Better BTS AI v0.45 Changelog
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Bugfix
- Fixed bug in player closeness calculations causing the AI to be blind to its actual proximity to other players
- Fixed bug with needed defenders where the AI would choose to defend a recently captured holy city less than a normal city
- Fixed bug causing player ID to be used in place of actual attitude when checking for denials in bonus, civic, and religion trading
- Fixed bug in paradrop code causing AI to avoid paradropping onto terrain bonuses under certain circumstances
- Fixed bug in AI denial of switching civics when in Emancipation
- Fixed bug introduced in unofficial patch causing immunity to collateral damage
- Fixed bug with espionage mission to spread culture to an enemy city
- Fixed bug causing combat promotions to be counted twice for aircraft
- Fixed bug (introduced) in consideration of plot defense when selecting bases for offensive air units
- Fixed bug (introduced) causing crashes if there was an unowned fort on the map
- Fixed bug in unit AI type matching for retreating emptied transports
- Fixed bug in unit AI's determing if a transport had required space to hold them where they didn't consider other units intending to load
- Fix for naval blockades reaching across land, including across diagonal water tiles (fixed both actual range and graphically shown range)
- Fixed bug (introduced) caused by different fixes to the espionage mission to spread culture in this mod and the Unofficial Patch
War strategy AI
- Modified how closeness is used for determining who to attack, different settings for regular and Aggressive AI
- Created new function CvTeamAI::AI_calculateBonusWarValue so AI will consider declaring war for resources, weighted towards resources AI doesn't have and plots that are more easily captured
- Modified city attack targetting by terrain bonuses to consider how important bonus is to AI
City AI
- AI will now more likely fill empty transports when enagaged in transcontinental war, making reinforcements and second waves on invasions more likely
- When doing invasions, AI will now be more likely to have cities with free air experience fill vacancies on carriers
- When doing invasions, AI will now have cities with high production more often fill needs for aircraft carriers
- When doing invasions, if AI has at least 50% of its possible missile capacity it will no longer always build missiles
- Rewrote CvCityAI::AI_isAirDefended so that it considers unit damage, movement, AI type and can also count land units
- Normal workboat build blocked if there's an enemy sea unit camping outside city
- Coastal cities will now build boats as if planning a sea invasion if there is no route to enemy cities
- Improved handling of building troops to fill transports, unified between coastal and non-coastal cities
- Non-coastal cities now help fill carriers, missile carriers
- The AI was blocked from building attack troops if it felt it was unable to build good ones, now if it is at war it can build them but with low probability so it can fight back a little early in the game
- AI will now emergency build fighter planes if its air defenses are shot down but it still has lots of bombers and missiles
- If not critical, AI will let cities with high production or free air experience usually build most planes
- Cities with military production bonuses now a bit more likely to build military units
- AI will now always build some assault transports if it has significant overseas colonies to help defend them
- AI will now build reserve sea units to defend its settler transports in later eras
- Reduced construction of escorts that are weaker than the transports they would be escorting (Caravels escorting Galleons primarily)
Espionage AI
- When a spy has waited in a city but has no mission available, they are now more likely to move around and explore instead of sitting
- Revamped desired Espionage rate and priority weighting calculations, AI now always update weights, relations play a larger role
- Neutral priority weighting is now 10 instead of 0, differentiates between
- When AI starts preparing for war against another player they will heavily shift their espionage spending towards that player
- AI will attempt to gain passive mission levels against adversaries
- AI will now actually load spies onto the spy transport it builds
Gold AI
- AI now has a budget for troop upgrades each turn based on how much gold it wants to have, it won't spend more than this budget on non-critical units when at peace
- AI now prioritizes upgrading escort ships to same extent as transports
Naval AI
- Modified bombard behavior. Priority remains on supporting player's ground troops, if none then consider supporting other troops with common enemy and spreading out stacks to increase reach of blockade.
- Modified and expanded Solver's changes to retreat from city/fort AI to be more specialized for various unit AI types, only move if there's a real threat
- Increased city danger threshold so enemy ships do not runaway so easily
- Damaged ships will stay in city unless city is highly threatened
- Galleons assigned escort roles before Frigates are available will now change their UnitAI type to assault transport instead of getting stuck in their role after better escorts come along
- Transport ships waiting in port will now only unload their cargo during a land war if an enemy city can be reached by land, the player is on the defensive locally, or a stack of enemy units shows up. Increases naval invasions of distant enemies on Pangea maps, sea assaults to complement land assaults.
- Assault flotillas now leave behind empty transports
- Assault ships now assume cities whose defenses the player can't see are properly defended (previously counted as a single defender). Should make invasions more likely to occur near blockades, attack ships, prior invasions.
