/Misfortune on a large map without actually setting up the sides, but the Misfortune could be ameliorated by fortune-teller abilities.

NTJedi · #4 October 22nd, 2007, 08:59 PM

Quote:

Morkilus said:
Setting Gold to 300 will give you so much you'll be able to build a couple castles every turn by the second year, which changes the game drastically.

One downside is the AI opponents don't march beyond a castle province until the province has been captured.

Zeldor · #5 October 23rd, 2007, 07:49 AM

I am sure there are simple solutions to improve AI skill and it wouldn't be so much work to do, for example:

- make AI choose scales and pretenders somewhat wisely
- make AI recognize geographically strategic provinces
- stop AI from using extremely stupid ideas like hordes of indies with C'tis miasma

Wikd Thots · #6 October 23rd, 2007, 10:54 AM

Quote:

Zeldor said:
I am sure there are simple solutions to improve AI skill and it wouldn't be so much work to do, for example:

- make AI choose scales and pretenders somewhat wisely
- make AI recognize geographically strategic provinces
- stop AI from using extremely stupid ideas like hordes of indies with C'tis miasma

the first item we can already do ourselves with maps and mods

the second thing needs more defining. Some people would say "build a castle in a choke point then dont take the neighboring provinces" but others would say "stupid AI built a castle on a chokepoint that only had 3 neighbors"

last item is out completely. There is only one AI and it builds its armies the same for all nations. The thinking must be something like "build x infantry, build x archers, build x mounted, build 1 commander or mage". And now you want "unless you are ctis with miasma then build". But then we end up with lots of "unless you are" all through the code. That would be a lot of work. And it would really slow the game down for solo playing

Zeldor · #7 October 23rd, 2007, 12:44 PM

Wikd Thots:

Point 1 would be really easy to implement. At least scales.

Pint 3 is indeed very complicated, but it should be like that

Human plays every nation in different way and so should AI. I should have gone to cognitive science so I could help with that...

Folket · #8 October 23rd, 2007, 09:02 PM

Zeldor, since you have an intimite understanding of how strong the different nations are when played by the AI why not just adjust difficult for the nations accordingly. Perhaps increase difficulty for Bandar Log and Caelum. Or decrease difficulty for Ermor and Pangaea.

If you want different nations to get strong in each game without before hand knowledge you may put three AIs to higher difficult and all with random nations.

Wikd Thots · #9 October 25th, 2007, 12:50 PM

Quote:

Zeldor said:
Wikd Thots:

Point 1 would be really easy to implement. At least scales.

Pint 3 is indeed very complicated, but it should be like that

Human plays every nation in different way and so should AI. I should have gone to cognitive science so I could help with that...

That's true of point one also. It would still end up having to be a list of every nation and the scales it would take. Plus I can come up with 2 or 3 standard scales for every nation depending on how its played. If you think that there is a set of scales that will work without doing an "IF" for each nation then let us know what is it.

But if they did do an if for each nation then it wouldn't matter much since the lag of thinking would only be at the creation of the game. Not as bad as trying to do it for in-game thinking like buying reasonable troops.