AI+ v13.1

[Siesta Guru]

Wow, Siesta, thanks for quick update! What was the issue with the districts, was it pseudoyields balance?

It appears it was indeed just a balancing on yields. Some small iterative changes to other areas (like a small increase in desire for science) must've pushed it over some border where suddenly no one was interested anymore. It probably happened in one of the later changes before the release, and I didn't notice because I don't look at district counts every game (and cant see gpp counts in the AI only games). Just turned their desire for culture up a little again and all was fine.
In addition I also added a bit more of an extra desire for 'cultural civs'. In vanilla cultural civs were defined, but they had no extra preference for culture/tourism directly, they just had a preference to selecting the culture victory, which would then increase their desires. I think it makes more sense if they have a small base increase in desire too.

without this mod ,my first try after the new patch,the first settler i see was alone. NO escort and no other unit around 8 plots.

Yeah I'm not sure what exactly they're supposed to have done that makes it better, it barely seems to make any difference. It's probably a tiny behaviortree change, since that's where most of the escorting logic takes place. It's so tiny I can't spot it though (wish I had saved the original somewhere). And since the whole behaviortree system is so limited, I doubt they could even make the behavior perfect with changes there.

 

[hermes11]

It's so tiny I can't spot it though (wish I had saved the original somewhere). And since the whole behaviortree system is so limited, I doubt they could even make the behavior perfect with changes there.

What files do you need? I have my entire games directory backed up with Crashplan, so I have any file before update saved on the cloud.

 

[WileyWilson]

I'd be very interested to hear anyone's experience playing the new patch without AI+ to see how much they really improved the AI.

Not to be a cynic, because I am greatly supportive of Firaxis and their work, but I'm assuming the AI is still 90% broken. They mention some AI changes in passing, but they seemed too general and secondary in the notes to really represent the complete AI overhaul that is needed.

I've played 3 half games (to renaissance) on Emperor / Standard map / Marathon speed / Low sea level / Abundant resources.

• Fall patch enabled
• Smoother difficulty mod enabled
• AI+ NOT enabled

In all 3 games, by the time I'd hit renaissance, I knew I'd "won" whatever victory condition I fancied (except religion - cba)

Here are my findings in all 3 games

• AI builds lots of cities and builds lots of units
• AI quite aggressive at attacking City States / each other
• AI sometimes upgrades units
• AI sometimes declares surprise war and attacks me with handful of units. I defend and they sue for peace after 10 turns with a lucrative deal. After building up my military, I counter attack AI . At times the AI should wipe my units out. What happens? Timid AI retreats most units and let's me pick off some stragglers. 2 turns later, they dance their units back, I think "aghhh", and again they retreat letting me pick a few off. Eventually I wipe out all their units, then proceed to take their (undefended) cities.

Now I know I am playing on marathon and that production times are slow. But when AI military is a LOT stronger than mine, I wish AI wasn't so chicken and just danced units around the battlefield. I've noticed the same issues with Birth of the federation, AOW3 and a host of other 4X games I've played over the years. The AI has a shed tonne of units and they split them up allowing us to take them out. The only game which had "intelligent" AI was Sins of a Solar Empire; AI amassed it's forces in a "safe" place then attacked en masse - that game was fun.

Do you know?

1. Are there any settings to make the AI more aggressive when attacking my cities and defending their own?
2. Do we know if AI changes cities' production to military when at war or does it carry on building wonders, theater and entertainment districts?

 

[RandV]

Gwydion62
Yep, on top of the fixes here, I did a lot of testing and made sure it's compatible with the new official patch. There were no real issues with anything.

I've not been able to reproduce the 'settler buildup' issue now even once in about 6 testing games, so it may be fixed now (did some small changes that might help it more against barbs). Not entirely sure yet though, that issue has a habit of popping up rarely. Too bad it takes me so long to do these test-runs.

It shouldn't be your mod that's doing this, I saw this as well in a game I just finished where the only AI mod I'm using is Quo's Fewer AI Tantrums. This is a game that I started before the official patch, then it got patched half way through so I don't know if it was there before or if it was because of the patch. But either way, small pangaea map on immortal difficulty, a spy in Brazil's capital showed 7 or 8 settlers just lazing around. Brazil had been aggressively expanding but the only places left were distant barbarian infested tundra.

