Hello everyone,
I tried to do some XML tweaks to the AI to encourage it to buid more troops for war and to take your cities in higner priorities when attacking. let me know what you find out, the mod is in the mod browser.

waiting for your feedback!

V4 is out:
- AI more aggressive when at war
- AI will not sign peace too quickly especially during stalemate.
- AI wil be more enclined to kill your damaged unit
- AI will focus more on capture your cities
- AI will create more units to defend already owned cities

list of changes V3 (compared to AI):
- when attacking cities ai will target more the city than before
- when attacking cities ai will try to destroy your units before attacking unharmed units
- when AI thinks it has enough military units it will create more units than before (still lower priority than building)(new from V2)
- when at war AI will favor a lot more offense and defense than before (economy should be more war focused)
- when preparing for war AI will favor offensive units, then defensive and a lot less archery units
- it will create a bit more military building when preparing for war
- city states more defensive with their army
- when AI thinks it is winning wars it will favor a bit more defense (to avoid being defenseless if another civ attacks when all their army is elsewhere)
- when AI thinks it is loosing war it will favor a lot more defense than before
- when the AI needs ranged it should create also other types of units




Elvince

May I ask you what file and what line did you modify to change AI cities attacking priority modifer?

you will find a lot to fiddle with in that aspect in CIV5TacticalMoves.xml. enjoy :)

Thanks but do you understand this:

<Type>TACTICAL_PILLAGE</Type>
<OperationsCanRecruit>false</OperationsCanRecruit>
<OffenseFlavorWeight>100</OffenseFlavorWeight>
<Priority>40</Priority>

Can you give me small tutorial please? How should I change this to make AI pillage more often (right now he almost never does)

The biggest problem with battle AI is pathing and coverage. units constantly block each other and they keep throwing archers to the frontline and then get annihilated by player's cavalry.

I played a game on huge map immortal, the most unit types I saw from AI is ranged units, very little melee units, and almost zero mounted units. my cavalry, once upgraded with mobility, can run around mow down archers without fear of retaliation.

If only AI made a few mounted units, they could actually do some damage.

The biggest problem with battle AI is pathing and coverage. units constantly block each other and they keep throwing archers to the frontline and then get annihilated by player's cavalry.

I played a game on huge map immortal, the most unit types I saw from AI is ranged units, very little melee units, and almost zero mounted units. my cavalry, once upgraded with mobility, can run around mow down archers without fear of retaliation.

If only AI made a few mounted units, they could actually do some damage.

is that with the mod enabled? curious as to how well this mod works.

Could you give a short summary of what's changed?

Also, if the AI builds more units, doesn't it make it even more "backwards"? I think the main problem is not with the numbers but the lack of strategy. I even got used to rarely ever building land units, what minors give me is normally more than enough to grind up the AI army in some defensive spots.

And did you do something with siege units? I've yet to see any being used by the AI. Especially shocking after Civ4 AI's catapult obsession. :) My guess there is that the AI don't build those because of it's absolutely inability to screen anything, so it would be just wasted hammers. But did you try that?

I'm looking at your mod, and it's hard to figure out what you did because it consists largely of copies of the game's own XML files.

The big idea in Civ5 modding is that your mod only needs to include the values you're changing, not the ones you're leaving the same. That lets it coexist with other mods. The project sounds promising, but you should sort this out early in development!

re Inverted: I think that the AI building more units is a good idea, up to a point.

Building too many units would indeed make it lose in the economy race, but too many times I've encountered AIs that just roll over and let me stomp them because they have like 3 units. Or even militarily powerful AIs who leave their capital undefended when my city 6 tiles away has a sizable army. (Gee, I wasn't planning on a conquest victory, but I may just take up that offer!)

It seems like it should be possible to tweak the AI's assessment of "can my neighbors mercilessly crush me?" without giving it an unhealthy obsession with military units.

There is two parameters that I modified that I think improves the game. Base Units to defend per city is 1 default, I put it at 3. Second there is a base number of units which are set to 2 default I put it at 4. The AI now defends better and does not attack like a crazy person with all their units.

