AI mod possible?
- Thread starter Spine
- Start date
Spatzimaus
Mad Scientist
Not QUITE true, but close. You can use Lua to create a new decision process to go with whatever new functions you add, you just can't edit the existing processes (or interrupt them during their execution). So if you were to add, say, a diplomacy mechanism where the player was presented with a choice of which motion to present to the U.N., you could weight each AI's choices by its initial Flavor biases. (Unfortunately there's no Lua function to extract its CURRENT biases, which'll be a combination of civ biases, grand strategies, and any local needs.) But you'd have to build that decision process entirely yourself, there's no easy way to simply add one more decision to the game's core logic.
Spatzimaus
Mad Scientist
Basically. The game uses a Flavor system to weight the AI's choices. Take buildings, for example; if the building queue is empty, then the AI will pick from every building it can build at that moment, but its choices will be weighted by Flavors. So if the AI really wants production buildings at the moment, then buildings with a positive FLAVOR_PRODUCTION will be relatively more likely to be chosen; the Factory, with a flavor value of 100, will nearly always be picked if the AI has Coal, but most of the buildings are in the 30-50 range and so aren't so absolute. This Flavor weighting will depend on the AI's leader choice (so Elizabeth loves naval stuff), the AI's Grand Strategy choice (so an AI going for a Domination win will favor military boosts), the AI's City Strategy choice for that city (the "Production Focus"-type things) and a bit of randomness thrown in for good measure. The only real cap on this is that the AI will never try to build anything that'd take more than 50 turns to complete, which mainly only applies to Wonders.
What it means is that you, the modder, can easily tweak the AI's choices by changing these Flavor values. Want the AI to REALLY want to build Walls in every city? Boost its Flavor. Want the AI to have puppet cities build the occasional growth and production buildings, instead of only ever making financial ones? Change the Flavor weightings on the puppet City Strategy.
What you can't do, however, is make the AI be more intelligent than that. You can't make the AI do things in an intelligent order (production stuff earlier, cheap stuff first, etc.), and you can't easily tell the AI that building X is a great thing to build once its cities get big but lousy to build when the city is still small. The same applies to other things, like Improvements; you can't teach the AI that building one of an improvement is great but that building two of them side-by-side is a bad idea. If something is a good choice, it'll be seen as ALWAYS a good choice.
That's the basic idea. We can change the AI's biases, or add rudimentary extra behavior of our own, but we can't fundamentally alter the existing behaviors. For that, you'd need the DLL.
Similar threads
