A Better AI.

Iustus said:
Since we have more or less feature frozen, this rewrite will probably not end up in the 1.0 release. Which answers someone else's question, yes we will be working post 1.0 on this. Personally I am working on some speed optimizations...

-Iustus
Click to expand...

Its good to read that you will be making further improvements after the release of version 1.00, but I thought that I’d let you guys know that the two games I have played with the latest build have been my most enjoyable Warlords games to date! :goodjob:

Playing my usual Noble settings I was battered to the point that it was pointless to carry on. Great stuff. :)

It was interesting to me to see two different AI attack styles. In one game I was attacked by a couple of MASSIVE stacks from Napoleon on one front, while on another, Monty sent a steady steam of 2 and 3 stack cavalry then riflemen (with the odd treb). And when Monty couldn’t take my hurriedly reinforced city, his units did a good job of pillaging, until his never ending stream wore my defences down, and he got the city. I had clearly lost by then anyway.

Reading the posts above I can see that there is merit in continuing to tinker by altering the emphasis of this, or adjusting the bonus of that, but I think that providing OOS errors in multiplayer are nailed you could consider you will have reached version 1.00.

Ooops! Just noticed the bombardment bug mentioned above; ok, add that.
 
Hey guys, i've been playing Civilization since Civ2 :), and i'm not exactly familiar with how to get this mod working, i have the file in the correct place, the Custom Assets folder, etc etc, exactly how it is in the example picture. When i play a game, it doesn't show up in the breakdown of my score? :S, any clue as to what could be wrong? Do i need to activate it IN civ?
 
Are you holding down ALT while hovering? This needs to be done.

Pep said:
The trebs attacking Alexandria can't bombard the city from the hill! But moving them to another position makes bombard to work properly again...
Click to expand...

Bombard button looks clickable to me :S
 
Bombard definitely is not working properly in the 1-8 build. The button lights up, but it doesn't do anything when you're trying to bombard across borders.

Even being aware of this, I forgot the problem at least three times, putting my siege units in the wrong place, and costing me a turn delay on attacking.
 
Quagga said:
Bombard definitely is not working properly in the 1-8 build. The button lights up, but it doesn't do anything when you're trying to bombard across borders.

Even being aware of this, I forgot the problem at least three times, putting my siege units in the wrong place, and costing me a turn delay on attacking.
Click to expand...

Oh, yeah, weird! I had a bombard that wouldn't work last game, and had no idea why it wouldn't.
 
I'm quite impressed with the Better AI performance. The AI fights other AIs well, making war often and effectively, and is a strong competitor. But I've noticed a couple things it doesn't seem to do.

1st, Ghandi was a vassal of Mehmed and in last place, but was working on a cultural victory. Roosevelt was an enemy of Mehmed, and got into a war with him, thus making Ghandi also a target. I joined in, and asked him to target Madras (closest of the top 3 culture cities). He may have made some effort, but most of his forces engaged the Incas, who though small had the best tech.

As an experiment, I took on Mehmed myself and defeated him, freeing the vassals and leaving only Ghandi as our target. I avoided any direct attack on Ghandi. He, though slowed down by the ongoing war, successfully won via cultural victory, from last place in score.

Pretty good for Ghandi! But as a human, I played from an earlier save, nuked Madras and landed three transports via amphib -- most without the promotion. End of cultural victory attempt, and any of the AI enemies could have done something similar.

OK, maybe targeting cultural victory cities is a bit rough, but it is what a human would do. Best would be if it could allow amphib assault, since landing and allowing a counterattack would have been riskier. Especially as the AI wasn't making many ships, and a one-transport landing simply would have died against all the available defenders.


Second thing is failure to target strategic resources. Pillaging/bombarding and sabotaging oil, coal, iron, and aluminum is very powerful in the late game, and eliminating copper, iron, or horses in the early game kills off a lot of enemy offensives. If an AI only has one or two of a resource, would it be possible for a raider force to be designated to try to take it out, and for bombers to target it?
 