Works great. Its in Global AI defines,

<Row Name="AI_STRATEGY_DEFEND_MY_LANDS_UNITS_PER_CITY">
<Row Name="AI_STRATEGY_DEFEND_MY_LANDS_BASE_UNITS">

If I understand correctly, that means that the AI will keep 3n + 4 units, where n is the number of cities, in their territory, instead of n+2. Am I right? Tripling the units per city seems excessive.

Do large civs ever manage to launch an attack in that situation? If you have 10 cities, keeping 34 units around that you're not even using for war has to be hugely expensive. I think a subtler change would work better, such as from n+2 to n+6.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding it. Is there a list of what all these XML rows actually mean somewhere?

I played a game on huge map immortal, the most unit types I saw from AI is ranged units, very little melee units, and almost zero mounted units. my cavalry, once upgraded with mobility, can run around mow down archers without fear of retaliation.

If only AI made a few mounted units, they could actually do some damage.

I actually did reduce the importance of building archers in the current version compared to melee units. I am not sure there is a specific factor for mounted units. I'll check.

I'm looking at your mod, and it's hard to figure out what you did because it consists largely of copies of the game's own XML files.

The big idea in Civ5 modding is that your mod only needs to include the values you're changing, not the ones you're leaving the same. That lets it coexist with other mods. The project sounds promising, but you should sort this out early in development!

rspeer, you are definitely right mate, I went the old fashion way... I will try to clean it in a few version, right now I am trying to see which factors have an impact.

There is two parameters that I modified that I think improves the game. Base Units to defend per city is 1 default, I put it at 3. Second there is a base number of units which are set to 2 default I put it at 4. The AI now defends better and does not attack like a crazy person with all their units.

Works great. Its in Global AI defines,

<Row Name="AI_STRATEGY_DEFEND_MY_LANDS_UNITS_PER_CITY">
<Row Name="AI_STRATEGY_DEFEND_MY_LANDS_BASE_UNITS">

Matte, thx mate I'll look into it for V3, but I don't want to cripple too much the ai capacity to attack.

everyone please let me know what you see as different when trying the mod regarding wars with the AI. I am working on V3 but lack usable feedback. I will modify my original post to be more clear about my changes.

Elvince

If I understand correctly, that means that the AI will keep 3n + 4 units, where n is the number of cities, in their territory, instead of n+2. Am I right? Tripling the units per city seems excessive.

Do large civs ever manage to launch an attack in that situation? If you have 10 cities, keeping 34 units around that you're not even using for war has to be hugely expensive. I think a subtler change would work better, such as from n+2 to n+6.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding it. Is there a list of what all these XML rows actually mean somewhere?

We can only guess on what the base mean, I suspect it means 1 city 7 units 2 cities 10 units. In my current game that seem to be the case. Flavors of leader also affect this. That why some dont have any defenders in vanilla.

I increased them higher to see an effect and it worked. Right now I want my AI to defend better as they suck at attacking. :)

When they fix the tactical AI, I would lower these. I also lower maintenace ost to let the AI have more troops without being penalized, I really would like them to keep a decent defense and at the same time be able to attack.


As I mentioned before the changes I made greatly improves early game AI, as they are less likely to be mad(Want to declare war) at a civilization thats way off beacuse they have no units

Great to see this mod come up already! :goodjob:
So I have an idea for how to improve the AI's proficiency in battle, it's in keeping with your tweaks which account for how much the AI sucks at using ranged units:

On defense, the AI should park a siege(or at least its best ranged) unit inside its city. This way it will be able to continue to do reasonable damage until the city is taken. The AI sucks at protecting these units from attacks and its too easy to go for them first. The only solution is to have one at least in a city where it is temporarily invulnerable.

hey bobby I'll look into it, but I did not find any xml being that specific.
you should try my mod as for what I can notice so far the AI builds less archers but more of other types than before, making it more dangerous when attacking...

Thanks Elvince. I'm going to give your mod a go after my current game wraps up. I had another idea which you can try and implement in your mod as well. One of the main problems with the AI in combat is not only does it not use units well, but it also fields way too many outdated units.