 

[oedali]

@Siesta Guru, I take it that your mod v6 is fully "compatible" w/ the new patch? None of the changes they made conflicted/overrode any of your changes?

 

[Qarisma]

Could you update the version number in the download file modinfo? I'm sure I have the latest version but it still says v1 and I'm just a little bit worried that I might have been downloading the wrong one somehow...

 

[Siesta Guru]

Now I know I am playing on marathon and that production times are slow. But when AI military is a LOT stronger than mine, I wish AI wasn't so chicken and just danced units around the battlefield. I've noticed the same issues with Birth of the federation, AOW3 and a host of other 4X games I've played over the years. The AI has a shed tonne of units and they split them up allowing us to take them out. The only game which had "intelligent" AI was Sins of a Solar Empire; AI amassed it's forces in a "safe" place then attacked en masse - that game was fun.

Do you know?

1. Are there any settings to make the AI more aggressive when attacking my cities and defending their own?
2. Do we know if AI changes cities' production to military when at war or does it carry on building wonders, theater and entertainment districts?

1. There's unfortunately a couple of things that affect 'agressiveness', so it's not a quick setting somewhere. There's a unit-level aggression, which can decide not to attack if ts health is low, this can be changed in behaviortrees (the defend unit nodes). Then there's an operation-level aggression, which determines what units they'll send in at what point, and at which point it goes into retreat mode, this is a rather complicated system, so I'd recommend just sticking with AI+ if you want (small) improvements there. And then there's the amount of units they produce and how willing they're to go to war etc, again sadly not small tweaks.

2. It mostly doesn't care in vanilla, but still does a little indirectly. The indirect effect is through it sometimes deciding it needs to add units to do certain operations, like defending cities. But it tends to be way late and way too little. In AI+ I've changed it so that there's a significant base desire difference when at war or when its cities are threatened. It'll focus military and leave longterm things be for a bit. It stil won't be a full 100% military production because a permanent war would then completely wreck an AI, but it's much more reasonable I feel.
Unfortunately it still won't do things like canceling wonder production if its in the middle of it..

It shouldn't be your mod that's doing this, I saw this as well in a game I just finished where the only AI mod I'm using is Quo's Fewer AI Tantrums. This is a game that I started before the official patch, then it got patched half way through so I don't know if it was there before or if it was because of the patch. But either way, small pangaea map on immortal difficulty, a spy in Brazil's capital showed 7 or 8 settlers just lazing around. Brazil had been aggressively expanding but the only places left were distant barbarian infested tundra.

Yeah it's definitely caused by vanilla problems, just trying to do everything here to try and solve it. It did for a while actually get worse with this mod on, so gotta be careful here.

@Siesta Guru, I take it that your mod v6 is fully "compatible" w/ the new patch? None of the changes they made conflicted/overrode any of your changes?

That's correct. The patch is also a change to the base xml files, so if anything its me overriding them. So far it seems to work perfectly fine though.

Could you update the version number in the download file modinfo? I'm sure I have the latest version but it still says v1 and I'm just a little bit worried that I might have been downloading the wrong one somehow...

Ah sorry, forgot about the filename! If you want to confirm you have the right one, look inside of the modinfo file, you should see the actual version number located somewhere near the top.

What files do you need? I have my entire games directory backed up with Crashplan, so I have any file before update saved on the cloud.

Awesome! It's behaviortrees.xml in base/assets/gameplay/data that I'm most curious about but the entire data map would be great to have,

 

[gheorghos130]

Siesta you are amazing.
Thank you so much for making our beloved game playable.
Going to try the VI version, could you please let me know if mod 'learns' AI how to conduct wars?
thank you again,cheers.

 

[hermes11]

Awesome! It's behaviortrees.xml in base/assets/gameplay/data that I'm most curious about but the entire data map would be great to have,

Here's that entire directory pre-patch:

http://filebin.ca/32e0AXm4HnRj/Civ6DataNovember132016.zip

 

[Horem]

When I enable this with the Fall Patch, I always get a random amount of Civs. I select large map, pick my Civ and Opponents. Once the game has loaded and I check the Victory progress there is never 10 civs but a random 4-8 not including myself. If I turn this mod off I get the 10 civs, every time. Anyone else noticed this?