Just won a comfortable victory. Comments: Zulu got two vassals and looked to be on his way to win a domination victory in the early game, but then somehow got stuck. He never declared war on anyone else (off his island/continent) and his power rating slumped. He also started falling behind in tech.

Napolen had twice the power of the 2nd civ and at least 5 times my power. Still he traded Aluminium to me and never attacked his much weaker neighbour, Roosevelt. I think, even if he was friendly/pleased with him, he should have taken him out.

In summary: Civs with very high relative power ratings need to declare war more often, even on friends.
 
OOS error for me using 1/8 build.

Playing LAN game with my friend so 2 humans, 16 AI civs. We were using the MOD version. We have since figured out the CustomAsset is working so we don't need the MOD.

Here is the save.
 

Attachments

However there is nothing stopping AI's nearing a dominating position to start having a really bad attitude towards others and thus not actually get in the friendly state....
 
Blake said:
However there is nothing stopping AI's nearing a dominating position to start having a really bad attitude towards others and thus not actually get in the friendly state....
Click to expand...
It's different when you have some warning and see the downhill slide in attitude. What I don't want is for every leader to have the same Machiavellian attitude as Napoleon.
 
sveint said:
Just won a comfortable victory. Comments: Zulu got two vassals and looked to be on his way to win a domination victory in the early game, but then somehow got stuck. He never declared war on anyone else (off his island/continent) and his power rating slumped. He also started falling behind in tech.

Napolen had twice the power of the 2nd civ and at least 5 times my power. Still he traded Aluminium to me and never attacked his much weaker neighbour, Roosevelt. I think, even if he was friendly/pleased with him, he should have taken him out.

In summary: Civs with very high relative power ratings need to declare war more often, even on friends.
Click to expand...

Was his goal to dominate? Doesn't thinking like that just turn the game into a war-match? Can't the AI go for other forms of victory?
 
It's different when you have some warning and see the downhill slide in attitude. What I don't want is for every leader to have the same Machiavellian attitude as Napoleon.
Click to expand...

We are not talking about Ghandi here, we're talking about Napoleon. If he wanted a Space Victory (he tried), he should not have given me Aluminium. And if he didn't want a domination victory, why build such an enourmous amount of units? He should have easily been able to crush anyone he wanted to.

So, either the AI needs to use the units it builds, or it needs to build somewhat less. Napolean had many times the number of units needed to defend his territory against any sort of attack.
 
Geez, is this really right? H.C. just attacked me when he was about +7 attitude. He's still +2 and at war with me. Am I missing something or is this out of whack?
 
Okay, this is twice now I've missed something important because it was somewhere I didn't expect or didn't know about (as opposed to being in the Creation & Customization sub-forums, basically)... silly me. :) I'm thrilled to see open-source AI work at all, actually; I had been under the impression the Total Realism ppl were the only ones doing this, and they weren't/aren't releasing their source.

Fortunately I've always tried to keep changes to game mechanics to a minimum in my mod, so incorporating this should be manageable... except for my air combat system probably, and Dale's ranged bombard code which I had some interest in using, and little things like my traits and units being a bit different from vanilla in some cases... I will have to wait til you get the MP OoS errors ironed out before releasing a version that includes BetterAI, but still, just wanted to say discovering this thread (and then spending 3 hours reading it) made my month. :)

Also wanted to echo a few previous sentiments about being in favor of *not* making save-game-compatibility a priority... I know you're already maintaining two versions for 1.61 and Warlords, so asking you to maintain four (with and without compatibility) would be pushing it, but people have to start new games all the time anyway, either to try different mods, to upgrade to a new version of an existing mod they've been using, or because Firaxis releases a patch. Personally I'd rather pay whatever cost is necessary (within reason, which that is) for any and all improvements you can make. But that's just me. My deep and heartfelt thanks for tackling this crucial-but-messy area of the SDK, regardless.
 
