A.I. Tactics priorities

[Slowpoke]

Looking at all the different values... it seems like it might actually be possible to fix the A.I. tactics already. The questions is.. how exactly do all these values work.

I'm assuming that lowest priority items are considered first, and if an action is not taken it keeps going down the list. If that's true, why in gods name didn't they list the priorities in order? It's a mess Which makes me think that might not be how the priority works.

 

[Slowpoke]

Okay after tinkering with it, it seems it's the other way around, higher priority actions result first. Setting pillage to 1000 e.g. will result in units never attacking you and even moving around your units to pillage. What doesn't make sense is, city attack is 15 and pillage normally is ~60. So why are units attacking cities before all/most tiles are unpillaged? Seems odd.

 

[SamBC]

Most likely there is a freestanding cost/benefit analysis in the AI code, but it gives the wrong results, and these values are heuristic tunic values to make it behave better, changing priorities overall but allowing for a context-sensitive behaviour through the original cost/benefit.

It's a guess, but it's how some other games' AIs work.

 

[Slowpoke]

It must be something like that. E.g. if you set city strength very high, melee units will simply swarm around the city and do nothing. It seems like priority chooses the action, and if that action is not worth taking, it SKIPS the rest of the list?