AI STEAMROLLING TEST

[Victoria]

amenities have to be a big reason why

The work is appreciated @Engeez but *have to* is a very statement given a test bed of 2 games.
Certainly the tests do not disprove the theory.
However I have just tested as follows with interesting results

Loaded up a random start... found myself on an island with Mansa
I spawn 6 Mali units around my city and declare war on them and they destroy my capital, game over

I reload, spawn 6 Mali Units again but this time I increase the Mali capitals population to 6 and declare war.
Mali reduce my capital to near 0 but do not take it!!

I will try again ... if it repeats I will post the saves here

... hmmm did not work out as expected the second time ... but here was the test if you wanted to see if sometimes Tamar lives rather than always

 

[Fluphen Azine]

So if I change the AI values in a game it will make the AI steamroll or runaway making the game more difficult?
Basically give them more amenities and buff their units?
All I need is FireTuner to do this or can I do this another way?

 

[Victoria]

can I do this another way?

Can you load my two saves, declare war and see what happens... maybe repeat a couple of times... does Mali ever not take the capital?

 

[Fluphen Azine]

Can you load my two saves, declare war and see what happens... maybe repeat a couple of times... does Mali ever not take the capital?

I'll give it a go.

 

[Casworon]

That test Victoria does definitely add more fuel to the fire suggesting that amenities has a big impact on how willing the AI is too conquer cities.

Im loving this. Having snowballing AIs in the game i think is the number one way to increase difficulty

 

[Engeez]

In units.xml I gave all arches, crossbows, cannons & machine guns 300 bombard strength. I just copied the “bombard”code from catapults and added this to the units above.

In buildings.xml I changed walls, castles, star forts from 100 to 20. I also changed the stadium to 99 entertainment with 99 regional effect.

In Technologies.xml I changed urban defences to 20.

In districts.xml I changed entertainment from 1 to 99 and 2 to 99 from in the entertainment complex and street carnival respectively.

When Kongo owned the world it was on a Pangea small map and also keep in mind I only watched 15 min of it then woke up 7 hours later to see they owned the planet with about 40-60 GDR’s walking around.

I also would recommend changing entertainment values for waterpark & copocabana as well but I didn’t see those in districts.xml.

I can tell you tat the AI acts completely insane on these settings in an AI only auto play. The amount of nukes they use is completely crazy and it seems like it is just perpetual war. Much different than a regular AI autoplay.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

@Victoria

I played both files 3 times each.
All 6 tries ended in defeat in 2 turns.

 

[Victoria]

@Victoria

I played both files 3 times each.
All 6 tries ended in defeat in 2 turns.

Yes... not sure what happened the first time but the units did just mill about after reducing the city
I'll try to bump up WW first with a few deaths as ww seems to be what it always was

 

[Victoria]

Interesting, city still dies if high WW and high pop... so looks like the theory may be wrong.

 

[Infixo]

@Victoria @Fluphen Azine If you have a situation that AI is unwilling to capture a city I would appreciate if you post a screenshot with visible units around a city.
I wrote in some other thread that pre-GS was a bug in a BH node responsible for capturing cities and the tree literally stuck and AI was doing nothing.
Re: amenities Once the operation is running (i.e. bh tree is active) there is no stopping it. It only considers diplo actions and chances of capturing a city.

 

[Victoria]

I wrote in some other thread that pre-GS was a bug in a BH node responsible for capturing cities and the tree literally stuck and AI was doing nothing.

Fantastic, that explains a lot. Occaisionally I have got it so when i next to I will make a save for ya. You need an operations log as well?

 

[Infixo]

Fantastic, that explains a lot. Occaisionally I have got it so when i next to I will make a save for ya. You need an operations log as well?

Actually, behaviortrees.log shows if a node is stuck but if you post a savefile i can run it myself and get it.

 

[blackcatatonic]

This is a really interesting experiment. I've often wondered why the AI refuses to take cities when it clearly can and it seems a lack of amenities could be a reason why. Kind of hilarious if it's because the AI is following the rules about overexpansion and amenities that the developers clearly wanted or expected the players to

The AI does raze cities on occasion, right? I'm sure I've seen it, and not just city states. Also I'm wondering if this also influences the AI's decision making if, during a siege, its melee units are targeted and wiped out and then it fails to bring up another?