Finished a Prince/Epic/Standard/InlandSea game as Mao using the Warlords 1-8 build. Won the game with a "Diplomation" victory. Here are some notes.

Why do the AIs build the UN? Once I had vassal'd a three of my neighbors, somebody else built the UN and I saw a shortened path to victory. One more vassal and a couple random cities and the game was over. It doesn't make sense to build the UN unless you are the population leader (including vassals).

I'm determined to not get caught by AI Cultural Victory again. Ramses was headed for it and he was next door. He was peaceful, so I left him alone until I finished my aggressive neighbors. I captured two of his top-three culture cities. One was packed with wonders. Got lots of GPs from it the rest of the game. However, his tech had stagnated. I was using Infantry to take out Musketmen and Longbows. He was my third vassal.

Asoka also seemed to be going for Cultural, though he stayed slightly ahead of me in tech. Still, his cities had only one or two current units. Many were the previous current unit and a few were ancient. He didn't put up any serious resistance. Fourth vassal.

I had vassal'd Alex and Napoleon earlier in the game. Alex was way behind in tech, Nappy was current. I killed off huge stacks of troops in cities, with no counter attack other than a Cavalry slipping out now and again. Not sure what win either was going for, but it didn't seem to be working. They were good vassals. I fed them all my techs in order to be best help with the other civs.

While I was warring with Nappy, Victoria attacked him. When he became my vassal, she was forced into peace. That's happened to me so many times; I was happy to see it happen to an AI.

Cyrus was my last target. He was going for Space Race. I got the Diplomacy victory after taking two of his cities. Again, no significant resistance. He had a few modern units, but my Mech Infantry spent much of their ordinance on Longbows and Catapults. He had a bunch of fighters that were just an annoyance.

Victoria was ahead of me in tech, going for Space Race. After I attacked Cyrus, I saw her power suddenly increase and get above mine. Not sure what she was doing, but it appears she was planning to go to war. She hadn't liked me for a long time because of trading with her worst and my vassals making her nervous. She probably had Modern Armor and Stealth Bombers. I hate it when the other guy has Stealth Bombers.

I was trying to boost my population to win Diplomacy ASAP. Built Supermarkets, which I see now are nearly pointless. Got Genetics, which is better. I was concerned that Victoria was building nukes, but after finally reasearching Fission, I saw that nobody built the Manhattan Project.

Nobody had a navy in this game. I did because I had to invade Asoka across the water. Other than my ships, I saw two submarines. I would have liked to have had a naval game, because I had a coastal production city with Heroic Epic, Military Academy, two Instructors, and Red Cross. Plus, I had the Pentagon. I was producing very nice ships.

A good start helped me a lot in this game. I'm going to go back up to Monarch for my next game. Monarch starts with the recent Better AI builds have been my undoing.
 
Quagga said:
Bombard definitely is not working properly in the 1-8 build. The button lights up, but it doesn't do anything when you're trying to bombard across borders.

Even being aware of this, I forgot the problem at least three times, putting my siege units in the wrong place, and costing me a turn delay on attacking.
Click to expand...

I had the same problem ... but I fixed it by removing the BetterAI mod for a few turns so I could accomplish my cross-border bombardment. As soon as I took out the DLL, bombarding worked again.

The AI appears to suffer from this bug as well. In my last 1-8 game in a war vs Toku, he moved a stack up next to my city which was right on the border. His stack just sat in his territory and did nothing. There were a bunch of siege weapons in the stack, and I think he was waiting to bring the cultural defenses down, but none of his siege weapons could bombard across the border.

Really fun game BTW, came down to the wire between me (Brennus) and Cyrus going for the spaceship, but Ramsses pulled out a cultural win at the last moment. I'd never played Brennus before, but having all those guerrilla promotions is actually kinda fun. I ended up with a bunch of Guerrilla III units, great for attacking cities from hills.

By the way, I think I noticed a bug: infantry units (upgraded from older units) with Guerrilla III didn't get any bonus attacking cities from a hill.
 
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