A Better AI.

[klokwerk]

I started my first game with the 1/1 build. Overall, my impressions are good, but I crushed Gandhi easily with 3 axemen, he had only 1 unpromoted archer (!) in his capital city (size 6 and a long time after the start...) so there still seems to lack defenders sometimes. I was very close (his cultural borders were overlapping mine) so he should have built much more defenders.

I'm among the 3 first civs (15 civs total) in middle age but this monarch game is definitely not easy (custom continents, 3 continents, standard size, all options off except alliances), which is a good thing.

Good points :
- far better wonder building than in the 12/21 build : I was beaten at the Hanging Gardens and the Great Lighthouse, but fortunately I managed to build the Colossus somehow.
- better defense, though I don't understand some of the AI choices (some border cities seem less defended than inside cities)

Bad points :
- we need even more wars, especially between AI. (Maybe the better defense means they also need bigger offensive stacks ?)
- some border cities (gandhi) need to have a better defense

 

[sveint]

Latest build seems very nice but I think I found an example of over-sally by city defenders. Granted this is barbarians, but I think the code is the same?

Basically as soon as my warrior was no longer stacked with an axeman, all but one defender left the city. (See screenshot).

 

[lipstickSS]

Sorry if these question has already been asked,

But I am not going to browse through 63 pages to find out.

Does the AI because of the improve AI have a better military now, I’m assuming if they build cottages and keep them and don’t trade away money that they will upgrade units now also buy more military and attack with more because they can?

Or is this wrong?

Also a side note is the computer more willing to trade tech?

 

[HardCoder]

At prince level, playing as Genghis Kahn, standard contients, low sea level, started in a good spot with floodplains and plains hills, 1/1 build ...

The closest civ to me was Stalin but the first I ran into was Alexander, and Alex is on my normal hot list to eliminate. So I started building up for an invasion to take a city or two for a start. It was going to take a while because he was 10+ tiles away through forest. So as I was expanding (trying to keep my research to at least 70&#37 I see Stalin cities popping up to my east, on my borders actually, like, WTH?

Also, there is only one religion on the continent. Isabella must be on the other one.

Stalin quickly has a 1.5/1 lead on me and the three other civs, including H.C. Normally I don't even pay much attention to Stalin, because he's sort of a backward and ******** leader who sits in the corner, doesn't research, and doesn't grow particularly fast, one of those civs you can get another civ to attack as a distraction. But, no.

Well at this point there is almost nothing I can do about him. He shares about 2/3 of my borders and obviously I can't make any progress on his frontier cities (which have grown from nothing to size 10 with a half dozen axemen in them) so I become twice as interested in Alex, who is on the bottom of the totem pole below me.

I make the trek northward to Sparta and take it, destroy a counterattack of about 10 units, and, well, that was it. I have only a half dozen units, no resupply, and feudalism has started spreading.

So I go back to building for a bit, on the theory that I can peck away at Alex, which seems quite possible. After a while I have some decent stacks of cats and a few trebs and attack units, and the time is growing nigh.

Stalin, meanwhile, is building almost every wonder. (!!) And of course there are now garrisons of 7 longbows on my borders. God knows what else. He reaches 2x my score. At that point, H.C. becomes his vassal and in the same turn Alex gives him a defensive pact. Everyone is still Confucian. Stalin is so far ahead in tech and size that I have nothing to trade him and have had nothing to trade him for centuries, and now he is "cautious."

So, I guess that's the end of that. Time to exit to Main Menu. Otherwise it'll just sadden me when 50 or 100 turns from now the waves of trebs, knights, macemen, whatever, overrun a few hours of relatively careful work.

I'm not so sure that was fun.

What did I do wrong? Not a lot I guess. I'm not sure I could have successfully attacked Stalin in the early game because he grew like a weed, I had no copper, and I had to build two cities in poor terrain to get horses and iron.

I'm curious to see how people who regularly win at monarch and sometimes at emperor in Warlords are handling this now.

I won a couple of Prince games pretty definitively with the last AI but with a setup like this, it's serious uphill swimming. The cheap upgrades were the last straw, taking invasion from "hard" to "impossible."

