AI+ v13.1

[V. Soma]

Oh, I thought I mention that in Omnibus mod I set the following:

movement +1 to all units
cities distance: 4 tiles
tech boosts: 40%

I love these changes...

do these influence AI with the AI+ mod?

and Siesta, thanks for v9, it is great...

 

[Siesta Guru]

I am talking about a newly saved game (autosave) from a newly started game - I couldn't even have started a game with AI+ if I didn't add AI+ modid to my mod's References list in the .modinfo file. I did that, started the game, tried to load an autosave from the last turn ..
It sent me back to main menu.

Hmm, your theory may be correct then. Have you looked at the modding.log file? That might give you some more details on loadorders

Siesta:

V9 - huge gameplay improvement. AI is making attack moves that I haven't seen it try before. Really good work.
Balance mods for late game city strength and anything else you feel should be adjusted would be welcome.
If, for example, you think it would be simpler to make a mod that increases CS early game defending rather than trying to decrease the AI's desire to capture CS, then go with the easier fix.

Hmm, that's a decent idea actually. Hadn't yet considered buffing city states to keep some more alive. A desire to city state military production may also be a potential solution. Will have to see what I can do here.

Have you sent your resume and copy of this mod to the developers yet? Maybe they will hire you and give you access to the full game code. Because if you can make these huge improvements with the limited tools available, imagine what you could do with the full code and compensation for your efforts.

Hah, that may be fun. I was thinking of contacting them with a couple of bug reports and questions, and maybe a few small feature requests after the holidays. I'm curious if thy'll be receptive.

Played my first post-winter patch with the AI+ ver9. Really like it so far. Lost 3 games on immortal in the ancient and classical era before finally getting into the swing of the aggressive AI.

Excellent! I hope it continue to give you trouble during the later eras.

I did notice a few circumstances where a pair of warriors would attack my archer. I had a high ground advantage and shot at them while they approached. They then just got next to me and fortified. Once each one was low enough to be killed on the next shot they started running away. Other than this small detail the AI has been behaving quite well!!!

Hmm, it fortified? And there were only 2 of them? That's peculiar. They were owned by players right? Not barbs/city states

1) I was fighting vs Roosevelt and noticed that he was using AT Crew units only. A spamload of them. Few siege weapons..
2) In fact Roosevelt wasn't able to capture one of my city state ally after he killed all the city state units.. America's AT crews were just wandering clueless in the city state territory, waiting to be killed by the city-state defense.

Sounds like poor Roosevelt probably beelined chemistry and had no niter for bombards. Did you happen to see any catapults or rams/siege towers in his army?

I don't mean it's wrong. I actually liked to have to clean some crazy nest of barbarians. Is that a vanilla behaviour? Or it comes with this mod?

That'd be vanilla behavior.

3) Noticed in v9 and v8: AIs don't build at all Campus districts.. I'm playing in a small map and AIs have built just 2 o 3 campus in total... Is that normal? Didn't noticed this in vanilla..

Do you mean 2 or 3 each? That's pretty typical. I put the overall desire campus a little lower than industrial/commerce and about the same as harbors/theatres/holy sites. Reason being that it seems campuses are rather weak in civ 6, with the extra production/food from those others translating to similar science eventually through bigger cities.

movement +1 to all units
cities distance: 4 tiles
tech boosts: 40%

do these influence AI with the AI+ mod?

Doesn't sound like it'd cause any problems. If anything the +1 movement may make it a little better in warfare.

 

[Horem]

[1198929.428] [Gameplay] ERROR: UNIQUE constraint failed: UnitAiInfos.UnitType, UnitAiInfos.AiType
[1198929.428] [Gameplay]: While executing - 'insert into UnitAiInfos('UnitType', 'AiType') values (?, ?);'
[1198929.428] [Gameplay]: In XMLSerializer while inserting row into table insert into UnitAiInfos('UnitType', 'AiType') with  values (UNIT_MODERN_ARMOR, UNITTYPE_MELEE, ).
[1198929.428] [Gameplay]: In XMLSerializer while updating table UnitAiInfos from file delnars_fixes.xml.
[1198929.428] [Gameplay] ERROR: UNIQUE constraint failed: UnitAiInfos.UnitType, UnitAiInfos.AiType

This was fixed in the Winter patch? Hense the Error. (v9)
Also how would I go about increasing Campus/Theater districts desire to be on par with industrial/commerce? I have nerfed the population gain alot in Test of Time. The AI is suffering because of it.

