AI+ v13.1

@Littlebob86

As for your last point, I've read that the values you see in diplomacy are unlike the stats of previous Civ games. They don't show your relations, but they merely modify per turn your relation. Therefore you may have +18 per turn and the AI still hates you like nobody else in the game.

@Siesta Guru

Thanks for the feedback. I already feared that my suggestions might be out of the question, nevertheless I find it important.

Do you have an idea if we will ever be able to mod the game like I suggested? AI for me is the »make or break« issue in terms of long time motivation. I quit Civ 5 because the AI was atrocious.

 

But even if it's per turn it had only been positive, I hadn't done anything aggressive or nothing ! We were just buddies then bam ! War !

 

Well, I haven't figured out AI diplomacy behavior yet, but it's pretty f**ked up

One thing that really bothers me are AI agendas, but that's meat for another post.

 

@Littlebob86

The diplomacy stuff seems to mostly be within the dll, so there's very little that can be done here. I'll keep exploring though, perhaps I can still find something.

@genosse.stanil

Some of them should be doable with effort if the dll is ever released, I have no idea when and if they will. In theory with the dll available, the options are just limited by modder skill and game performance. The one where the AI coordinates it units properly is probably the hardest one out of them.
Some of it is partially doable now (the catapults for minor civs).

 

Joint war are totally out of whack currently! They don't seem to obey to any of the usual war rules. I've had AIs DoW me before i even met them through Joint Wars. Another game they declared a Formal War without previously denouncing me. They should just be removed until Firaxis fixes them.

On topic. Really interesting to see what can be done with just a few number tweaking. If really the AI is much better (rather than just confirmation bias) it would mean the base AI was better than we thought at first, but the developers didn't have the time to tweak the values correctly because of deadlines.

 

Both of these were kind of true for Civ 5 as well. Joint wars were coded differently, with different (fewer) modifiers playing a role. There was an odd bug in there too. If player A was asking player B to declare war on C, you'd expect them to be less likely to ask/accept if they were trading with C. Instead, they used the wrong variable, so that A is less likely to ask B to go war with C if was trading with A!! And the same problem was there for accepting the deal. So they ended up not caring about whether they're trading with you, and also tended to only do joint declarations of war with 'randoms' as they'd be trading with their nearby buddies. I would not be surprised based on the behavior I've seen so far that they ported that one over.

And tweaking numbers made the AI way stronger in 5 too. It would still stuck at the tactical game, but the economic game and the way they send forces/declared war could be tweaked to make the AI almost an entire difficulty level tougher, just with xml. Mostly through the snowballing advantage some got out of it, I've seen plenty of civs win a dom victory or like accidentally win with culture after eliminating all but one.

 

Thanks for this mod! Can the behavior of the AI to suicide charge low power units to their deaths be fixed?

 

Mind if I ask in what context you see that behavior? There's actually some limits on that kind of thing, so if you're seeing that they may have missed it somewhere.
In fact, I was planning on allowing the AI to do that a little more in some circumstances as it sometimes makes it stand around for no good reason, with units it shouldn't care about anyway.
With low power you mean outdated units right? Not low health

 

If they did more of that when a city was in peril they would make for a more dangerous opponent. Alot of times they have a city down to one more shot and pull back their wounded units.

 

What do I need to change to stop AI from settling 2 tiles from their other cities? Its already ridiculous to have them doing that on normal maps, with bigger maps its unbearable.

 

Thanks for the feedback, I'll increase their desire to sit next to fresh water somewhat in v2.

Unfortunately there's no good way to stop that as of now. The problem comes from them still considering tiles in their own territory as new tiles. So if there's an area the AI considers good (like one with a ton of luxuries), it'll spam it full.
I've been trying some 'hacky' ways of making it little less, but so far no luck.
It might actually be a decently effective strategy for civs who have the settlers to spare in civ 6 though, I'm not entirely sure if fixing this will actually make the AI become a better player.

 

Actually, considering the actual balance, it even may be a good strategy (to group cities).