 

[HardCoder]

That's not really close. Close especially means when one player founds it prevents another founding!

With the 12/21 build I had a start on a roughly 3x4 peninsula with another civ on the same peninsula. So something was broken there.

 

[Quagga]

Played most of a 1-1 build game last night. (I say most, because I'm probably going to retire it.) I was stuck on an isolated island with Nappy in a Fractal/Epic/Monarch game. Tech progress slow because of. However, here are my observations:

I noticed the slowness others mentioned. On our little island, there was nothing going on to explain it. Not sure what the other civs were doing, but it was noticeably slower than previous builds.

Lots of longbow defenders. I needed lots of catapults to capture two cities from Nappy. He briefly took one back in a counter attack that should have taken him one turn, but instead took him three. Gave me a chance to roll up a counter-counter attack and take the city back on the next turn.

Defenders seek borders. I just happened to go in a little further and found Paris (capital) with only one defender. Looks like a winning human strategy might be to sweep in with horses past the border cities and capture weakly defended interior cities.

Defenders came out to attack my units. This was ineffective. I destroyed two small stacks of longbows that would have been harder to beat if they stayed put.

That's about all I could tell from this semi-isolated start.

 

[klokwerk]

I saw thoses bugs in the latest build too.

- Sometimes there's only one defender in a major city like the capital (which happened to be a border city too...), probably a bug in the evaluation of danger. It 's a new feature after all...

- too often, too many enemies go out of their city when I'm just one or two squares away with my army... There were 4 archers in Gandhi's second city, but 2 of them went out so it was easy to kill them then take the city... Gandhi should have acknowledged he was not in position to counter attack, not only because he was losing the war (I had just taken his poorly defended capital), but also because his tech was below mine (archer vs axeman)

I had no trouble with the speed of the game, with my average 2-year old PC and 15 opponents, it ran smooth. It 's still the middle age, though.

Anyway, the new build is more challenging than the last one, and I like it. Keep up the good job !

 

[Jet]

Vanilla 12-21: I think he wanted a mine here.

On the other hand, he had Engineering and horses and ate my prophet while I was ridiculing his improvement choices.

 

[jkp1187]

Haven't noticed any slowness in the 1/1 build. Am playing as Washington on a SMall Techtonic map (with 8 civs). The AI is fighting very effectively -- Ragnar is in last place in term of score and in the lower part of the pack in terms of tech, and he is doing an excellent job fighting a two front war against me and Asoka.

Two glitches

1.) during the early exploration, I noticed that there appear to be a lot of "phantom" huts -- tribal villages that appear to be there, but as soon as the screen refreshes, just vanish. Some of these are appearing in the ocean.

2.) we are entering the modern era, and every once in a while, during the AI's move I see what appears to be a phantom Carthaginian Infantry floating. (Usually over the ocean). It only lasts for a second or two, looks like it's moving, and then vanishes. (I had not noticed this before at all.)

Otherwise, this is a very challenging build. Thanks for your efforts!

**** EDIT ****: toward the end of the game, I did notice a tad bit of slowness between the turns...maybe taking 20-30 seconds to process whereas before it would've only taken 5-15 seconds. It didn't bother me that much, and my computer, while no slowpoke, isn't particularly fast either.

After re-loading, I did not notice any more of the phantom huts or phantom units. While the map was focused on my territory during the AI move, I did hear a phantom tank (the only other nation who could've had tanks was Carthage, and they were on the other side of the world.)

Fantastic game, though. Exciting all the way to the end. Asoka came within 700 culture points of winning -- if his last great person had been a Great Artist instead of a Great Prophet, he would've won a CULTURE Victory(!) I was trying to build up an expeditionary force to take out his culture cities, but I doubt it would've gotten there in time. As it was, I lucked out because Hannibal built the U.N., and thanks to some earlier diplomatic maneuvering, I managed to eke out a diplomatic victory at the last minute. If the UN hadn't been built, though, it would've been Asoka for the culture win. NEVER seen the AI come so close at that before.

