Acken's Minimalistic Balance for singleplayer (and AI improvements)

[noto2]

Actually here is one thing that really bothers me and might be easily moddable:

I hate how the AI will run missionaries and prophets to my border, and I can't tell them to screw off until AFTER they have converted my cities. I wish there was a way to tell the AI to not convert my cities before they are converted. If the agree to leave me alone, the missionaries/prophets don't come in the first place. This would save so much headache and prevent countless wars. It's always frustrating when I see those pesky little zealots on my border, I have to sit there and calculate the cost/benefit of allowing them to convert a city or two, then make a demand, vs just declaring war and losing an ally/trading partner.

 

[meatpardle]

Possible bug - keep getting offers for Open Borders agreements before I've researched Civil Service.

 

[Akbarthegreat]

The AI focuses way, way less on religion than it does in the unmodded game. This is not even up for debate. Both getting a religion and spreading your religion is far easier.

What I've noticed (both in the mod and unmodded) is that AI attitudes vastly differ towards religion. In my previous game, I was the second to found a religion (dont remember the turn though, but I wasnt too slow) on difficulty 4, and by the time I spread my religion to 4 of my cities, Ethiopia had converted 16 cities on their continent to their religion! On the other hand, many a times the AI cant be bothered to found a religion even if they are doing well overall.




An idea I had to make diplomacy a bit more relevant: When I ask an AI to stop spreading his religion or when an AI comes with the "I'm attacking your CS" threat, there should be two possible responses. One is "very well", i.e I back down. The second should be "You'll have to get past my troops to (spread religion/attack CS)". Now, the second option should give the AI two options as well : Declare war on me, or back down. Feel this would be a little more realistic and sensible; plus it would give me a Casus Belli as well if they choose to attack me.

 

[Lake.Solon]

I presume the AI still plays on Chieftain difficulty, even though you've bumped the difficulties down one number each to insert Demi-God?

Does your mod apply all the settings from the Mod/AI/Difficulties.xml? Are any settings from the base game still used (something/something/Gameplay/Handicap.xml if I recall correctly)?

Answering my own question:

With regard to AIUnhappinesPercent, NumCitiesUnhappinessMod, and PopulationUnhappinessMod.

Neither
/Assets/Gameplay/XML/GameInfo/CIV5HandicapInfos.xml
nor
/MODS/Acken's.../AI/Difficulties.xml
have any effect.

Changes will take effect by adding the relevant SQL statements to
/MODS/Acken's/AI/Handicaps.sql

 

[Acken]

Yes it still works like the base game where the AI uses a lot of the parameters in the AI default entry. The lines in difficulties.xml are there only for the few lines where the AI doesn't use the default value and handicaps.sql is there to change a few values as well as introduce new columns.

 

[Chum]

Possible bug - keep getting offers for Open Borders agreements before I've researched Civil Service.

Open borders has always only required one party to have researched Civil Service.

 

[meatpardle]

Ah OK, my bad.

 

[10000hours]

Question for those who have played this mod: I normally play on Immortal Epic and sometimes Deity Epic, and win all my games on Immortal. Would you still recommend stepping down to Emperor for my first game with this mod?

 

[Chum]

Question for those who have played this mod: I normally play on Immortal Epic and sometimes Deity Epic, and win all my games on Immortal. Would you still recommend stepping down to Emperor for my first game with this mod?

It's very likely that immortal in this mod will crush you, at least until you understand what's changed and what the new goals are.

 

[Akbarthegreat]

Currently playing on Terra Incognito, and am in the middle of an industrial era city spam in the new world (The AI seems unwilling to colonise). Took order and resettlement, what I thought was even if you plan to keep resettlement within order, it still needs a bit of work.
1. Make it a tier 1 policy. Tier 2 has way too much competition anyway, and it isn't good enough.
2. New cities starting with 6 pop has the disadvantage that the city will often starve unless you rush buy a granary/lighthouse/food rich tiles. If you dont you lose the advantage of the policy completely. How about giving the city a free granary and lighthouse, or letting the city grab more land (the Shoshone UP or a toned down version of it)?

