AI tweaks - Battle AI

[Marshall Thomas]

We can only guess on what the base mean, I suspect it means 1 city 7 units 2 cities 10 units. In my current game that seem to be the case. Flavors of leader also affect this. That why some dont have any defenders in vanilla.

I increased them higher to see an effect and it worked. Right now I want my AI to defend better as they suck at attacking.

When they fix the tactical AI, I would lower these. I also lower maintenace ost to let the AI have more troops without being penalized, I really would like them to keep a decent defense and at the same time be able to attack.


As I mentioned before the changes I made greatly improves early game AI, as they are less likely to be mad(Want to declare war) at a civilization thats way off beacuse they have no units

Did you lower maintenance for only the AI and not the player? How do you do this? Thanks in advance

 

[Matte979]

Did you lower maintenance for only the AI and not the player? How do you do this? Thanks in advance

I lower a cross the board. There is a parameter in the global defines in Assets XML folder.

Its set to 50 as based, the paramater is called something like cost per units 100


If you lower it to 25 then you half the price.

 

[Marshall Thomas]

I lower a cross the board. There is a parameter in the global defines in Assets XML folder.

Its set to 50 as based, the paramater is called something like cost per units 100


If you lower it to 25 then you half the price.

Do you raise the defense or hitpoints of early cities? I'm trying to stop AI vs AI early rushes.

My biggest preblem with Civ 5 is that, by mid-game, most AI civs are either really big or are down to just a couple of cities. I don't mind AIs taking cities from each other in the first half of the game; but I don't like to see too many civs almost eliminated by The Middle Ages. I hate discovering the "other" continent, only to find it's been overun by one or two massive AI empires.

 

[rspeer]

This isn't going to be the most informative problem report, because I was running Battle AI along with other mods (specifically, all of Thalassicus's Balance mods that were out on October 7). But the AI is ideally supposed to deal somewhat gracefully with changes in game rules, so here goes.

I was England, on King level. America started fairly close to me, and did the typical hypocritical AI thing of yelling at me for settling vaguely near him while wedging a city in between the borders of two of mine on the next turn. That part's fine. But somehow he seemed to have no idea that my response would be to build two horsemen, a swordsman, and a catapult and invade him.

America had three cities to my four, and his total defenses seem to have consisted of a spearman and an archer. He left the archer undefended in range of the swordsman, and he built maybe one more unit during the war. It hardly took any effort to destroy him.

 

[pipdog]

nice work. But I think those tweaks would be better if used along with some combat balance modifications. Another problem that makes the AI so easy is that the AI only have one layer of defense. If he loses one city, he loses the whole game. This is why the result of most games is determined before industry era. I think I would be better if u can add in some defensive bonus or make it easier for him to replenish his losses. Like increasing the strength of the unit that currently garrisoned in the city or for example double the effect of the defensive structures, or give a default bonus to the strength of the unit within the 1 tile rangle of the city.As replenishing losses, I think the production of combat units can simply be reduces. with the high maintenance costs looming above, the overall units count shouldnt be that different. with this kind of balance changes, it will actually cost the player something to take a city

 

[jwallstone]

Does this really need to have Affects Saved Games checked? It only needs to be checked if you're changing something that would break a save game if the mod were turned off, not just changing parameters etc.

Right now it makes it impossible to switch it in and out and try the same saved game with/without.

 

[SerialK]

Hi, i'm interested in your mod, but I am wondering if you are still using whole xml files or using the method introduced by Civ5 (alter specific values for better inter-mod compatibility) ?

 

[rspeer]

An update: I started another game (using jooyo's CCMAT without tech diffusion, which includes Battle AI, Thalassicus's Balance mods, and a few others). Still on King level.

This time the AI has been a formidable foe. It still isn't any good at tactics, but its approach has been "who needs tactics when you can send a ginormous wall of units".

And that's been working pretty well for the AI: I haven't been able to leave my territory for long enough to make a serious attack on an AI city, because I always have to be ready for the next wall of units.