Militarily, the AI performed very well, much better than usual. Good use of defensive weapons. Good use of a feint attack, and of terrain. AI used defensive units to cherry pick one or two of my weakened cavalry units.

When the AI attacked, I did NOT see massive artillery stacks with few/no offensive as I was in the 12/21 build. I was able to fend off several attacks, but only with difficulty. (I actually had a bad start with no iron or copper....and situated next to Ragnar, who had both. I was, randomly, Washington/Americans).

AI built wonders VERY WELL. I had productivity issues in my core cities, had to build some overseas colonies just to get some basic resources....I was unable to get any modern wonders at all.

BTW, this was *noble* level. Back in the old days, I was normally a Monarch player. On the official 2.08 patch, I was able to win on Prince. I tried a Prince-level game 1/1 build game, but was forced to retire early after my army was destroyed by the Zulus....

Oh well, I suppose my ego was getting too big....

 

[skankerm]

Slight worker bug. The workers are great at running away from barbarians and enemy ai when im at war with them. When I built the great wall my workers thought they were invunerable which is true except when they are connecting some of my citys with roads. Otherwise great build though i had to drop again from monarch back to prince. Every time i think im getting better and new ai comes out and smacks me down again.

 

[HardCoder]

One thing I've started wondering about -

Does the AI's newfangled tendency to build large numbers of defensive units negatively affect its ability to wage offensive war? There's only so much you can do with 20 longbows.

What I'm afraid will happen is that 20 longbows will sit around until gunpowder, and then become 20 riflemen, and later on become 20 mech infantry, and at some point during that part of the game, they will become a part of the offense.

 

[Wodan]

1/1 build. Max food button, but city governor is running 2 specialists.

Wodan

Edit: Never mind. I'm a dork. I'm running mercantilism and have the SoL.

 

[ToxicBones]

1/1
When playing as an expansive civ and building a worker at start, the auto-governer prefer using 3F tile instead of 2F 1H, which should be better in any case. (on cap square only 1H)

 

[largedarryl]

I am currently unaware of any reason why the auto-governer would pick the 2F 1H. In both cases the worker should be completed in the same amount of turns because they both result in 3H being used to construct the worker.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[gdpdht]

With the 1/1 build I get a bug where the turn never ends.

The game does not crash or freeze but just keeps processing forever. Removed the dll from my custom assets and the problem went away. The game was started with the previous build, so that might be the problem, although I had played several turns with build 1/1 before this bug occured.

Happens right after Cyrus moves a gunship into my territory to pillage a town.
You can get the save game from below. Just press end turn and the following turn never ends...

AD-1747.CivWarlordsSave

 

[Uncle_Joe]

1/1
When playing as an expansive civ and building a worker at start, the auto-governer prefer using 3F tile instead of 2F 1H, which should be better in any case. (on cap square only 1H)

Is the Expansive 'worker bonus' even working? I have looked and no longer see the +50% hammer bonus applying when playing Isabella. The Imperialistic bonus for Settlers seems to be working fine though.

Perhaps that is why the governor is not using the 2f/1h plot.

Anyone else see the hammer bonus applying properly?

 

[Elhoim]

I must congratulate you on the newest build. In my game the americans defended their borders and threatened city in a most excelent way.

 

[DevilJin]

I really wish that the AI will know that I'm going to declare war when I put lots of units near his borders, and prepare to the war.

 

[PaintItBlue]

hi sorry if this has been covered in the thread, only to page 7 so far (glad the difiiculty discussion is ending). Is there a way to verify that a mod is loaded when i click the advanced>about> the mod name says none.

I did extract the one dll to my warlords\customassets folder, am i supposed to extract the \BetterAI folder with the dll in it??



Is there a way to search one topic inside of a forum?

 

[Ralgar]

Is there a way to verify...

Hold down the alt key and mouse over your name on the bottom right where all the player scores are displayed. The score breakdown that shows up on the left side (score from population, score from wonders, etc) should have ""=== Better AI ===" at the top if you have it installed correctly.

Is there a way to search one topic inside of a forum?

Yes:

But it is limited to only one search every 60 seconds, which sucks if you want to refine your keywords. But the Google Search works just fine.