Your mod is going to make them field more units which is better, but I feel it may be more efficient if in conjunction with that, the AI strongly prioritises upgrading its units (you'll need to make upgrading cheaper as well). If you also make it so warriors upgrade to spears then you'll have gone a long way towards balancing out the power of the horseman rush which is ridiculously OP at the moment.

Feedback:

I am currently using your mod on a small pangea map with 6 civs and a couple of city states.

Well it seems like the ai prepared better for war, but it failed landing on my coast since i blocked the few tiles that lead to me by land it tried using ships and i was surprised that i might end up fighting for survival cause of the massive transport invasion.

Turns out i was wrong.

They put their units into transportmode, and landed on their own coast again...with numerous units.

they got nailed by an arriving barbarian trireme after 5 turns of waiting at my coast... none of the 7-8+ units ever made it on my coast which was defenseless.

Never has the ai actually attacked my cities. They mostly walked around them trying to avoid to get hit by it aswell...

Have you been thinking of do some adjustment to battle bonuses?

I think the AI is severely handicaped by the possible bonuses and postioning advantage the player has at their disposal.

I currently change my game and lowered bonuses

1. Great General 15%
2. Positions 10%
3. Morale Honor 10%
4. Oligarchy 15% Bonus in homeland.
5. Fortify bonus 5% per turn - max 5 turns. 25%


I also have upped XP level to 15 from 10. Changed Range XP to 1 per attack or defence. This makes XP farming much harder and new units will have a chance against veterans , it also stops the powerful ranged units from climbing to fast. I also lower minimum damage for ranged units and upped hps to 15 from 10. Combined with the changes to bonuses this reduced the effect of uber archers drastically or the overpowered effect possible in some situations for other ranged units. Range units now mostly soften up the attacker and you still need melee units for the quick kill.

The tactical battles play much more evenly now, and the AI number advantage actually makes a real diffrence. You have to be more smart about using terrain.

You still get a bonus for positioning correctly but not as much. The Melee units have more room to manouver before they get cut down. Its harder to just use range units to snipe the melee units before the reach you specially in rough terrain.

I think Firaxis intentionally created higher bonuses so it made larger difference to improve the fun level of positiong and generals etc, but it bascially made it like everybody is playing on chieftain level when it comes to tactical battles. The huge problem with the way it currently works is related to the diffrence strength do to the math of battle, no wonder people can take the whole world with a few units. The AI production advantage is nullified because of the high strength diffrences due to these bonuses. This farily easy to realize, but as I said I think fun won over challange and balance.

And features that AI cant use that changes the balance to the degree these bonuses do, breaks the game balance, even if they are really fun on paper.

I think the main problem is not with the strong defense bonuses, as that is one of the rare things that AI actually realize in warfare. The main problem is that the AI is way too much obsessed with attacking. If you see an AI unit on hill+forest that you really dont want to attack, all you have to do is to move to a nearby defense hex and the AI will attack your unit. In which case its good position does no good to it.

Now that I had the chance to see siege and ships in the hands of the AI, Im not surprised the devs made those very low priority. Siege units (like ranged actually) are used by the AI as if they were melee. It will move its catapult right at your melee unit before trying to fire with it. The only chance it will use siege units at range is when the frontline is blocked by other units, but as soon as those fall, the siege units advance. I find it hard to believe but it still seems that they forgot to code the AI to at least try to use ranged units at range.
And for ships, there is a strong reason the AI doesnt like to build them: it is totally unable to use them. (much like sea transporting units that tend to just sit at your shore and never disembark) The brightest use was when it pillaged my work boats near a city, but once that was done, it just left the ship there to be shot at by the city, didnt even bother to shoot the city more than once every 3-4 turns. Likewise I could sail my caravel right through a pack of ships (frigates and destroyers) without the AI considering to attack it. Its a joke, really.

So I think for now you're best off if you make the AI strongly emphasize on melee units and try to make it a bit more defensive.

Some nice ideas on this tread :goodjob:

After thinking some more about those bonuses, I am convinced the game will be harder if bonuses are less dramatic. Two main reason.