So, great work. I don't know what made the first game so different.

 

[player1 fanatic]

What I think would be great, would be to somehow change the way how AI evaluates human player army.

Regardless how much we can improve AI, human player units will always be worth more combat wise, then similar units from AI civilization.

So wouldn't it be great, if when AI is deciding if someone is worth attacking (or mocking for their small army), that it takes into account that human player army is stronger then it looks. Something like +50-100% modifier in human favor. That way, AI will be aggressor less often against human and would have bigger army when it does so.

Of course, I have no idea if this is in any way possible without DLL modification.


P.S.
Another thing needed is additional "handicaps" at higher difficulties more suited to the way how Civ5 combat works.

Instead focusing on higher production and lower unit maintenance for AI army (which worked decently in Civ3/Civ4), they should start with bonus experience, to strengthen biggest weakness of AI troops: low survivability, which means less promotions then human player units.

Probably not possible currently, so it's wishful thinking on my part.

 

[virtuality]

Ya, more experience for AI units are a great suggestion. From king and on, AI should get one extra promotion per each increase in difficulty for units right out of the gate. And those should be bonus promotions, it should not increase the experience required to gain next promotion from battle. That would even the playing field somewhat.

 

[kirneh]

hi there. i'm poking around modbuddy, trying to improve stuff here and there, to make military conquest more balanced and fun in civ5. anyway, i've incorporated your changes in my small personal mod (which may or may not get to be anything more than that at some point ) and in doing that, converted it to <update> format to see what you had changed. so here you are, use it if you want to: http://rapidshare.com/files/424510679/Update.rar

 

[six blade knife]

hey guys =)

just wanted to say I played my last game using this mod (v4) and I foud it very good ! it adds some challenge and it's a real pleasure to see AI armies be less dumb. I even saw some AI civs using ships (ok just a few, let's stay honest but it's better than none in the vanilla).
Some feedback :

*was playing on a custom earth map (y.a.h.e.m) and a CS captured an egyptian city instead of razing it. don't know if it has something to do with the AI tweaks but I enjoyed that.
*I never saw gandhi so raging at war !
*it was very fun doing some battles in the sea
*some AI civs (japan, greece) settled on different continents
*still the AI doesn't know how to use siege machines, throwing them in battle like they were melee units

so to conclude, thanks for the good work Elvince, this mods improves a lot my games of civ5 ! keep up the great work

 

[Saarud]

As someone said earlier in this thread the AI are very bad at defending especially when he looses the first line of troops (he doesn't have any reserves). Well I thought that one of the problems for that might be that it take a very long time to build new units so it's hard to replace any losses. How about making buildcost for units lower... like 50% of current or even 25% or so? Do you think that would help the AI anything? If such a change would be made I would like to increase the unit maintance cost alot.

 

[six blade knife]

As someone said earlier in this thread the AI are very bad at defending especially when he looses the first line of troops (he doesn't have any reserves). Well I thought that one of the problems for that might be that it take a very long time to build new units so it's hard to replace any losses. How about making buildcost for units lower... like 50% of current or even 25% or so? Do you think that would help the AI anything? If such a change would be made I would like to increase the unit maintance cost alot.

to counter the fact the AI can't build units fast, I use Valkrionn "economy mod" which changes the game balance. it's really effective and I could observe in the games I played that the AI has now a true army for attacking and both defending cities.

 

[Kadath]

Two issues in making training faster:

1- the AI does indeed field decent armies, and has more chances to recover from a first loss without being immediatly swallowed by the winning empire (especially for civs already focused on unit training such as Rome). However this leads to huge armies that will cripple the AI economy, forced to build TPs everywhere to not fall into the red, which means later on small undeveloped cities and an even bigger recession.

2- the combat AI is already dumb and we need only a bunch of units to overwhelm it. If it is easier and faster to build units both for them and for the player, the rare case in which we actually make a mistake and lose some battles will be even less of an issue, further worsening the player advantage over the AI.


