AI nation skills

[Taqwus]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[Zeldor]

Folket:

That's what I plan to do next time, but I would prefer not to use tricks like that. And choosing higher difficulty does not make AI make wiser choices with scales and so on.

[Sombre]

Well you can start them as a human player, choose appropriate scales and then turn them over to AI. But I'm pretty sure the impossible AI is always stronger, because it gets a huge bonus to pretty much everything.

[NTJedi]

Zeldor said:
Folket:

That's what I plan to do next time, but I would prefer not to use tricks like that. And choosing higher difficulty does not make AI make wiser choices with scales and so on.

That's why I use map edit commands to provide the AI with strong scales, strong blessings, Mighty/Impossible difficutly setting and pretenders it won't blindly send into the death match arena.
Much more powerful results than starting a nation as human then switching to AI.

[Folket]

Well, I find that it is not as fun when you know what you are up against.