1. AI wont use bonuses anyway to their best advantage (Even with better AI) so they mainly benefit the human player, sure AI use terrain but those bonus will stay the same.
2. AI use more fresh troops as they "waste" troops, the player tries to keep their troops alive and promote single "uber" units, the less powerful these uber units are the better balance between new and old.

Personally I think the large bonus is a relic of stack combat where it did not matter as much as number was more important and you could still kill a unit with enough units attacking it and with collateral damage, when you have fever units every unit is critical, if the human player can much easier get higher bonuses it just make the game to easy. Another bengif is that Terrain will also matter more and upgrading old units which the AI sucks at will also be less of a problem.

I also have upped XP level to 15 from 10. Changed Range XP to 1 per attack or defence. This makes XP farming much harder and new units will have a chance against veterans , it also stops the powerful ranged units from climbing to fast.

It's true - right now XP for units goes up pretty high, even when you 'farm' on really weak units/cities. And humna player can easily recieve few overpowerd units, that can't be countered by AI at all.

Espetially it's effective on Archipelago maps for ships - 1000+ XP destroyers are real DESTROYERS - they destroy everything up to 3 tiles inland and then you need only single land unit to capture broken citites in this range.

And is there any way to tell the ai to limit their army to a reasonable size?

to me it seems they ruin themselfes with it, which than leads to the situation that the losses they make in gold will be paid in research points. Leaving them damn unadvanced in lategame if u start in ancient. I had that situation pretty much in all games no matter what difficulty

Really? The AI builds too many units and doesn't use them?

That's much the reverse of what I've normally seen, which is either that the AI neglects to build units, or when it builds massive armies it soon fights a massive war that loses most of them.

Really? The AI builds too many units and doesn't use them?

That's much the reverse of what I've normally seen, which is either that the AI neglects to build units, or when it builds massive armies it soon fights a massive war that loses most of them.

The Ai actually do build units but if it does not loose them in war they cost them way to much. I hope firaxis address the whole unit upkeep cost soon. For now I just halved the overall unit upkeep cost. The bonus they get does not seem to offset the need for the AI to have more units due to being inferor in tactics.

So there is no option to tell the ai to not build too much stuff? *g

No idea if this is doable, since i din't even take a peek in the AI files, but i think a way to partially fix the AI flaws in battle is to reduce their "suicidal" behaviour.
Before attacking a unit the AI should evaluate the losses (calculated from the hammer value of the units, so a 300 hammers unit is worth 30 hammer for each damage and additional 300 hammers on a kill/loss) for both sides, and attack only if the odds are for him (if possible factoring subsequent attacks in the same turn from other units he owns). If not it should either move to a defensive position (if being attacked there would change odds in his favor) or retreat out of range if possible. This wouldn't give it the strategic depth of a human player, but would remove one of the biggest AI flaws (units going banzai agains heavvy fortified enemy units).

well some stuff will require the DLL SDK, here we can only tune existing behavior.
yet I have done another pass with V4 of my AI tweak, and I got attacked by a formidable american army pushing me to surrender in my test game.
you guys tell me what you think.
in V4 AI should be even more aggressive while at war while better at protecting already owned cities.
awaiting for your feedback!

So far I'm really enjoying this mod. I'm only as far as the classical era on my current game using v4, I play on marathon; but I really like how when you're at war with someone they really bear down on you with their army. For some reason I haven't had them actually siege my cities yet though. I was playing as Rome, Germany was attacking me, they had one group of archers and 3-4 warriors, they were focusing on taking down my warriors but never once attacked any of my cities even though they were standing close to them. Maybe something else was going through their mind at the time.

Also I was wondering about naval units. Are you planning on having the AI take advantage of naval units a little better, if you haven't already; haven't had time to test the enemy AI's naval capability with your mod yet.

Awesome work so far, though, great stuff:goodjob:

edit: Playing a bit further it looks like the AI does siege, they just get into position first it seems, so all is good in that respect.

glad you like it :)
for the naval I have not done anything yet and I doubt anything can be done but I'll look into it. were you on V3 or V4?