 

[Morgawr]

V9 improvements are clearly noticeable, excellent job! I gave up on my Deity game after falling way too behind (2+ eras) by turn 100. I had to drop down a difficulty level to Immortal going forward. In my first Immortal game, I waged war ~turn 90 and tried to take a city but the AI fought very well and actually used its Knights to attack and kill by crossbows... I finally took the city after 20+ turns but my war weariness was off the charts and I fell behind in everything else. The capable AI is definitely having my rethink my strategy - AI not a cakewalk anymore. Truly impressive that you accomplished this just w/ the XML. I am going to start a new Immortal game with a new approach now, taking the AI more seriously.

Re: early CS conquering, you could give them free walls on higher difficulties, give that tech free on start, or at least make walls their #1 priority. It makes sense given they are such juicy targets. If I were a lonely puny city state, I would definitely want walls ASAP in a dangerous world surrounded by bigger civs..

 

[White Out]

Did v9 change barbarian spawn time?

 

[Siesta Guru]

[1198929.428] [Gameplay] ERROR: UNIQUE constraint failed: UnitAiInfos.UnitType, UnitAiInfos.AiType
[1198929.428] [Gameplay]: While executing - 'insert into UnitAiInfos('UnitType', 'AiType') values (?, ?);'
[1198929.428] [Gameplay]: In XMLSerializer while inserting row into table insert into UnitAiInfos('UnitType', 'AiType') with  values (UNIT_MODERN_ARMOR, UNITTYPE_MELEE, ).
[1198929.428] [Gameplay]: In XMLSerializer while updating table UnitAiInfos from file delnars_fixes.xml.
[1198929.428] [Gameplay] ERROR: UNIQUE constraint failed: UnitAiInfos.UnitType, UnitAiInfos.AiType

This was fixed in the Winter patch? Hense the Error. (v9)
Also how would I go about increasing Campus/Theater districts desire to be on par with industrial/commerce? I have nerfed the population gain alot in Test of Time. The AI is suffering because of it.

Are you sure you're using v9? This was a problem in v8 right after the winter patch came out but I fixed it for v9.

The best way to buff desire for campus etc would be to increase both their desire weight for science and the pseudoyield for great scientists, especially the latter seems impactful.

V9 improvements are clearly noticeable, excellent job! I gave up on my Deity game after falling way too behind (2+ eras) by turn 100. I had to drop down a difficulty level to Immortal going forward. In my first Immortal game, I waged war ~turn 90 and tried to take a city but the AI fought very well and actually used its Knights to attack and kill by crossbows... I finally took the city after 20+ turns but my war weariness was off the charts and I fell behind in everything else. The capable AI is definitely having my rethink my strategy - AI not a cakewalk anymore. Truly impressive that you accomplished this just w/ the XML. I am going to start a new Immortal game with a new approach now, taking the AI more seriously.

Awesome! Having people drop difficulty levels is one of my main goals, so glad that's actually working

Re: early CS conquering, you could give them free walls on higher difficulties, give that tech free on start, or at least make walls their #1 priority. It makes sense given they are such juicy targets. If I were a lonely puny city state, I would definitely want walls ASAP in a dangerous world surrounded by bigger civs..

Forcing walls is a pretty good idea indeed, I may do that. I'm not sure if I can directly give them free stuff, although I may be able to attach traits to them that boost production or something.

Did v9 change barbarian spawn time?

No, but the winter patch did do something about barbarians. Not entirely sure what, but the behaviortree is different.

 

[jsurpless]

I am talking about a newly saved game (autosave) from a newly started game - I couldn't even have started a game with AI+ if I didn't add AI+ modid to my mod's References list in the .modinfo file. I did that, started the game, tried to load an autosave from the last turn ..
It sent me back to main menu.

I'm also seeing this behavior - the 1st time I try to either create a game OR load a previous game

I have a number of Mods installed (but disabled all right now except AI+) - could you tell me what I need to modify so I can resolve?

Thanks!

 

[Leyrann]

Any chance you can improve on things like Gorgo calling me out for not going to war in turn 16 on epic game time?

PS Amazing job done so far! Already made me scale difficulty back a bit after I nearly lost my capital to a well-coordinated attack early on.

 

[Siesta Guru]

I'm also seeing this behavior - the 1st time I try to either create a game OR load a previous game

I have a number of Mods installed (but disabled all right now except AI+) - could you tell me what I need to modify so I can resolve?