 

[Acken]

Giving settlers some base buildings as you go through the eras is worth considering.
Won't really solve the problem of late game settlements being weak but maybe it will feel less stupid.

 

[Akbarthegreat]

Yeah, the highly situational nature of the policy will always be there.

Out of curiosity, which map script(s) does everyone play usually?

 

[Acken]

I mostly play the NQpangea. I just cannot go back to awkward chokepoints and long mountain range, it just isn't compatible with 1UPT in my opinion. I also like the standardisation of the start, everybody starts with 2 food, 1 bonus 2 luxs etc.

That said if someone still has the NQmap activated using my mod it will also affect the other map generation... I'm pretty sure your continents etc will also have standardised starts and less chokepoints etc.

I play Pangea because I like having room and meeting everyone. But from what I've seen, despite poor AI naval abilities the AI is also challenging on continents and archipelago in the mod (at least more than the base game).

 

[DeAnno]

I play NQ Pangea as well (in the next version where itll be removed Ill probably get it from the Map Pack). I like the combination of a big continent for everyone with many small, rich islands to reward sea technology and give extra room to expand. I do think that Exploration could use a Resettlement-type buff though, possibly in addition to a general buff for settling late (maybe a different settler unit available at a later tech?)

 

[Akbarthegreat]

Will try out NQ Pangaea then. Although I couldn't seem to find a feature list for it anywhere.

 

[10000hours]

Hmmm I may be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure on epic you can usually get 67 gold for 1 strategic resource, but I'm only getting 45. Are the amounts hardcoded to standard speed?

 

[Acken]

No, standard speed get 30gold per strategics in the mod. The trading now works as multiplicatives of 30 on standard (and therefore multiplicatives of 45 on epic). This is in order to make gpt trading more consistent and avoid things like trading strategics 1 by 1 giving more than multiple at once.

 

[catfly]

Hi, first time here.

I tried your mod on my Mac version and it's just too buggy. Oligarchy didn't give me any buildings, Religious Fervors didn't give me happiness, Mandate of heaven didn't reduce GP cost, and Cataphract keep appearing on faith buy regardless of civ I picked. Is this normal on Mac version ?

I love your mod idea though. Problem is a lot of aggressive civ like Iroquois, Greece are getting stronger (which in most game, they already is) because of weaker cities. It would be great if those defensive civ know how to defence their territories better, so I won't have to play with Hiawatha ruling the entire continent.

 

[noto2]

Actually I'd have to disagree that the AI is competitive on continents. This is a real thorn in my side. I don't like playing on pangea because it seems too boring to me, I want some exploration and naval combat in my games. Unfortunately, the AI neglects its navy in EVERY game. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a powerful AI like China or the Zulu with an army of 30 powerful state of the art land units, and only 6-8 naval units.

In any continents or hemispheres game, basically as soon as I can build frigates the game is over - especially now that melee ships can take cities. Privateers and frigates will knock civs out of the game, the AI has zero ability to deal with this. In all honesty, I've actually never had an AI dominate me at sea, ever, not once in my 1000+hrs plus of playing Civ 5. It's so bad that I'm considering just playing on a pangea script.

In Civ 4 there was a map script called "big and small" and it worked fairly well in that it was like pangea but there was usually a lot of islands full of resources that made exploration and a navy still important, while keeping the civs on the same continent, for the most part, which was good for the AI. What map script can I use in Civ 5 that would accomplish this?

 

[beetle]

That said if someone still has the NQmap activated using my mod it will also affect the other map generation...

Okay then, that explain why my map generation has been off! I tried Archipelago and Fractal a few times each — and kept getting smallish Pangeas! I gave up and when back to the TI script which I like better than NQpangea.