 

[oedali]

I have been playing with fall patch too but never had this issue. I play standard map though. Did you make sure to update to v6?

 

[Siesta Guru]

Siesta you are amazing.
Thank you so much for making our beloved game playable.
Going to try the VI version, could you please let me know if mod 'learns' AI how to conduct wars?
thank you again,cheers.

You're welcome! So the AI does get somewhat better at war, but not massively so. What you'll probably see is that it got better at sending appropriate amounts of units in, and that it'll reinforce it's troops better. It also won't stand around staring at your city nearly as much. But it'll still be nowhere near the level of humans.

When I enable this with the Fall Patch, I always get a random amount of Civs. I select large map, pick my Civ and Opponents. Once the game has loaded and I check the Victory progress there is never 10 civs but a random 4-8 not including myself. If I turn this mod off I get the 10 civs, every time. Anyone else noticed this?

That's weird... No idea what could be causing something like that. Check your modding.log and gamecore.log when it happens and see if you find anything funny

Here's that entire directory pre-patch:
http://filebin.ca/32e0AXm4HnRj/Civ6DataNovember132016.zip

Ah thank you so much!
So for those curious, what they did in the settler escort fix is that they moved three nodes around in the settler behavior tree to correct a bug. In the original method, it would try to make a formation after moving to the intended spot, instead of before. Now it does it the right way.
It's a change I had made as well at some point, so you won't see any increase in competence if you had been using AI+. The change does make it a little better than the launch version, but not too much, as unfortunately the behaviortree often skips past the formation node as if it's completed, without any formations actually being formed. It appears it may only do anything if settler and escort are already standing on top of each other, without it attempting to move the two together.

 

[Horem]

When I enable this with the Fall Patch, I always get a random amount of Civs. I select large map, pick my Civ and Opponents. Once the game has loaded and I check the Victory progress there is never 10 civs but a random 4-8 not including myself. If I turn this mod off I get the 10 civs, every time. Anyone else noticed this?

I traked it down to another mod, Mapscript mod of all things. Soz to trouble ya.

 

[Leodim]

Hi all,

Here is my first report about v5 (games are long, havent tried v6 yet, but it seems changelog doesnt impact this report):
- it's true the "no wall issue" is not entirely gone, but it's already 'acceptable'. AI didnt have wall when he could but after a long siege with units, he built some (well in like 20 turns on "online" speed, but he did)
- the main issue "AI doesnt attack" is not gone. I had 5 or 6 poor ranged units (slingers/scythia unic but without 50 kill-heal capab (changed that to 25%, too OP imho) or whatevere the name in english) shooting around and standing near his city (which had no wall) and AI had like 6 knights (!!) that didn"t attack most of the time, for about 15-20 turns. Once in a while he made an attack, losing only 20 hp while my unit lose 60, but he seemed to never attack if not at full health! So I just had to keep his units "below 100% health" or even just so only one was in range of the same unit of mine (err ur following?) to never lose a unit, where I should have been crushed even by a kamikaze AI. In the end, I just shot them down with ranged.
Side-consequence: the AI is very bad at crushing lesser AI, even if at war and with ultra superiority, not that much a worry but feels "stagnant" throughout the world". When a city is capture AI to AI it's like the event of the millenium lol.

I will post screenshots with turns later, I kept the save files.

I looked at mod files, I think you already did great at how AI stack troops to attack a city, but is there any value to change to make the AI more likely to attack on a "one turn" basis?
At this point, I feel even a kamikaze-nobrain-AI with rule "always attack a unit when I can if at war" would do better than civ6 strategic AI

 

[Siesta Guru]

Hi all,

Here is my first report about v5 (games are long, havent tried v6 yet, but it seems changelog doesnt impact this report):
- it's true the "no wall issue" is not entirely gone, but it's already 'acceptable'. AI didnt have wall when he could but after a long siege with units, he built some (well in like 20 turns on "online" speed, but he did)
- the main issue "AI doesnt attack" is not gone. I had 5 or 6 poor ranged units (slingers/scythia unic but without 50 kill-heal capab (changed that to 25%, too OP imho) or whatevere the name in english) shooting around and standing near his city (which had no wall) and AI had like 6 knights (!!) that didn"t attack most of the time, for about 15-20 turns. Once in a while he made an attack, losing only 20 hp while my unit lose 60, but he seemed to never attack if not at full health! So I just had to keep his units "below 100% health" or even just so only one was in range of the same unit of mine (err ur following?) to never lose a unit, where I should have been crushed even by a kamikaze AI. In the end, I just shot them down with ranged.
Side-consequence: the AI is very bad at crushing lesser AI, even if at war and with ultra superiority, not that much a worry but feels "stagnant" throughout the world". When a city is capture AI to AI it's like the event of the millenium lol.