Thanks!

Could you share the contents of the database.log file in my games/civ 6/logs ? That might give answers
There's definitely something funky going on in general though, I've had the issue a few times myself without discernible reason.

Any chance you can improve on things like Gorgo calling me out for not going to war in turn 16 on epic game time?

PS Amazing job done so far! Already made me scale difficulty back a bit after I nearly lost my capital to a well-coordinated attack early on.

I've looked a bit into agendas, and it seems that for most of them, I at least can't really do much about their conditions. However, it may be possible to convert a couple of them from an instant relationship hit, to a relationship issue that slowly builds up, which is how a couple of them are done. It's going to be a rather lengthy process though (very hard to test) that won't even make it much better. With say kongo, him getting angry over not spreading your religion to him, is always going to feel wrong if he's on the other side of the continent, whether or not it took him 15 turns to get angry.

 

[jsurpless]

Could you share the contents of the database.log file in my games/civ 6/logs ? That might give answers
There's definitely something funky going on in general though, I've had the issue a few times myself without discernible reason.

Please see attached - changed extension to .zip since it was complaining about .log when trying to upload

 

[Siesta Guru]

Please see attached - changed extension to .zip since it was complaining about .log when trying to upload

Seems you don't have the winter patch installed successfully, or you did something to your units.xml file. The UNITTYPE_CIVILIAN_LEADER bit was added there.

If you can't figure out a way to get the right units.xml, then you may want to just remove this line in military.xml of AI+ and reload the mod fully (close game, change versionnumber in modinfo, then reapply tick in additional content)

<Row TeamName="Simple City Attack Force" AiType="UNITTYPE_CIVILIAN_LEADER" MaxNumber="1" />

 

[WileyWilson]

Great work on V9 Siesta, thanks! I know the mod's not set up for marathon, but it's significantly better than vanilla!

Game settings: Emperor / Marathon / Standard Map / Abundant resources / Low sea level. Mods: Smoother difficulty, AI+V9

What I've noticed so far:

• LOTS of horse spawning barb camps (might have been unlucky here, I'll do more testing)
  
• By ~1AD, Japan's taken over all of England, Egypt AND Germany's cities PLUS 1 city state on my continent
• By this time, I was the only other civ on the continent. I had 3 strong cities and at least 10 Legion & ~5 archers
• By ~500AD I'd taken all of Japan's cities and made peace for gold, I left them with one size 3 city. After ~30 turns, they declared a SURPRISE war on me with several knights and Samurai. wow, never had that in 200+ game hours

Thanks again Siesta. Kudos, grats and my eternal gratitude!

 

[jsurpless]

Seems you don't have the winter patch installed successfully, or you did something to your units.xml file. The UNITTYPE_CIVILIAN_LEADER bit was added there.

If you can't figure out a way to get the right units.xml, then you may want to just remove this line in military.xml of AI+ and reload the mod fully (close game, change versionnumber in modinfo, then reapply tick in additional content)

<Row TeamName="Simple City Attack Force" AiType="UNITTYPE_CIVILIAN_LEADER" MaxNumber="1" />

Oh, sorry - should have mentioned that I don't have it installed yet because I'm playing on a Mac

What is UNITTYPE_CIVILIAN_LEADER?

 

[Siesta Guru]

• LOTS of horse spawning barb camps (might have been unlucky here, I'll do more testing)
  
• By ~1AD, Japan's taken over all of England, Egypt AND Germany's cities PLUS 1 city state on my continent
• By this time, I was the only other civ on the continent. I had 3 strong cities and at least 10 Legion & ~5 archers
• By ~500AD I'd taken all of Japan's cities and made peace for gold, I left them with one size 3 city. After ~30 turns, they declared a SURPRISE war on me with several knights and Samurai. wow, never had that in 200+ game hours

Thanks again Siesta. Kudos, grats and my eternal gratitude!

You're welcome!
Wow, Japan was really going at it. I have seen 2 civs a few times in my own test games, but never 3 entire civs eliminated. Sounds like the record mentioned by the ai dev in the prelaunch battle royale has been broken!

Haven't changed anything about the barbarians this version myself, but the winter patch did something that seems to have invalidated my earlier slight nerf to barbarians, so you might be experiencing that.

Oh, sorry - should have mentioned that I don't have it installed yet because I'm playing on a Mac

What is UNITTYPE_CIVILIAN_LEADER?