I started with v3, but play 4 now since it was released. But haven't done any testing for naval on either version.

I can add some experience with Sieges, The AI seem to be smart enough to calculate overall success to take a city based on units around it, if the chance is to low they will just stay there and wait for more units (reinforcement). I guess thats a good thing, like a real siege.

I just think they should break off if there is no reinforcement coming soon, so they dont get killed by ranged attacks. But I guess thats more of a personal preference. I think if they AI overall gets more concern about their unit health and actually retreats damaged units, the AI would get a nice boost.

I've been also using the mod that gives all units 25 hitpoints, as well as several other mods, and I find that mod quite nice especially in longer games such as marathon.

This way you'll have to make many attacks on an enemy unit before completely destroying it and it adds some more tactics, like more chances to attempt to retreat, and not getting cut down by city defenses so quickly.

But to counter the stronger units I'm also using the active city defense mod, so cities can hold out better.

At first I was wondering why the enemies didn't seem to be sieging but yes it appears, as you said, that they wait for reinforcements before sieging. I like how they do this because then there will be more units surrounding the city, pretty much like a blockage, then they just keep attacking the city, virtually suffocating it.

edit: Thinking about that siege system, has this been done in this mod for others situations as well? For example will the enemy scout out an area they wish to attack, then wait for reinforcements so that they can move a larger mo coherent force at their enemy?

Elvince ----> can you put on forum your modified xml file used for your mod please. I would like to take a look into it.

you will find them in your mod folder under my games, I only use the mod browser for files. I hope it helps.

cheers

Elvince

This mod breaks alot of early game AI. I had a game where 1-3 civs expanded like normal and became super power houses, usually the aggressive AI. Bismark had like 1200 score to my 700.

PROBLEM: majority of the civs like 12/15 all played on 1 city maybe 2 once it got to riflemen. The Ai had trouble making armies as set in your mod while expanding properly as to not screw itself completely.

My guess is bismark was able to develop properly cause he got free units from barbs. Ps i still beat bismark, with my 1 era back units, just goes to show how horrible this game is, and how uncompetitive the AI is. Without a huge advantage it is easy to attack retreat it to death just by using comon sense not even super cheap tactics. Bismark had gather 30000 gold im not kidding every other civ had like 1000, and he just kept fast buying riflemen and cannons and just was throwin them at me. Boring game, tactical game AI always dissapointing :X

This mod breaks alot of early game AI. I had a game where 1-3 civs expanded like normal and became super power houses, usually the aggressive AI. Bismark had like 1200 score to my 700.

PROBLEM: majority of the civs like 12/15 all played on 1 city maybe 2 once it got to riflemen. The Ai had trouble making armies as set in your mod while expanding properly as to not screw itself completely.

My guess is bismark was able to develop properly cause he got free units from barbs. Ps i still beat bismark, with my 1 era back units, just goes to show how horrible this game is, and how uncompetitive the AI is. Without a huge advantage it is easy to attack retreat it to death just by using comon sense not even super cheap tactics. Bismark had gather 30000 gold im not kidding every other civ had like 1000, and he just kept fast buying riflemen and cannons and just was throwin them at me. Boring game, tactical game AI always dissapointing :X

This mod is still beta, I believe, and so far it's head over heels better than vanilla. It might take more work to iron out several things from both modders and the devs, but eventually the ai should take shape.
P.S. In my gaming experience 'eventually' won't be as long as you think.

you will find them in your mod folder under my games, I only use the mod browser for files. I hope it helps.

cheers

Elvince

Can you write it down how exactly is named your mod in civ 5 mod browser? I can't find it. :crazyeye:

Can you write it down how exactly is named your mod in civ 5 mod browser? I can't find it. :crazyeye:

as the name of the thread indicates AI tweaks - Battle AI :)

This mod breaks alot of early game AI. I had a game where 1-3 civs expanded like normal and became super power houses, usually the aggressive AI. Bismark had like 1200 score to my 700.

PROBLEM: majority of the civs like 12/15 all played on 1 city maybe 2 once it got to riflemen. The Ai had trouble making armies as set in your mod while expanding properly as to not screw itself completely.