 

Posted this in Delnars AI mod as well but wanted to give some feed back:

So I too am playing a heavily modded game and am using the mix of the 2 AI mods... but I wanted to give some feedback as well. While the difficulty isn't dramatically harder(better) it is in fact better. I've had the AI actually kill a number of my units in the first war. (Rather then just staring at half life archers and getting arrows rained on their heads like before) And at least 3of the civs are doing a good job of keeping up with me in settling cities and tech even though I've captured 3 cities and 2 settler (Gandhi is SOOOO bad at war). I'm only into 1300 bc so still early but so far so good I'll play this one a little further and try to provide anymore feedback.

I am still curious why the AI doesn't ever seem to build archers of their own nor upgrade their slingers. It kinda seems like archery is a mandatory tech and I always have to rush it as the 3rd or 4th tech... is that strategy something that can be prioritized for the AI?

Oh also I am convinced that adding 1 maintenance to warriors and slingers makes the first 50 turns better as it seems the AI does a better job of building things other than hoards of those two units. I know you are primarily focused on AI and not balance so if you don't want to make that changes is there a way to simulate it and either lower the AI's priority for those early game units or trick them into thinking their is a cost?

PS all of this is on emperor epic

And on placing cities close together I'm pretty sure because of the radius of industrial and entertainment districts and the benefit of placing multiple district adjacent to each other you actually want to pack cities as tightly as possible. I've been ICS with all of my cities only 3 titles apart (4 if that extra gap will get them fresh water) and I'm convinced that is the optimal way to play. In the early game you don;t have enough housing and amenities to get much more than pop 6-9 anyways and by the late game with farm adjacency you can still get cities to 20+ even packed so closely together so there is no need to try and chase 30 size cities as 3 pop 18-20 cities with overlapping industry is WAY stronger than that one mega city. So I actually love it when the AI settles right on my border it's usually a spot I would have wanted anyways and gives me one more city for my ICS

 

Glad to hear it feels a little better at least!

When it comes to archery, yes I could make the AI prioritize it. But it's likely going to be a rather 'dumb' prioritization in that I can't really add good conditions. So they may end up always prioritizing it, or only if they're attempting for a military victory. I'm not entirely sure if that'd be an improvement, but it's definitely worth considering and testing out.

Edit: So I just tried it, even with a boost to archery preference, they still avoid it like the plague. It's indeed as you said, it doesn't get picked because they're trying to get to the higher end techs.

 

only allow 5 hexes

---
UPDATE GlobalParameters SET Value = '5' WHERE Name = 'CITY_MIN_RANGE';

 

This is my experience as well. Though I tried the "Combined AI" mod which merges this one with Deflan's. Basically the AI has a million Pop 2 cities, allowing me to completely eclipse them in population, districts, great people points, etc. Their combat AI is great, but their culture, science, and production are way gimped in this particular game.

 

Yeah I remember in Civ5 it was something like this, but I cant seem to find it anywhere. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. Can you give me a little more help?

 

I'm another one of these jerks who can't give proper testing feedback due to using Combined AI I am experiencing the same thing though. AI properly fills out land now, but their cities are underimproved, have almost no districts, and aren't growing. Teddy has like 16 cities and I expected him to turn into a runaway AI juggernaut (aka worthy foe) but so far nope. Also ancient wonders are almost totally unclaimed at 0 AD (I believe only Stonehenge is built in a an 18 AI game!), this isn't a huge issue though since early wonders aren't that strong.

Havn't been able to test combat yet, got a magically peaceful starting location. Barbs did OK but not sure if better than normal.

EDIT: Starting to suspect that CombinedAI does not have the latest version of Delnars which lowered the Settler cap to 2 from 16(!), since I have seen the AI with 3 settlers at once. So the lack of growth may be caused by the AI spamming useless settlers and unrelated to your mod. EDIT2: EDIT: Ok there is code putting settler cap at 2, wonder why I'm seeing civs with more than 2 settlers. Maybe captured.

Also forgot to say thank you for working on this!

 

<drive letter>\<install path>\Civilization VI\Base\Assets\Gameplay\Data\GlobalParameters.xml

Lines 81 and 83 (ish, depends on your text editor)

---
<Row Name="CITY_MAX_BUY_PLOT_RANGE" Value="3" />

<Row Name="CITY_MIN_RANGE" Value="3" />
---