Leader Personalities

[Deliverator]

Keldath has done some work on the Leader personalities and found that they were not very aggressive. See this post which has a new version of CIV4LeaderHeadInfos.xml.

I wonder if it is now time to give our Leaders more personality. On the Planetfall mod they have gone through an exercise of giving their Leaders different personalities. There are a lot of different XML values to define. A lot of good information is collected in this thread.

Here is a spreadsheet that they used in working out the values for Planetfall - I has all the values for the vanilla leaders for comparison. It would be good to start a Dune Wars version of this. Varying the Leader settings should make the mod more interesting to play.

 

[Ahriman]

A nice idea. I will take a look at that spreadsheet and come up with an alternative set of values for our Dune leaders.
Can you also post these values for the current Dune leaders that we have?

 

[Slvynn]

Yep i agree, this thing should be prioritized, because this is thing that affect fun and joy of player. Without different and symbiotic to their traits personalities game will be less chalenged. Again, i playing on Immortal level , with Aggressive AI and found that game was totally not challenging for me. Just because: Ai dont build enough units for defence early or sending them far, so i wipe their capitals with 2-3 promoted soldiers. And there is no Shaka's behaviour ais, so i can just take all my units and go attack someone being pretty sure that noone will threaten me.

 

[Deliverator]

Perhaps David can extract the values from Keldath's CIV4LeaderHeadInfos.xml into a spreadsheet in the same style as the Planetfall one. It's not something I've done before.

 

[Ahriman]

By the way, can I make another case for replacing Malky with Prince Rhombur Vernius (the cyborg), or adding him?
And can I make a case for Princess Wencisca not really making sense as an imperial leader, and replacing her with Elrood IX (Shaddam's dad).

 

[Deliverator]

I'm happy to have Vernius instead of Malky if we can find a decent image for him that doesn't look out of place. I wouldn't be satisfied just putting any old cyborg image in.

I quite like having Wensicia. I got the idea from one of your posts I think. I was thinking of adding Farad'n too. I think Wensicia makes at least as much sense as Irulan.

 

[keldath]

ahh very good idea to open up a thread.

this requires a lot of thought since the leader personalities can affect the entire game and its difficulty.

as i wrote, for now, most leaders are made to be aggressive, i would need some feedback on it.

y the way, can I make another case for replacing Malky with Prince Rhombur Vernius (the cyborg), or adding him?
And can I make a case for Princess Wencisca not really making sense as an imperial leader, and replacing her with Elrood IX (Shaddam's dad).

also as i suggested - it is better to add leaders then to remove - this way - the game will change ech time you play it according to its leader.

 

[Slvynn]

Yep i started new game, and noticed major improvement. Though it can be more, cause there are other parameters involved - DistantWarProb , BuildUnit, etc. But it is much better. Dune Wars is not about peace but about Wars, finally.
Yet we must to do extensive work to patch up and build leader personalities well. 1 parametr is not enough.

Also Wind Trap tech should be prioritized by any leader.

 

[Ahriman]

Geez this is taking a while... didn't realize 160 AI values each leader!
Making good progress though. There are a *lot* of cool things here that let leaders be mercenary or rash or loyal or backstabbing or subservient or demanding, etc. etc.

The AIs should play quite differently when I'm done. I'm basing them off vanilla and Planetfall.
I'm happy to weak the aggression ones afterwards if they don't feel high enough.

Irulan at least becomes the Emperor's wife - which is what she has been trained for her whole life. Wencisca never is.

The way I am making them, Irulan is a cautious, subservient, diplomatic AI, while Shaddam is brash and hot-tempered, and Elrood is more calculating.

I would prefer to remove Malky- he doesn't come by for thousands of years.

 

[keldath]

Slvynn,
really glad to hear that is much better!

i have changed most parameters - not only one . s

ahriman, yap, theres a lot of interesting tags, we just have to create the combinations we like.

you can use this link to assist you further - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=274966

 

[Ahriman]

I have been using http://modiki.civfanatics.com/index.php/Civ4LeaderHeadInfos as a guide.

 

[Deliverator]

Wencisca never is.

No, but she is head of House Corrino for a while until Farad'n takes over.

Geez this is taking a while... didn't realize 160 AI values each leader!
Making good progress though. There are a *lot* of cool things here that let leaders be mercenary or rash or loyal or backstabbing or subservient or demanding, etc. etc.

Well done for taking the project on. It'll make a big difference.

 

[Ahriman]

Ok, here is what I have so far. I haven't looked at the contact and memory variables yet, but I designed a lot of other stuff which I would recommend using to replace the current values (if they're all the same for all leaders). Should add more personality.

I really hope that the other changes you're making aren't just to turn every civ into raging warmongers. In that type of game, as long as you survive the early game, the rest of the game is boring because the other civs are too weak in terms of infrastructure and economy.

