AI Problems

kumari82

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 27, 2006
Messages
4
I just recently started with FFH. I love the idea behind this and it's actually great to play, but I was wondering if anyone else was disappointed with the AI?

It just seems more or less sedentary. My most recent game the AI civs didn't even declare war amongst each other. Even if they were of polar alignments and despised one another.

I had a neutral civ attack an evil one. Though the former was much more powerful, it took them around 100 turns to take just one of the latter's cities.

I provoked a war with another civ and just sat back to watch. Though he razed a number of improvements, there was nothing like a concentrated assault. My cities were *very* sparsely defended but I didn't lose a single one.

I've played one game on Monarch so far, two on prince. I downloaded the most recent version: is it possible that it's corrupted in some way? Or is this sort of a "multi-player only" type of mod?

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
 
kumari82 said:
I just recently started with FFH. I love the idea behind this and it's actually great to play, but I was wondering if anyone else was disappointed with the AI?

It just seems more or less sedentary. My most recent game the AI civs didn't even declare war amongst each other. Even if they were of polar alignments and despised one another.

I had a neutral civ attack an evil one. Though the former was much more powerful, it took them around 100 turns to take just one of the latter's cities.

I provoked a war with another civ and just sat back to watch. Though he razed a number of improvements, there was nothing like a concentrated assault. My cities were *very* sparsely defended but I didn't lose a single one.

I've played one game on Monarch so far, two on prince. I downloaded the most recent version: is it possible that it's corrupted in some way? Or is this sort of a "multi-player only" type of mod?

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?

Do you play with aggresive ai turned on?
 
Can't say I've had that problem much. The AI tends to fight wars with each other pretty often when I play, though of course if the alignments of bordering AI's match then they do fight a lot less. But that's as 'should' be, sort of. Sure, sometimes it does happen that they sort of wuss out and don't fight much any, usually when they are very evenly matched.

As for the AI and me.. I ~rarely~ tend to be able to go long without being DOW'd on. And the rare few times where I seem to be able to go peacefully the AI usually builds me in or something, effectively forcing me to declare war on him, and from that point on they tend to stick to playing vendetta with me.

I even seem to arouse the AI's ire for little to no reason sometime. When playing a game as the Elohim I had the Khazad hate me for no obvious reason. I think it started out mostly as them wanting to expand by force, but then when I kept (barely) beating them back they would agree to peace only after long and bloody fighting, and then only stick to peace for a few turns of rebuilding before launching back into it. :-p

Fricken greedy dwarves..

Cheers!
 
Huh. You know I'd gathered reading these forums that my problem was sort of original.

I have had aggressive AI turned on. One thing I'm thinking is there tended to be either an even match between most of the enemy AI's or they were of similar alignment. And I was a fair bit ahead in the last game (on Monarch).

So maybe that's what the deal was. Maybe the FFH mod just puts more weight on comparative strength, which would actually be an improvement.

In any case, I'm gonna try playing at a higher difficulty level and see how it happens. I'm really not the greatest player in the world so I'll probably get trounced, but that's a'right sometimes. As long as it's interesting. :)
 
kumari82 said:
Huh. You know I'd gathered reading these forums that my problem was sort of original.

I have had aggressive AI turned on. One thing I'm thinking is there tended to be either an even match between most of the enemy AI's or they were of similar alignment. And I was a fair bit ahead in the last game (on Monarch).

So maybe that's what the deal was. Maybe the FFH mod just puts more weight on comparative strength, which would actually be an improvement.

In any case, I'm gonna try playing at a higher difficulty level and see how it happens. I'm really not the greatest player in the world so I'll probably get trounced, but that's a'right sometimes. As long as it's interesting. :)

The AI in Civ4 uses your relative strength to determine if it should go to war with you. So in games where good players are dominating by the midgame it seems as if the AI isnt aggresive. Actually the AI is just scared of you.

I play on Noble or Prince and I see a lot of AI war declarations (including 3 against me in one turn in my last game, which killed me). I also see the AI take out other AI's.
 
I started a game last night, standard Terra, and had war declared on me by 3 of the 5 other civs, and one of the others asked for my help in a war.
Of course, it's partly being good with Os-Gabella, Jonas, Flauros, and Hyboream around! (Ironically, Cassel was the second one to declare war.)
 
