[BTS] Aggressive Ai

[Inthegrave]

How does the "Aggressive Ai" flag work? What exactly does it change?
Does it change leaderhead values?

 

[Nightinggale]

That's actually a pretty good question. In fact it's such a good question that I realized I had to do some research.
I searched the source code for GAMEOPTION_AGGRESSIVE_AI and it does the following:

• alters choice of what cities produce
• less likely to ban nukes and more likely to build nukes
  
• alters how they handle diplomacy (not really sure what altering iDiploValue does)
• more likely to use spies
• AI less interested in cultural victory
• AI 50% more likely to aim for domination victory
  
• more likely to use dagger strategy
• more likely to use crush strategy
  
• places more defending units in each city
• uses the same code as "always war" setting for planning unit placements in areas
• AI is twice as likely to start a war and less likely to end wars
• AI might decide to start a war just because it's not already at war EDIT: might actually be planning war rather than actually declaring it. This can happen with without aggressive AIs too, but they do it a bit differently
• AI is less scared of enemy troop strength for consideration of start/end wars
• Altered rules regarding hiding units in cities and attacking enemy units

Aggressive AIs seems to be quite a lot more aggressive. I was kind of surprised at how much custom code there is for this game option. One big surprise I was unaware of is the AI (aggressive only) plan to raid another player and actively seek out and capture as many enemy units as possible before the defending player moves all of them into cities. Combine this with the fact that I think dagger strategy is to attack without declaring war first and you should be concerned for your workers.

 

[Inthegrave]

Thanks a lot for this information, I heard that one of the programmers actually wanted this to be a part of the default difficulty instead of a custom game flag.

Is this a good place to start for learning about DLL modding?:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-easiest-way-to-compile-a-new-dll.608137/

I just wanted to make sure I found the best tutorial with up to date information.

 

[Nightinggale]

Is this a good place to start for learning about DLL modding?:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-easiest-way-to-compile-a-new-dll.608137/

I just wanted to make sure I found the best tutorial with up to date information.

Yes it should work just fine. You can use a newer version of Visual Studio and in fact I encourage it. However there seems to be an issue with Windows 10 where you have to install 2010 even if you use a newer version of MSVS. The precise reason is still unknown, but if it can be fixed by just installing MSVS2010, at least it can be made to work.

 

[Nightinggale]

I heard that one of the programmers actually wanted this to be a part of the default difficulty instead of a custom game flag.

I never heard that, but it wouldn't surprise me. The difficulty level (called handicap in the source/xml files) is essentially just a list of handicap entries and each consist of different numbers. Each number represent a certain change in the game like how much food the AI needs to grow (percentage of what humans would need). This means the difficulty level system is designed to work very well with something like "AI 50% more likely to aim for domination victory". In fact only 3 of the changes doesn't match perfectly to the difficulty system.

• uses the same code as "always war" setting for planning unit placements in areas
• AI might decide to start a war just because it's not already at war
• Altered rules regarding hiding units in cities and attacking enemy units

Sure those can be rewritten to work based on numbers, but it would be more work than the rest, which is basically just reading a number from xml. For instance starting a war for no reason could be chance of starting a war for no reason and on lower levels set this to 0. I'm not entirely sure about the other two because I just saw custom code and didn't go into details, but I will assume converting those will also be doable if somebody is determined enough.

We can convert this to difficulty level now because it's all in the DLL, hence accessible to modders. However I don't think it's worth the time anymore. We do have a working GameOption, meaning the many hours it would take to alter and test the changes wouldn't really add much to the game. The time could be better spend modding something else.

 

[Inthegrave]

I never heard that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Yeah here is a topic quoting Blake (One of the Beyond the Sword devs) about aggressive Ai. Read it if your interested:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/aggressive-ai-the-real-civ.234263/

The time could be better spend modding something else.

Don't worry I'm not insane. I'm fine with having aggressive ai as just a custom game flag.
Although I did think about removing the "AI might decide to start a war just because it's not already at war" feature because I'm already adjusting
the leaderheads to be more likely to start war if you piss them off. I'm also making certain actions have a stronger penalty.
For example currently if one of your spies get's caught you only get a -1 to relations but now I'm bumping it up to a -3 or higher for most leaders.
Along with increasing other penalties like difference in religion, nuclear war and close borders.

I feel having "AI might decide to start a war just because it's not already at war" on top of what I'm doing would be a bit much.

 

[Nightinggale]

I feel having "AI might decide to start a war just because it's not already at war" on top of what I'm doing would be a bit much.

I agree. I went back to CvTeamAI to read more on it and there is a lot of code. It will take quite a while to figure out precisely what is going on. Without actually spending hours studying this, I say it might be planning for war with army buildup instead. It's one of the most complex parts of aggressive AI code. In a way it is way more eager to start wars anyway because building a bigger army combined with being more eager to declare war on powerful teams will result in significantly more wars.