I will not pay attention to your last part which is not constructive for me, but can you give more details on what happened? I did not meet that in my games, I had one of all the civilizations I met indeed not expanding but then it attacked me and ... conquered me :(
but It is possible that in V4 as I added more importance to defense, maybe the AI lack enough to build settlers... could anyone else coroborate?

We can only guess on what the base mean, I suspect it means 1 city 7 units 2 cities 10 units. In my current game that seem to be the case. Flavors of leader also affect this. That why some dont have any defenders in vanilla.

I increased them higher to see an effect and it worked. Right now I want my AI to defend better as they suck at attacking. :)

When they fix the tactical AI, I would lower these. I also lower maintenace ost to let the AI have more troops without being penalized, I really would like them to keep a decent defense and at the same time be able to attack.


As I mentioned before the changes I made greatly improves early game AI, as they are less likely to be mad(Want to declare war) at a civilization thats way off beacuse they have no units
Did you lower maintenance for only the AI and not the player? How do you do this? Thanks in advance

Did you lower maintenance for only the AI and not the player? How do you do this? Thanks in advance

I lower a cross the board. There is a parameter in the global defines in Assets XML folder.

Its set to 50 as based, the paramater is called something like cost per units 100


If you lower it to 25 then you half the price.

I lower a cross the board. There is a parameter in the global defines in Assets XML folder.

Its set to 50 as based, the paramater is called something like cost per units 100


If you lower it to 25 then you half the price.
Do you raise the defense or hitpoints of early cities? I'm trying to stop AI vs AI early rushes.

My biggest preblem with Civ 5 is that, by mid-game, most AI civs are either really big or are down to just a couple of cities. I don't mind AIs taking cities from each other in the first half of the game; but I don't like to see too many civs almost eliminated by The Middle Ages. I hate discovering the "other" continent, only to find it's been overun by one or two massive AI empires.

This isn't going to be the most informative problem report, because I was running Battle AI along with other mods (specifically, all of Thalassicus's Balance mods that were out on October 7). But the AI is ideally supposed to deal somewhat gracefully with changes in game rules, so here goes.

I was England, on King level. America started fairly close to me, and did the typical hypocritical AI thing of yelling at me for settling vaguely near him while wedging a city in between the borders of two of mine on the next turn. That part's fine. But somehow he seemed to have no idea that my response would be to build two horsemen, a swordsman, and a catapult and invade him.

America had three cities to my four, and his total defenses seem to have consisted of a spearman and an archer. He left the archer undefended in range of the swordsman, and he built maybe one more unit during the war. It hardly took any effort to destroy him.

nice work. But I think those tweaks would be better if used along with some combat balance modifications. Another problem that makes the AI so easy is that the AI only have one layer of defense. If he loses one city, he loses the whole game. This is why the result of most games is determined before industry era. I think I would be better if u can add in some defensive bonus or make it easier for him to replenish his losses. Like increasing the strength of the unit that currently garrisoned in the city or for example double the effect of the defensive structures, or give a default bonus to the strength of the unit within the 1 tile rangle of the city.As replenishing losses, I think the production of combat units can simply be reduces. with the high maintenance costs looming above, the overall units count shouldnt be that different. with this kind of balance changes, it will actually cost the player something to take a city

Does this really need to have Affects Saved Games checked? It only needs to be checked if you're changing something that would break a save game if the mod were turned off, not just changing parameters etc.

Right now it makes it impossible to switch it in and out and try the same saved game with/without.

Hi, i'm interested in your mod, but I am wondering if you are still using whole xml files or using the method introduced by Civ5 (alter specific values for better inter-mod compatibility) ?

An update: I started another game (using jooyo's CCMAT without tech diffusion, which includes Battle AI, Thalassicus's Balance mods, and a few others). Still on King level.

This time the AI has been a formidable foe. It still isn't any good at tactics, but its approach has been "who needs tactics when you can send a ginormous wall of units".

And that's been working pretty well for the AI: I haven't been able to leave my territory for long enough to make a serious attack on an AI city, because I always have to be ready for the next wall of units.