I usually win my wars easily because of poor AI preformance in military. But it is better in 0.16 and I started playing on Monarch, now AI really dogpiles my troops early on, sending in waves and waves of uits, but there could still be improvement.
 
Anyone know what the power differential has to be to force or inhibit a war?

I've regularly got -10 or worse relations, but no declarations of war ( and that with aggressive AI)
 
kumari82 said:
Huh. You know I'd gathered reading these forums that my problem was sort of original.

I have had aggressive AI turned on. One thing I'm thinking is there tended to be either an even match between most of the enemy AI's or they were of similar alignment. And I was a fair bit ahead in the last game (on Monarch).

So maybe that's what the deal was. Maybe the FFH mod just puts more weight on comparative strength, which would actually be an improvement.

In any case, I'm gonna try playing at a higher difficulty level and see how it happens. I'm really not the greatest player in the world so I'll probably get trounced, but that's a'right sometimes. As long as it's interesting. :)

It's not completely original - I've noted that during my last 2 games I've been the only one to declare war on anyone - the result being that the good and neutral nations all hate me but have open borders with each other. Not that I mind much as my vaults are overflowing and I own my own continent whilst all four of them are bottled up on the other :D

All four are furious, but none of them dare to get involved.

The odd thing is - as I approached the late game, I noticed the "exponential slowdown" that someone mentioned in the bug thread. After it became unplayable (Dual Core, 2Gig Ram, Radeon X1900XT - I'm not used to Civ slowing down lately) due to the delay between turns, I took a look in Worldbuilder to see if anything unusual had happened - all I could see is that certain nations had random squares absolutely filled with Macemen and Pikemen (or their replacements). Upto 12 in one place, across about 20 different squares - not counting cities. My defences were decent, but they could quite easily have swarmed at least part of my continent with that - though they seemed reluctant to try building boats (also a lesser problem with vanilla, but I feel a vanilla Civ race *would* have built at least a few boats at this point).

Anycase - it looks like the massed forces on that island might have been responsible for the slowdown, which is the real problem I face at the moment - if I've not won by the time they run out of things to build, I can't finish playing as the game slows down so much during AI turns when they have 150+ units each randomly swarming across their land. Maybe they could be "encouraged" to build wealth/research if their relative power is fairly sound?

In the meantime, I'm cranking up the difficulty a notch or two and using Aggressive AI to see if I can persuade them to fight amongst themselves a little.

Savegame attached incase you want to see what I mean about "swarms".
 
... one silly question:

In which directory IS the AI, and how can we change the AI? Is it "simple" like XML, or is it c++ code or similar? I am a noob in programming, but I would like to try to change some things for 'Fall from Heaven' (if I can...).
 
RavenXL said:
... one silly question:

In which directory IS the AI, and how can we change the AI? Is it "simple" like XML, or is it c++ code or similar? I am a noob in programming, but I would like to try to change some things for 'Fall from Heaven' (if I can...).

There are some tunables in the Civ4LeaderHeadInfos.xml file (if you have excel you can use the editor to adjust these). But most of the real AI work is all in the SDK, and its by far the hardest thing to mod in the game.
 
Vehem said:
It's not completely original - I've noted that during my last 2 games I've been the only one to declare war on anyone - the result being that the good and neutral nations all hate me but have open borders with each other. Not that I mind much as my vaults are overflowing and I own my own continent whilst all four of them are bottled up on the other :D

All four are furious, but none of them dare to get involved.

The odd thing is - as I approached the late game, I noticed the "exponential slowdown" that someone mentioned in the bug thread. After it became unplayable (Dual Core, 2Gig Ram, Radeon X1900XT - I'm not used to Civ slowing down lately) due to the delay between turns, I took a look in Worldbuilder to see if anything unusual had happened - all I could see is that certain nations had random squares absolutely filled with Macemen and Pikemen (or their replacements). Upto 12 in one place, across about 20 different squares - not counting cities. My defences were decent, but they could quite easily have swarmed at least part of my continent with that - though they seemed reluctant to try building boats (also a lesser problem with vanilla, but I feel a vanilla Civ race *would* have built at least a few boats at this point).

Anycase - it looks like the massed forces on that island might have been responsible for the slowdown, which is the real problem I face at the moment - if I've not won by the time they run out of things to build, I can't finish playing as the game slows down so much during AI turns when they have 150+ units each randomly swarming across their land. Maybe they could be "encouraged" to build wealth/research if their relative power is fairly sound?

