House Rules against the AI

[Sombre]

Good luck with that. How many years have you been talking about it again?

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Good luck with that. How many years have you been talking about it again?

Heehee. Yeah I end up doing about 1 a year. Not like some of the fast burner mod makers.
And dominions has dropped on the list. As far as this project goes I havent gotten very far in even play testing my own efforts from the other thread, or the mods done for AI such as NTJedi. On the other hand mentioning it shouldnt hurt since there seem to be people who speak up that have much more specific info on what the AI does and doesnt do well than I have.

[Tollund]

Of course it would be possible. Just create a nation where the AI can recruit juggernauts as troops and vampire lords as commanders for 1 gold and 1 resource each. It would easily crush any human player then, but still wouldn't be a very interesting opponent.

Anyways, you're still conflating the AI with nation/pretender design. The AI is the decision making engine. It cannot be modified, changed, or affected in any way by the players. One can create better pretenders and cheat in other ways for the AI, but this is _not_ AI modding.

[kenmtraveller]

I haven't played MP, but have played SP exhaustively.

My latest rule , is

1) all AIs on impossible and aggressive
2) I'm not allowed to recruit troops or mercenaries. I only get starting troops, commanders, troops from random events, and nationals summons.

Ken

[Edi]

Since the AI can't be modded directly, about the only way that it can be affected is by limiting its choices, which is the driving force behind both the Better Independents mod and the No Independents maps.

They work fairly well given the limitations, but fighting the AI is always dealing with hordes and fairly little magic (in light of the enormous potential that you see wielded in MP games). With the BI and NI solutions, you just face hordes of quality troops and more national troops instead of identical militia/light infantry hordes.

Something that would help if it were possible to set non-random AIs, ala creating an AI pretender with the point bonuses that could only be assigned to an AI nation (just like you can create and load pretenders for human controlled nations). Sure, you'd know what kind of build you're up against, but it would make for a better SP game experience when you don't have half the AIs turmoil/sloth/death/misfortune 3, which causes them to fall apart after around twenty turns.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Edi

Something that would help if it were possible to set non-random AIs, ala creating an AI pretender with the point bonuses that could only be assigned to an AI nation (just like you can create and load pretenders for human controlled nations). Sure, you'd know what kind of build you're up against, but it would make for a better SP game experience when you don't have half the AIs turmoil/sloth/death/misfortune 3, which causes them to fall apart after around twenty turns.

Thats part of the SemiRand program. Run your map thru it before playing and it will attach a randomly selected pre-built pretender/scales for the AIs you select. Most are versions of player builds but some by Stavros are quite cranked and well thought out.

[Foodstamp]

I hear a lot of people say the Better Independents mod works well but I have to ask how you got around the huge flaws that the mod had before.

In the past the Better Independents mod either increased the gold cost or the resource cost of the bad Independent units. This created two scenarios that pretty much destroyed the AI.

If the gold cost was raised, Militia events would devastate the AI's economy.

If the resources were raised, the AI would not be able to produce units in any castle except the capital because it would queue up the independent units that had the resource cost it could never hope to meet ultimately only allowing armies to be built at the capital.

How did you get around these limitations?

[Edi]

The current version fixes it so that units generated by events don't have altered gold costs but the same units in national rosters are replaced by a copied unit that does have higher cost. I never ran into the queue problem myself.

[Foodstamp]

Originally Posted by Edi

The current version fixes it so that units generated by events don't have altered gold costs but the same units in national rosters are replaced by a copied unit that does have higher cost. I never ran into the queue problem myself.

What about the standard militia event?

To test the resource hang up I am talking about, you only need to take over any AI controlled castle besides their capital. I am pretty sure the AI makes the same decisions in provinces without castles but you just don't see the queue hang up because that bug only allows you to see the queued units when you conquer a castle.

If the AI doesn't do this anymore, I may give it another shot!

[Edi]

Originally Posted by Foodstamp

What about the standard militia event?

To test the resource hang up I am talking about, you only need to take over any AI controlled castle besides their capital. I am pretty sure the AI makes the same decisions in provinces without castles but you just don't see the queue hang up because that bug only allows you to see the queued units when you conquer a castle.

If the AI doesn't do this anymore, I may give it another shot!

The standard militia that appears by event is unmodded in terms of gold cost. It will not cause bankruptcy. It will also be recruitable in the gold cost version from those poptypes that have it (two or three, so you see some of it in the AI armies). Nations that had other crap in their rosters still have them, but as copies. So e.g. if they had light cavalry 26, they now have other units (unused) that had light cav copystatted on them.

If the queued up units don't show outside castles, then yes, that would be a problem for the resource mod. I use the combo or the gold cost version myself most of the time. So the resource version may or may not suffer from that problem.

The only problem with gold cost mod is that enslaving indies via astral magic can be hazardous to your finances, so a look at the mod code and the poptype list in the Dom3 DB is advisable before experimenting.