So, great work. I don't know what made the first game so different.

What I think would be great, would be to somehow change the way how AI evaluates human player army.

Regardless how much we can improve AI, human player units will always be worth more combat wise, then similar units from AI civilization.

So wouldn't it be great, if when AI is deciding if someone is worth attacking (or mocking for their small army), that it takes into account that human player army is stronger then it looks. Something like +50-100% modifier in human favor. That way, AI will be aggressor less often against human and would have bigger army when it does so.

Of course, I have no idea if this is in any way possible without DLL modification.


P.S.
Another thing needed is additional "handicaps" at higher difficulties more suited to the way how Civ5 combat works.

Instead focusing on higher production and lower unit maintenance for AI army (which worked decently in Civ3/Civ4), they should start with bonus experience, to strengthen biggest weakness of AI troops: low survivability, which means less promotions then human player units.

Probably not possible currently, so it's wishful thinking on my part.

Ya, more experience for AI units are a great suggestion. From king and on, AI should get one extra promotion per each increase in difficulty for units right out of the gate. And those should be bonus promotions, it should not increase the experience required to gain next promotion from battle. That would even the playing field somewhat.

hi there. i'm poking around modbuddy, trying to improve stuff here and there, to make military conquest more balanced and fun in civ5. anyway, i've incorporated your changes in my small personal mod (which may or may not get to be anything more than that at some point :)) and in doing that, converted it to <update> format to see what you had changed. so here you are, use it if you want to: http://rapidshare.com/files/424510679/Update.rar

hey guys =)

just wanted to say I played my last game using this mod (v4) and I foud it very good ! it adds some challenge and it's a real pleasure to see AI armies be less dumb. I even saw some AI civs using ships (ok just a few, let's stay honest but it's better than none in the vanilla).
Some feedback :

*was playing on a custom earth map (y.a.h.e.m) and a CS captured an egyptian city instead of razing it. don't know if it has something to do with the AI tweaks but I enjoyed that.
*I never saw gandhi so raging at war !
*it was very fun doing some battles in the sea
*some AI civs (japan, greece) settled on different continents
*still the AI doesn't know how to use siege machines, throwing them in battle like they were melee units

so to conclude, thanks for the good work Elvince, this mods improves a lot my games of civ5 ! keep up the great work :goodjob:

As someone said earlier in this thread the AI are very bad at defending especially when he looses the first line of troops (he doesn't have any reserves). Well I thought that one of the problems for that might be that it take a very long time to build new units so it's hard to replace any losses. How about making buildcost for units lower... like 50% of current or even 25% or so? Do you think that would help the AI anything? If such a change would be made I would like to increase the unit maintance cost alot.

As someone said earlier in this thread the AI are very bad at defending especially when he looses the first line of troops (he doesn't have any reserves). Well I thought that one of the problems for that might be that it take a very long time to build new units so it's hard to replace any losses. How about making buildcost for units lower... like 50% of current or even 25% or so? Do you think that would help the AI anything? If such a change would be made I would like to increase the unit maintance cost alot.

to counter the fact the AI can't build units fast, I use Valkrionn "economy mod" which changes the game balance. it's really effective and I could observe in the games I played that the AI has now a true army for attacking and both defending cities.

Two issues in making training faster:

1- the AI does indeed field decent armies, and has more chances to recover from a first loss without being immediatly swallowed by the winning empire (especially for civs already focused on unit training such as Rome). However this leads to huge armies that will cripple the AI economy, forced to build TPs everywhere to not fall into the red, which means later on small undeveloped cities and an even bigger recession.

2- the combat AI is already dumb and we need only a bunch of units to overwhelm it. If it is easier and faster to build units both for them and for the player, the rare case in which we actually make a mistake and lose some battles will be even less of an issue, further worsening the player advantage over the AI.


About the mod per se: pretty good behaviours here, I'm even seeing AIs settling one tile islands! Just one thing I noticed, which happens in vanilla too and needs fixing: when it unlocks it, China tends to go crazy building only chu ko nu units. They are awesome, ok, but they can't seize cities, being ranged. This leads to china keeping under siege several cities, but never having one or two melee units to actually conquer them. They waste their resources losing units at the cities' defenses, and their military advantage given by the UU suddenly becomes a disadvantage when the tides turn.