In the meantime, I'm cranking up the difficulty a notch or two and using Aggressive AI to see if I can persuade them to fight amongst themselves a little.

Savegame attached incase you want to see what I mean about "swarms".

Thats probably the great commander exploit that the AI is using to create hundreds of free units. Its fixed in patch "e". Patch "e" will keep the AI from being able to make more free units but it doesn't get rid of the ones that are already there, so the game will still be slow even with "e" installed.
 
Kael said:
Thats probably the great commander exploit that the AI is using to create hundreds of free units. Its fixed in patch "e". Patch "e" will keep the AI from being able to make more free units but it doesn't get rid of the ones that are already there, so the game will still be slow even with "e" installed.

Aye - it was - I mentioned it in that thread too just before you tracked down the problem :)

Got to say - as an AI graduate - I'm impressed that it managed to learn how to cheat so effectively :lol: Some real emergent intelligence there...
 
The main problem with the AI is that it isn't really an AI design, it's just a complex expert system weighing different preset factors. That's why it so seldom surprises you by doing new stuff; the design inherently inhibits it from diversifying it's strategy. Basically it's just a tree structure of IF-conditionals, it's not even using heuristics for tasks for which it would be relatively simple to implement, IF you'd have designed for that from the beginning. A difficulty now is understanding what the variables do in the different iterations of the loops and functions because you have to reverse engineer the whole thing.

For example, I'm making a mod for FFH where the first to build a temple of a given religion founds that religion. To help the AI understand this I wrote a conditional that increased the relative value of building a temple as long as the religion wasn't founded yet. For some reason this function was apllied to ALL buildings (I still haven't figured out what's happening) and I ended up hardcoding that IF the cityAI CAN build a temple of a religion that's not been founded, it HAS TO. It's dirty as hell, but it's the only way I can get a prototype working atm. Still, the AI pulled off building a Hunting Lodge instead of a Temple of the Leaves the next time it had the chance, even though the temple came up next.

My point is that the AI handles a lot of variables in a pretty confusing way and that makes it difficult to improve upon it without putting a major effort into restructuring the whole shebang. Somebody will do it, I'm sure, but it will be a herculean effort and in the mean time we're stuck with nudging or smacking the AI into doing stupid animal tricks instead of teaching it beautiful new languages.
 
Yeah. Firaxis has a hard road to follow. They opted early on to make Civ4 truely moddable. That decision means they can't hardcode any AI logic. The fact that I can drop a str 40 unit in the game and the game uses it well is amazing. But it requires an AI system without preset definitions (ie: weighting).

Now of course their are limitations to this and lots of room for improvement but I emphasize with the challenges of creating an AI able to play against a human (which knows every ability of every unit) without being able to directly tell the AI the abilities of every unit.

And sure you can have the AI read specific values and make judgements based on that, which is what the game does. But the truth is that however important we tell the game that a point of strength is (for example) will be wrong in a variety of situations. Nothing is static in this game and the beauty of Civ4 is that there are so many systems working together.

Trying to get the AI to understand that it should use a Hunter to chase down an enemy scout instead of a higher strength Elven Archer is a challenge. But even more getting it to understand that thats is only true if the enemy isnt fleeing through forests. Or that a captured Malakim swordsman is better across deserts. Its a lot for human players to take in, let alone a non-specific AI.
 
Well, at least I'm sure there's no one on this forum that claims Firaxis made a bad decision when they went for full modability :) I like to get my hands dirty in this sort of stuff, but I've never had the time (or stamina) to make something as complete as a whole mod, so for me it's excellent that the opportunities to just poke and adjust the small things are so many. You really have to hand it to Firaxis for releasing the source. I hope more developers choose to take this path in the future, inspired by what the community can do to keep a game alive and virile. If it wasn't for FFH, CivIV would've been stuck on my shelf by now. I'm not much of a scenario man either, so the limited additions of the Warlords expansion sort of paled in comparison.

I've been sort of praying for someone to make a Master of Magic II for years now and that FFH has taken the edge of that craving is the best compliment I can give any mod.

Getting back to the AI issue, I understand that it's important to get in all the new mechanics before trying to teach the AI how to use it. Take your time. Most of us crazy...er...dedicated people are patient :crazyeye:
 
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