- AI will now try to break blockades if it has many attack ships in port
- Transports will now pickup units stranded on small islands
- Transports looking for cargo to pickup now use PUF_isAvailableGroupHeadUnitAIType instead of just counting unit ai types, should stop assault transports from waiting forever for units attached to a settler to load or waiting forever on small islands for units already in their cargo to load
- EscortAI units will now also shadow settler_sea units when there is nothing else to do
- Added a pathlength consideration to AI_pickup so that mostly loaded flotillas don't sail around the world to pickup one more unit (previously they would have waited trying to load the units they already had on board until someone else came around)
- SettlerSea transports now only run pickup if they're not full (another change necessary since transports no longer try to pickup the units they're already holding)
- Modified CvUnitAI::AI_shadow to optionally ignore units in cities, far away
- Reserve sea units will now shadow empty settler transports out at sea
- Attack sea units won't run around the world to shadow transports and carriers
- Slow escorts (Caravels mainly) will now protect large flotillas instead of doing nothing
- Escorts with nothing to do will now return to the primary area if it's not too far away so that primary area city production decisions take them into consideration
Air AI
- Modified and expanded Solver's changes to retreat from city/fort AI to be more specialized for various unit AI types, only move if there's a real threat
- Increased city danger threshold so enemy aircraft do not retreat so easily
- Attack planes in endangered cities will now more likely to airstrike attackers
- Improved code for defense planes in endangered cities so they stay to defend longer and either airstrike or patrol
- Improved efficiency of danger threshold check for ships and planes
- Improved code for moving planes to offensive or defensive bases to take city threat into account
- AI bombers will no longer consider basing in undefended forts even if the fort is unthreatened
- AI bombers will now consider moving to a city with two defenders (down from requiring 3), change made because of added threat logic and should allow AI to now use almost all of its cities as airbases
- Fixed bug introduced in Unofficial Patch 0.19 causing bombers to skip their turns whenever an interceptor was around
- Many improvements to better handle damaged planes in threatened cities
- Added two functions for defensive airstrikes to make both air defense and offense units more directly aid in defending cities from enemy stacks
- AI air defense units wake from airpatrol every turn, re-decide roles/need
- AI air defense units now consider how many other air defense units there are in the city and guarantee air defense
- Air defense units with Interceptor promotions now will be more likely to patrol when city is threatened
- Added new function for weighting bases for attack air units with new consideration for supporting offensive stacks and defending endangered cities, plus keeping planes safe from sneak attacks when at peace
- When at war forts are now more likely to be used as offensive bases, though cities are still preferred
- AI will again consider basing attack planes in teammate's territory (plot defense considerations effectively disabled this in many circumstances in earlier versions of mod)
- AI will now consider basing attack planes in vassal territory, though it will only use them if it owns no good base cities or forts itself
- Attack air units will now pull out of cities/forts if the defenders leave
- Airstrikes will no longer target enemies in adjacent territory when the territory is only adjacent to owned water tiles
- Fighters now always move before bombers, they're much better at taking on enemy fighters
- New function in CvPlot to count how many air units are running intercept missions already
- Added emphasis for both offensive and defensive units on the the players primary area
Unit AI
- AI will skip bombarding and go straight to attacking cities when it has good initial attack odds and a big strength advantage
- Stranded units with nothing to do will wait once someone is coming to get them instead of mindlessly patrolling
- Stranded settlers will now wait if someone is coming to get them instead of just scrapping after 20 turns
- Attack unit stacks will now break up when assigned to defend workers so that some of the units can do other things (protect other workers, get in transports)
- Units set to UNITAI_ATTACK will now get in transports instead of aimlessly patrolling when player is preparing invasion force
- If attack_city units cannot reach an enemy city while in land war, they will try airlifts and then load into boats
- Tweaked circumstances where attack units load into transports to encourage filling up boats
- Fixed discrepancy where attack units could group with settlers and then get in boats but were highly unlikely to get in boats with waiting settlers
- Speed up to AI_group so it loops over selection groups instead of units
- Attack units now do a bit better of defending cities in the new world if the AI hasn't sent/built enough city defense units yet
- Removed blanket block for loading transports when in land war, now handled by specific unit ai logic
- Tweaked loading of Counter units (Axemen, etc) onto boats to integrate with other changes
- Removed redundant logic from counter ai routine
Barbarian AI
- Barb ships will now often blockade cities for a few turns before moving on if they have no nearby targets
- Barb ships trapped by ice or around 1-tile islands are now removed so more can spawn
- Barb ship spawn rate throttled so they don't swamp the seas before players build navies
- Improved barb ship blockade decisions so they stick around for a while but will then should actually move to another area
- Barb ships less suicidal, more oppurtunistic
- Reduced range in which barb ships detect unprotected resources by 25%
- Barbarians now will build defenders in captured cities first, not buildings
General AI
- Modified city closeness calculations to use population from both cities, not just pop of the other city
- Created functions for determining when cities share the same water area (lake, ocean)
- Removed the unused partial implementation of a new A* solver for closeness
- A bonus which enables the civ's unique unit is now valued more
- Added function to calculate plot strength of teammates and (if desired) vassals
- AI will now be more likely to sacrifice green units when assaulting a well-defended city
- AI will now be reluctant to sacrifice units with medic promotions when assaulting a well-defended city
- Created function PUF_isAvailableGroupHeadUnitAIType for counting number of unit ai's on a plot which might actually load onto a transport (aren't in another group, aren't already cargo)
Combat Mechanics
- Modification for air v air combat to make veteran units more valuable, especially when wounded. Air v air combat is now more much more similar to land combat. This change can be disabled/enabled using BBAI_AIR_COMBAT in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml
Customization
- Added GlobalDefinesAlt.xml to mod files to allow some customization of what new features are running
Debug
- Added SDK and adapted python code from AIAutoPlay mod to faciliate testing
- Modified debug mode output to show relevant information for these developments
- Added string to lower right flag help text showing Better BTS AI version number currently running
- Added SDK and adapted python code from ChangePlayer mod to facilitate testing
- Added new Python module Tester for testing purposes
Better BTS AI also includes Dresden & Solver's unofficial 3.17 patch version 0.21.