 

[Slvynn]

I looked into that file, and have 2 points:
All Harkonnen are misantrops (hate everyone), i'd make their base attitude -1 and beast rabban -2

Ordos:
The both shoud be warmongers. Roma is to peacefull in your set, but as i see her in videos she is very evil , swift and agressive. IMO She should be much like Cathy in vanilla personality wise. Fast REX and xpansion, backstab. Executrics should be less REXer, more military and warmonger type, but they both should have hight WArProb, and should be easy to bribe (espessialy Roma) . They love to trade techs, and more they will love to DoW just because some tasty tech.
All Ordos should have Spy on 150 - its just race , BTl should be 150 on espionage too.

 

[Ahriman]

I looked into that file, and have 2 points:
All Harkonnen are misantrops (hate everyone), i'd make their base attitude -1 and beast rabban -2

I interpret this base attitude as "how willing are people to deal with you".

First, I want to try to move *away* from the just "Harkonnen = bigbadbruteforce".
Vladimir in particular isn't like that; he is cunning and devious, he'll use violence or brutality for a purpose, but he is also very good politically. Vladimir is a *smart* villain; Rabban is a brute force one. And Feyd is young and charismatic; people like him. Hence the positive value.
Second, none of the civs in vanilla have a -2 value there. They are all either -1, 0, 1 or 2.
So Rabban got the lowest, Vladimir the second lowest (no-one really trusts him), and Feyd +1.

Harkonnen are all power hungry, but that doesn't mean that they can't be good manipulators, or can't use diplomacy. Vladimir could well have ended up making Feyd emperor, if Paul had died in the desert.

Leto and Paul should probably be 2 though.

The both shoud be warmongers. Roma is to peacefull in your set, but as i see her in videos she is very evil , swift and agressive. IMO She should be much like Cathy in vanilla personality wise. Fast REX and xpansion, backstab. Executrics should be less REXer, more military and warmonger type, but they both should have hight WArProb, and should be easy to bribe (espessialy Roma) . They love to trade techs, and more they will love to DoW just because some tasty tech.
All Ordos should have Spy on 150 - its just race , BTl should be 150 on espionage too.

I disagree that the Ordos should just be brute-force warmongers. I have made the Executrix more militaristic, but Roma more diplomatic. They are both very very mercenary; its easy to bribe them to go to war. This is already there; look at the DeclareWarRefuseAttitudeThreshold values and the DeclareWarThemRefuseAttitudeThreshold values.
They can be bribed to go to war by anyone, and they can only *not* be bribed to start a war with people they are Friendly with; the highest category.

The key thing about Ordos is that they are mercenaries and infiltrators. Why start a war unless you're getting paid to do so, given that you can wreak havoc with your enemies with espionage without *needing* to declare war.

I gave Roma the highest espionage value in the game, and the Executrix a slightly lower one but still quite high (being more militaristic).
For both of them, war of assassins is their preferred civic (big espionage bonuses).

There is no tech gain from conquest, so going to war for tech doesnt' really make sense here, unless you can wring it out of a peace deal, but you're only going to do that if you're stronger.

 

[Deliverator]

It would be nice to have an automated way of taking Ahriman's updated spreadsheet and updating the XML from it. Entering these values by hand would be time consuming and error prone.

 

[davidlallen]

Reading stuff out of xml is easy. Writing a lot of stuff into xml is hard, at least with the scripts I have around. How closely does Ahriman's spreadsheet match the changes keldath has already done?

 

[Deliverator]

How closely does Ahriman's spreadsheet match the changes keldath has already done?

Not remotely.

Keldath has simply changed all leaders to make them more aggressive.

Ahriman has specified a lot of the other leaderhead settings to try and give our leaders personality.

 

[Ahriman]

My spreadsheet has a little over 50 AI values that vary across each leader, based on my fluff-interpretation of their personality. We can tweak it afterwards for aggression if needed, but I think they should capture a lot of nice flavor. Like the Fremen or Atreides are good loyal allies, whereas Vladimir or Shaddam will backstab you if they feel like it, or join in on dogpile wars. The Ordos will focus on espionage, and are easily bribed into wars. Some leaders are much more religious than others, and care more or less about sharing religion or civics. Rabban is a beast, and will attack without mercy with little provocation. Armand wants open borders and trade. Bene G will focus more on peace and development. Paul is more religions and more aggressive than Leto, and Alia even more aggressive. Harkonnen will demand tribute more, whereas Atreides will not (if you are their friends). And so forth.

My understanding was that nearly all of these values were basically the same for all the leaders.

So there are roughly 1000 parameter values to enter, so it would be nice if there were a script that did this.

 

[davidlallen]

OK, that is a huge amount of data. I will try to think of a convenient way to blast it into the leaderheads file.