About the mod per se: pretty good behaviours here, I'm even seeing AIs settling one tile islands! Just one thing I noticed, which happens in vanilla too and needs fixing: when it unlocks it, China tends to go crazy building only chu ko nu units. They are awesome, ok, but they can't seize cities, being ranged. This leads to china keeping under siege several cities, but never having one or two melee units to actually conquer them. They waste their resources losing units at the cities' defenses, and their military advantage given by the UU suddenly becomes a disadvantage when the tides turn.

 

[Uncle_Joe]

This is a really good mod. At the very least, I've seen a lot more balanced AI armies including mounted units. It also seems to use a navy a lot more (I've seen upwards of 4 Frigates and later Destroyers shelling a city).

It still builds too many 'counter-units' in the Industrial/Modern Age and I still haven't seen an aircraft, but for the early game, this mod is a HUGE step forward over the stock AI IMO.

 

[Perkus]

hi there. i'm poking around modbuddy, trying to improve stuff here and there, to make military conquest more balanced and fun in civ5. anyway, i've incorporated your changes in my small personal mod (which may or may not get to be anything more than that at some point ) and in doing that, converted it to <update> format to see what you had changed. so here you are, use it if you want to: http://rapidshare.com/files/424510679/Update.rar

Elvince, kirneh did you a huge favour here, you should grab his stuff and switch to it. It's much clearer for everyone to see what you are or aren't changing, and it's compatible with other mods. I can't vouch for the accuracy of his port, but it looks good, even shows the default values for every change made.

Kirneh - this is based on the latest version, 4, correct?

 

[SerialK]

Thanks for this updated version Kirneh

I was refraining myself from looking at this mod due to that.

edit: A few comments

About MilitaryStrategies.xml

- Flavor: Offense, Defense, Ranged, City_Defense, military_training, etc. are all linked to units and buildings which have specific values. The proposed changes are favoring offensive units a lot to the detriment of support. Okay, the AI doesn't know how to use those, so i guess it's the logic behind the changes.

- I'm kinda annoyed by the very strong increase in most of the weights used here, instead of increasing everything but one option for let's say WAR_MOBILIZATION, the only unchanged one should have been reduced to achieve basically the same result with less hassle. It also *probably* reduce how effectively the AI differentiate units from each other.

- It fails to grasp that a single unit type have different flavors. A cannon has the following: Offense:4, Defense:4, Ranged:9. Anyway, i'll try to make a table showing the weight of the different buildings / units during the different states of the AI. It's gonna take a while, though, there's a load of data to process, but it should be a base for a more coherent build order from the AI (hopefully).


About DefinesGlobal.xml

Increasing each flavor doesn't make much sense as flavors are linked to each other. Think of them as weights in a balance.

The same comment apply probably also to TacticalMove, but here i'm less sure.

 

[kirneh]

Elvince, kirneh did you a huge favour here, you should grab his stuff and switch to it. It's much clearer for everyone to see what you are or aren't changing, and it's compatible with other mods. I can't vouch for the accuracy of his port, but it looks good, even shows the default values for every change made.

Kirneh - this is based on the latest version, 4, correct?

Yep, it's based on version 4 and should be pretty accurate. I used a small program called winmerge to find all the changes and converted them to the update format, and I have been checking that each change actually gets applied to the SQLite database after loading it. I had some strange problems with the filenames, where I had to change the names of some files to get them to load.. I don't remember which names I used before, but later I thought it might have had something to do with using filenames that are already used by the civ5 assets.

I did make one small change by setting AI_DANGER_MAJOR_APPROACH_DECEPTIVE to 0.3 (in DefinesGlobals.xml).. this can be easily be removed, it was motivated by me having done some pretty deceptive approaches to the AI without it doing anything to prepare, even though my army was obviously massing up just outside its borders

 

[Plouk]

I am really interested about this mod, but... little noob question: where can I find the mod? I've searched 10 times this thread without finding it!
(ok let's say that I'm just sleepy)

Thanks!