AI Spamming... Scouts?

[notque]

playin' it. works like a charm. No more defendings scouts in cities and early offensive forces consist (bronze)warriors/axemen.

Playin' in monarch. lot of fun.

Btw, when choosing a trait instead of minor, does it mean that is all I get? Or is there a chance to get some more?

You have a 20% chance to get 2 traits. If you have any more input, please put it in the minorleaders thread to avoid thread jacking this.

Glad it's helping, it works really well for me.

 

[sable_twilight]

Reduce their <iPower> value, add UNITAI_CITY_DEFENSE, UNITAI_ATTACK_CITY and UNITAI_RESERVE to their list of NotUNITAIs and change their UnitAIs list to only include UNITAI_EXPLORE.

Reducing the iPower value will help the AI understand that they are not powerful when they have 100 scouts. The NotUnitAIs will prevent the AI from building AND using them for those purposes. By only having one UNITAI defined the AI will prefer them for that use but they will still be able to use them for other functions not excluded by the NoUnitAI list. For example, if you remove UNITAI_CITY_DEFENSE from warriors and add it as a NotUnitAI for scouts early in the game the AI will defend with warriors because they can't defend with anything else but once they can build archers they would defend with them and use their warriors for attacking. The AI build descisions for units are heavily influenced by the UNITAI values so fixing these first will greatly improve the AI without any changes to the code.

There are a lot of units that could use similar attention to help the AI understand how to use them better. Also, if Kael feels so inclinded, adding the ability for promotions to modify the UnitAIs and NotUnitAIs for individual units would be a big help, another boost would come from allowing promotions to modify the iPower value of the unit. This would get the AI to understand that highly promoted units are potent adversaries and you could get the AI to use units based on the promotions it has given them in addition to what the base unit was designed for. Imagine if the City Raider promotion also gave the unit UNITAI_ATTACK_CITY, you'd see an improvement in the AIs use of existing units with more experience.

If I were going to self mod this, and wanted to add in the ideas for the promotions, would I just add in an ipower line and appropriate unitai value section under each promotion?

 

[krinndnz]

Sable: It probably won't work, but you should try it and see what happens, then tell us about it. The more experimentation and documentation there is, the easier it'll be for that to make it into the main branch of FFH.




Also, to Seven05 - I used your advice to tweak my FFH experience a bit. I like it so far! Thank you, that was a gold-star-worthy post.

 

[sable_twilight]

Krinndnz: I know how to add it to the promotions, but how can I tell what the computer sees at the unit value? It is possible to check through the world builder?

Either way it will have to wait till I get back from my trip.

 

[Skyre Noktis]

If I were going to self mod this, and wanted to add in the ideas for the promotions, would I just add in an ipower line and appropriate unitai value section under each promotion?

You would need to mod the DLL to get it to understand what the new XML fields do. It understands 'iPower' and 'UnitAI' tags for units, but not for promotions.

 

[krinndnz]

Skyre: Do you know if it's possible to do modifications in Python that would change the iPower of a unit? I'm taking a quick search through the Python stuff, but my Python competency is not high (but it's better than my ability to tinker with the DLL, which is zero).

 

[Skyre Noktis]

Not without editing the DLL, unfortunately. The XML field is all you've got, because the game takes the unit's power value directly from there.