Balancing Civ4LeaderHeadInfos.xml

Finally here is the revised Civ4LeaderHeadInfos.xml. It took me some time because i wanted to test my changes as often as possible. This is just a first step to make the AI act more like we want and i think that more balancing could be done with this file. Therefore i created a new thread to keep better track of the changes and the feedback. I'm curious how it plays out and waiting for your feedback.

Here is an incopmlete list of the changes so far:

• generally lowerd iMaxWarRand, iLimitedWarRand and iDogpileWarRand for all leaders to make them declare war more often.
• generally increased iMaxWarNearbyPowerRatio, iMaxWarDistantPowerRatio and iLimitedWarPowerRatio for all leaders to declare war even if the enemy is stronger.
• drastically lowered or removed the NoWarAttitudeProbs. Most leaders still won't declare war if you have friendly status, pleased status however won't help that much anymore.
• removed the Attitude bonus for sharing the same religion for all leaders except the pope.
• Changed the MemoryDecays to make leaders forget about past events faster, and added some that weren't used by bts yet (eg. leaders can forget about declarations of war now)
• fixed some strange values. (eg. some leaders had an attitude bonus of 6 for sharing their favorite civics)
• revised the UnitAIWeightModifiers. This can be used to lay the focus on certain unit AIs. Made Norse, Genoa, England and Portugal build ships more often. Also Genoa and Portugal should settle more over sea. For all other leaders i corrected only obvious faults.

Things i like to do next:

• Assign an appropriate favorite civic to each leader.
• Tweak UnitAIWeightModifiers for all nations/leaders
• Revise AttitudeThresholds, that means at which attitude leaders will sign open borders, trade maps, sign defensive pacts or trade techs, etc.

For those changes i need input on every leader what he is supposed to do.
Note that most nations have different leaders that change over time. Therefore we can change the behavior of a nation whenever their leader changes.

Nice indeed! It should be much harder to be on good terms with all leaders at the same time!

Sounds nice, will definitely implement most of your changes
The only thing I dislike even without testing is:
"removed the Attitude bonus for sharing the same religion for all leaders except the pope"

AbsintheRed said:

Sounds nice, will definitely implement most of your changes
The only thing I dislike even without testing is:
"removed the Attitude bonus for sharing the same religion for all leaders except the pope"

Click to expand...

the bonus is that you do not get a penalty. Also there is the small bonus through faithpoints, at least for Christians.
The intend was to remove some bonuses as there are already too much and the AI always ends up beeing pleased or even friendly with each other, and therefor almost never declared war on each other. I tried to explain it in detail here.
3Miro agreed to remove the same religion bonuses (or lower them drastically to cap at +1 or +2).

Use my file, at least for the next beta. Copying all the changes per hand while take quite a while. If it realy makes it worse you can always replace it with the old one later.

Don't worry, I played around with the leader personalities before (for another mod)
I also planned to improve it for RFCE - it's even in the changelog file for quite a long time - so I'm really glad you had the time for it.

I will check your changes, discuss what I would further improve, then upload your modified file to the svn

Hey Caliom!
I'm running through all your changes right now.
I have to say, awesome work

Will get back with some proper feedback later

I know some tweaking has been done to the war attitudes, and tweaking the AI leaderhead attitudes sounds great - the current AI just doesn't trade blows often enough, and it's frustrating to only see England and France butt heads after the early game's spawn war by sheer coincidence of Defensive Pacts.

What if certain civs (or at least, leaders) had permanent negative attitudes toward each other? Something along the lines of "Our blood feud runs deep." or "Your existence is an insult to our empire!" This could be one more factor to ensure certain foes remain hostile toward each other (England/France, Spain&Portugal/Cordoba, Bulgaria/Byzantium, Sweden/Russia), and more likely to declare war.

They already do, it's hidden though.