 

[cvb]

UPDATE GlobalParameters SET Value = 20 WHERE Name ='CITY_AMENITIES_FOR_FREE';

For test purposes a line like this is surely the easiest. If abundant amenities in fact change the behaviour positively, here the mod Resourceful 2 (Gathering Storm compatible), I mentioned above.

Re: amenities Once the operation is running (i.e. bh tree is active) there is no stopping it. It only considers diplo actions and chances of capturing a city.

Yes, once the operation is running, I would expect, that it is tried to complete it (successfully). But I suspect, on a higher decision level "the operation" could be dismissed or delayed (again and again) because of lacking amenities - so that the operation is 'too seldom' activated.

I mean, I'm ready to give the AIplayers lots of free units, but that is to no avail, if the AI fears the problems of many additional people in conquered cities in the face of scarce amenities.
OTOH I could discover specificly for every Civ 'in case of necessity' a resource (amenity) or two on an empty tile in their territory.

 

[Krajzen]

@Engeez you are genius

Can modders directly modify AI behavior regarding amenities without dll? Otherwise, if this is indeed the case that amenities cause this mysterious behavior, I hope for a mod that indirectly unleashes AI by changing amenity system (or maybe only it is possible to make only AI, but not human player, bypass amenity shortages)

 

[Engeez]

Well I let another game run all day while I’m at work so I’ll post a screen shot when I get back. Like @Infixo pointed out, it was just one game that got that result.

I think everyone also has to realize that I give ranged units one shot bombard power. Normally, I never see a ton of siege units later in the game by AI’s so how the hell can they even take a city? They also don’t use observation balloons properly and go two tiles from a city and get wrecked via garrison priority.

 

[sa1vy]

This is very interesting. Presumably an easy fix to the AI so it could actually handle itself in war is just increasing their amenities then? Like, +1 amenity in every city?
The current state of AI city-taking is atrocious. Look at the replay, and only four cities ever were captured? (And they were all city-states...) The AI should be able to do more.

 

[Engeez]

This is very interesting. Presumably an easy fix to the AI so it could actually handle itself in war is just increasing their amenities then? Like, +1 amenity in every city?
The current state of AI city-taking is atrocious. Look at the replay, and only four cities ever were captured? (And they were all city-states...) The AI should be able to do more.

Well giving them 99 amenities at the moment only if they build the entertainment complex. I really would guess on Deity they need more than a an extra amenity or 2 because the back and forth unit killing is obscene. (I believe this affects war weariness/happiness). Also hundreds of nukes being dropped can’t be good for happiness I presume.

 

[Infixo]

Yes, once the operation is running, I would expect, that it is tried to complete it (successfully). But I suspect, on a higher decision level "the operation" could be dismissed or delayed (again and again) because of lacking amenities - so that the operation is 'too seldom' activated.

I’ve never seen any behavior tree stop working because of some „higher thinking”.
And the fact that some of them get stuck (e.g. also settlers sometimes stuck and GWAMs) also confirms that. Because if there was such a mechansim eventually a stuck tree would be canceled and re-started. But nope.

 

[Furycrab]

Im loving this. Having snowballing AIs in the game i think is the number one way to increase difficulty

It's not a great way of doing it, especially if they are basically snowballing off each other. It means you created another problem where an AI doesn't know how to defend itself properly. Snowballs are also notoriously lame to play against. Losing a game because an AI on another continent managed to kill everyone isn't fun, could be interesting at first, but would get old and you would hate the civs that can pull it off too often. I remember hating Alexander in 5 on some patches because sometimes you got a game where he was this 15 city monster.

Walls are a bit ridiculous right now though. Was playing a game with Eleanor yesterday, and had a situation where Poland moved up on me correctly identifying that I was stretched thin and greedy, but then the only threat to my cities are these Catapults which are way too easy to pick off with city attacks and ranged units, and then they posture around your city until you've murdered everything and then they want to throw gold at you just to end it. Worth noting though, the extra 50 defense added to ancient walls did end up mattering and making things easier for me.

Little strange to see that even if the walls were down, the AI might have been reluctant to take the city anyway.