This is a really good mod. At the very least, I've seen a lot more balanced AI armies including mounted units. It also seems to use a navy a lot more (I've seen upwards of 4 Frigates and later Destroyers shelling a city).

It still builds too many 'counter-units' in the Industrial/Modern Age and I still haven't seen an aircraft, but for the early game, this mod is a HUGE step forward over the stock AI IMO.

hi there. i'm poking around modbuddy, trying to improve stuff here and there, to make military conquest more balanced and fun in civ5. anyway, i've incorporated your changes in my small personal mod (which may or may not get to be anything more than that at some point :)) and in doing that, converted it to <update> format to see what you had changed. so here you are, use it if you want to: http://rapidshare.com/files/424510679/Update.rar

Elvince, kirneh did you a huge favour here, you should grab his stuff and switch to it. It's much clearer for everyone to see what you are or aren't changing, and it's compatible with other mods. I can't vouch for the accuracy of his port, but it looks good, even shows the default values for every change made.

Kirneh - this is based on the latest version, 4, correct?

Thanks for this updated version Kirneh :)

I was refraining myself from looking at this mod due to that.

edit: A few comments

About MilitaryStrategies.xml

- Flavor: Offense, Defense, Ranged, City_Defense, military_training, etc. are all linked to units and buildings which have specific values. The proposed changes are favoring offensive units a lot to the detriment of support. Okay, the AI doesn't know how to use those, so i guess it's the logic behind the changes.

- I'm kinda annoyed by the very strong increase in most of the weights used here, instead of increasing everything but one option for let's say WAR_MOBILIZATION, the only unchanged one should have been reduced to achieve basically the same result with less hassle. It also *probably* reduce how effectively the AI differentiate units from each other.

- It fails to grasp that a single unit type have different flavors. A cannon has the following: Offense:4, Defense:4, Ranged:9. Anyway, i'll try to make a table showing the weight of the different buildings / units during the different states of the AI. It's gonna take a while, though, there's a load of data to process, but it should be a base for a more coherent build order from the AI (hopefully).


About DefinesGlobal.xml

Increasing each flavor doesn't make much sense as flavors are linked to each other. Think of them as weights in a balance.

The same comment apply probably also to TacticalMove, but here i'm less sure.

Elvince, kirneh did you a huge favour here, you should grab his stuff and switch to it. It's much clearer for everyone to see what you are or aren't changing, and it's compatible with other mods. I can't vouch for the accuracy of his port, but it looks good, even shows the default values for every change made.

Kirneh - this is based on the latest version, 4, correct?

Yep, it's based on version 4 and should be pretty accurate. I used a small program called winmerge to find all the changes and converted them to the update format, and I have been checking that each change actually gets applied to the SQLite database after loading it. I had some strange problems with the filenames, where I had to change the names of some files to get them to load.. I don't remember which names I used before, but later I thought it might have had something to do with using filenames that are already used by the civ5 assets.

I did make one small change by setting AI_DANGER_MAJOR_APPROACH_DECEPTIVE to 0.3 (in DefinesGlobals.xml).. this can be easily be removed, it was motivated by me having done some pretty deceptive approaches to the AI without it doing anything to prepare, even though my army was obviously massing up just outside its borders :)

I am really interested about this mod, but... little noob question: where can I find the mod? I've searched 10 times this thread without finding it!
(ok let's say that I'm just sleepy)

Thanks!

I can't find it here either. I made my own version of this for testing based on kirneh's port. I've attached it to this post. This is untested (I haven't played on it for any length of time), but give it a shot. It doesn't affect saves, you can always get rid of it.

Extract into your mods folder making sure it's in its own directory...

This mod working with new patch 1.0.0.62?

Good question. The patch made some AI changes in the same areas. As a result I've disabled this in my game for now. I certainly wouldn't use the original version, which totally replaces its files, which have certainly changes somewhat in .62. Use my update version at your discretion...