I will post screenshots with turns later, I kept the save files.

I looked at mod files, I think you already did great at how AI stack troops to attack a city, but is there any value to change to make the AI more likely to attack on a "one turn" basis?
At this point, I feel even a kamikaze-nobrain-AI with rule "always attack a unit when I can if at war" would do better than civ6 strategic AI

Thanks for the feedback!
Honestly, I think you're basically right, the AI could accomplish more if it just kamikaze-rushed its units in with no regard for their safety, especially in terms of defensive behavior. Based on the name of the zerg operation in my files you can see I've actually kind of attempted that in the agressive tactics, sadly with little luck. There's unfortunately no direct way to force that kind of behavior, so it still has to be faked through operations (with one man teams), and it's not so easy to get right.
When it comes to aggressive behavior, it'll unfortunately probably end up being worse with full-on zerg-like behavior. One of the bigger reasons is that the AI does almost all its war declarations through the operation system. If you'd allow these tiny one man teams to declare war, they'll declare war on everything in sight (I've seen this, it's fun to watch, but doesn't make for a good game). If you don't, they'll never declare war.
On top of that, there's no way to coordinate these one man teams walking to the same city, and there's no way to coordinate them attacking the cities at the same time. With the current insane healing on cities, they would never take a single city.
Hopefully I'll manage to improve on it a little more, but as for now, I worry the system here is just way too limited and dll access is required.

Interesting to hear that the non-attacking thing is still an issue. Will have a further look at that. My hunch was/is that it's basically units that have been locked in to some purpose (a city attack, clearing a barb camp) and are waiting for something. But that doesn't completely match with your report on their healths.

 

[Littlebob86]

I had a settler running around close to a few barbarians, a melee horse, a ranged horse, a scout and a warrior (the warrior was the furthest at 3 tiles away), and none of them went for him.

 

[V. Soma]

I had a settler running around close to a few barbarians, a melee horse, a ranged horse, a scout and a warrior (the warrior was the furthest at 3 tiles away), and none of them went for him.

Well, in my present game (AI+ v6, smoother difficulty: Kings, 8AoP, 8AoW, Impr. Water yields, 6-player-balanced map)
I met a lonely barb settler in the middle of the map... captured it with my scout... I guess first barbs took it from AI...

 

[AlyG]

with only using 8 paces rest vanilla ai is settling way more now this is just a king game all cities have have acces to water

 

[Matte979]

First thanks for your work. Tried Fall patch without the mod and still was pretty horrible AI.

Then added back version 6 and AI is ok and make for a reasonable game, I do have slower tech and policy enabled but that's all. Some observation.

- AI does settle pretty good, they do settle a little to often closer without access to water than instead of going a little further for a water location. I think this is better for the AI even though this will make some cities small to begin with, the draw back is that the players settle recommendation can basically be ignored as its uses the same logic, which is not optimal.

- Ai War, Better they do use wounded units more but still start healing at about 70% or so instead of fleeing or continue attack. Its not all bad as units at 70% does fight with lower attack value. Personally I think we can get rid of stay still in around enemy and heal for AI for now, and just make it either attack or retreat, make retreat higher maybe 50%.

 

[Real SciPio]

this mode and increased min city distance (+4 tiles) mode make AI perfect at settling

micro war waaay better than vanilla but macro ...errrmm....AI attacks with overwhelming force (immortal) than several turns later if you repel him he will make peace with huuuuge reparations (last time scythia gave me all cities but capitol!?) even thou he is ahead on science, culture, faith, military, cities.......

attacking cities by AI nearly not happening if cities have walls and atleast 1 range unit around

like AI is just bluffing most of the time...starting the attack but eagerly avaiting to give you his gold and cities ....too shy most of the time... like nerd in brothel

oh...and obsolete units spamming still happening...less than before but still...