AI nation skills

[Wikd Thots]

thejeff said:
Not necessarily a list of scales for every nation. I want the randomness in there. I don't want the same pretender design every time, nor a list of 2-3 choices for each nation.

But a couple of things ruled in/out would help a lot.
Some general rules like:
Don't take 3 misforture and 3 turmoil.
and some specific ones:
Neifelhiem: take cold 2 or 3
EA/LA Mictlan: high dominion and/or awake pretender
High production with MA Ulm

Don't think of it as optimizing the AI's design, but avoiding stupid mistakes.

On another note:
If the code is well-designed, there should be little to no lag even for in-game nation specific thinking. You don't have a series of checks at every decision point, you have separate, preferably inherited, functions for races that want special handling.
(Of course, it's probably not well-designed. Most code, including mine, isn't. That's not a criticism, just an observation. Large codebases tend to grow haphazardly and need to be rethought from the ground up, but there is rarely time or interest.)

Well go ahead and write it all out. Post it so we can see it (I already have some problems with your examples).

And, the code wasn't designed at all. It was written on an Atari many MANY years ago and has grown in pasted-in code ever since. That is part of what Johan has been saying the whole time. Changes like some people want would involve rewriting the whole thing from scratch. Not fun (and then won't happen)

[Wikd Thots]

HoneyBadger said:
Well, I'd elect myself, but I've got no working computer to use. Won't have, for a year plus. That and I'm not a very good player anyway, so the AI doesn't need that much help squashing me.

Don't bother. Somber has gotten that argument many times.
A better AI mod needs to be written by one of these people who feels that the AI sucks and they know exactly what it should do to play better. Various threads have tried to pull out the suggestions. I think there was one for a better Mictlan AI that Somber and someone else did finally make mods from.

ALSO there is the SemiRandom project. It lets us all design gods, scales, equipment choices for the AI to start with. And it will randomly pick from those files when it starts a game. If more people did AI design files for it then it would have a bigger pool to choose from but still all be sensible choices. That is probably easier to go with than trying to get the game code rewritten

[Edi]

HoneyBadger said:
In addition to the NI maps, someone ought to create mods for the various nations that eliminate units the AI shouldn't be creating, within it's own nation.

*points at sig*

Though I need to update that mod to the one I'm using right now. The currently public one is screwed up. I also need to rename it to "Better Independents"

[thejeff]

The "if the code is well-designed" part was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. As I said, code is rarely well-designed if designed at all and I knew enough of Dominions history wo assume it wasn't. Had forgotten the Atari beginnings, though.

Still, I suspect that kind of logic wouldn't increase thinking time significantly if implemented well. Especially since that's already a tiny part of the lag between turns. Impossible to know without looking into the code, though.

I'm not sure what you mean by "write it all out." It's not going to be implemented, not is it moddable, so I'm not sure what the point is in coming up with a complete detailed list. Nor am I qualified. I haven't even played most nations.

All I was saying, is that a few common sense rules could prevent the AI from making broken pretender design choices. Some of which, on further reflection, it probably already does. I think the races are biased towards their preferred temperatures, at the very least.

The rules need not be complete to be useful. Rules that prevented a particular bad design would still be an improvement, even if other problems were still possible.

I am curious what problems you have with my examples? I was going for obvious and non-controversial.



Hmmm. catgod reads pretender files, right? Does that mean we know enough to write them? That would let us play with tweaking random pretender design. Couldn't get the AI bonuses though.

[Edratman]

Wikd Thots said:

ALSO there is the SemiRandom project. It lets us all design gods, scales, equipment choices for the AI to start with. And it will randomly pick from those files when it starts a game. If more people did AI design files for it then it would have a bigger pool to choose from but still all be sensible choices. That is probably easier to go with than trying to get the game code rewritten

I will help get this ball rolling. I will have a minimum of 10 AI pretenders by Nov. 1st. If everyone chips in 5 to 10, there should be a substantial number of pretenders available.

Now I need some guidelines:
1. Should they be generic or nation specific pretenders?
2. Do you stay within the game points limitations or is a lttle cheating acceptable? (IE, if another 10 points or so are required to give an additional level 4 bless, will that be considered acceptable.
3. What format is required for the submissions? I would think a text format that works with map editting would be good, because it allows flexability. But I have 3 different editors that work on map edit and while all 3 are compatable with the game, I do not if they would be mutually compatable with some central compiler.
4. Where do I send them? (I am not computer knwledgeable enough to serve that role.)
5. Any other guidelines or suggestions?

[Zeldor]

Wikd Thots:

I've never heard about that Semi Random project but it sounds great. I wish it was posted as a big sticky so people would know about it. Any more info on it? It should have pretenders divided by map size too [at least small and big map].

[Edi]

For those wondering about the NI (or actually BI, as of today) mod, it's been updated.

[Edratman]

Edi, does this mean that I should not start making pretenders for AI or is that a seperate issue?

[Edi]

That's a separate issue. These mods only prevent the AI (and players) from recruiting hordes of indie archers, light infantry, militia, light cavalry and other crap that the AI generally likes to use and forces one to rely much more on national troops. The nice indies like crossbowmen, the good heavy infantry, heavy cav etc are still available, as are specials like amazons etc and you can mass archers if you get woodsman provinces, but it makes the AI nations far more interesting since they don't all use the same horde tactics with the same units under different flags. The mods do NOTHING about the AI still designing crap pretenders on auto.

[Wikd Thots]

Zeldor said:
Wikd Thots:

I've never heard about that Semi Random project but it sounds great. I wish it was posted as a big sticky so people would know about it. Any more info on it? It should have pretenders divided by map size too [at least small and big map].

It started as a way to change Gandolphs random maps to something more sensable. Instead of just wild things thrown everywhere people are supposed to design logical provinces. Where the pop, sites, guards, extra equipment on commanders made sense. Such as a province where a magic site allows you to recruit sorcerors should have sorcerors in the province defense. And then a map is randomized from all of those province files to have really cool surprises all over it.

But recently they added sensable AI gods also.

You can check it out in this thread
RanGen program