Oh mac players don't have the patch yet? Hmm, will have to do something about that.

The UNITTYPE_CIVILIAN_LEADER thing is just something added in the winter patch that appeared near the bottom of your log (it keeps track of great generals). Since it's missing where my mod expects it, things crash.
The small edit I suggested in my previous fix should resolve the issue at least, with only minimal impact.

 

[sp00n]

Is there some way to discourage the AI from parking his units all over the place in my territory when you have open borders? They're blocking off my builders from improving the tiles... I doubt he's planning a "surprise" war, we're green and I have roughly twice his military power.

This game really needs a "remove your troops from my ground" diplomatic request, which the AI already can. Or let my builder enter MY OWN tiles within MY OWN borders regardless of any FRIENDLY unit there. FFS.

 

[Morgawr]

Is there some way to discourage the AI from parking his units all over the place in my territory when you have open borders? They're blocking off my builders from improving the tiles... I doubt he's planning a "surprise" war, we're green and I have roughly twice his military power.

This game really needs a "remove your troops from my ground" diplomatic request, which the AI already can. Or let my builder enter MY OWN tiles within MY OWN borders regardless of any FRIENDLY unit there. FFS.

Yes I wish they would let your civilian units stack with AI military and vice versa when at peace, as it was done for the Civ 5 VP mod. Much smoother that way

 

[Morgawr]

No, but the winter patch did do something about barbarians. Not entirely sure what, but the behaviortree is different.

In my current Immortal game the barb CAMP spawn rate is extremely low. I am on a huge continent with lots of empty space. Once the initial camps were cleared, I swear not a single new camp has spawned, even into turn 120+. Found that to be very strange. Either has to do w/ what you modified in gamechanges.xml or a fluke.

(UNIT spawn mechanic worked fine though - once a barb scout spotted my city and went back to the camp, it spawned numerous horseman and horse archers, as it should )

 

[Morgawr]

Must say I am continuing to be impressed by the AI's improved combat abilities in V9. In my Immortal game Scythia was sitting on its lone capital for many many turns early game (into turn ~60) and I thought something is off why is she not expanding. Then she founded a 2nd city next to Norway and raised a giant army of horseman, saka archers, and other melee units and took over 5 of Norway's 7 cities extremely quickly. It was quite epic watching the Scythian hordes sweep the continent. Meanwhile I am sitting on the other end of the continent thankful I wasn't the target. After that Scythia went on a expansion spree and founded like 4-5 new cities so their 1 city ballooned into a 10+ city empire in less than ~40 turns! Totally did not see that coming.

 

[View619]

In my current Immortal game the barb CAMP spawn rate is extremely low. I am on a huge continent with lots of empty space. Once the initial camps were cleared, I swear not a single new camp has spawned, even into turn 120+. Found that to be very strange. Either has to do w/ what you modified in gamechanges.xml or a fluke.

(UNIT spawn mechanic worked fine though - once a barb scout spotted my city and went back to the camp, it spawned numerous horseman and horse archers, as it should )

I'm actually experiencing the opposite of this in my current Germany game. Four camps spawned near my capital in the early turns, and additional camps have spawned in those areas where I don't have vision. Probably just a fluke on your end.

Any chance you can improve on things like Gorgo calling me out for not going to war in turn 16 on epic game time?

PS Amazing job done so far! Already made me scale difficulty back a bit after I nearly lost my capital to a well-coordinated attack early on.

There's actually a mod being developed that deals with agendas. Check that out and see if you can use it with AI+.

 

[Lion King]

Hi SIesta, thanks for replying!

Thanks for the detailed feedback in your post!
A lot of changes went into it. One of the biggest is solving a bug that made them not even start siege operations in lategame. On top of that I did some work to the behaviortree that makes them focus cities more, to operations to make them retreat less often, and to teams to make thm bring more appropriate siege support.

I am wondering what's driving the AI desire to a)create a group to attack city and b)actually attack city when it is surrounded
I see there are 4 parameters, which might be responsible for the operation moves:
a) min odds of success
b) initial strength advantage
c) ongoing strength advantage
d) priority

Do you know what these parameters are driving exactly and their ranges? I am trying to change them to make sure AI attacks cities if they reach it but sadly I don't see much impact.

Yeah both of these seem to result from in dll settling code bugs. The 3 tile one is mostly because they still count tiles that are already in someones territory as being worthwhile. The 1 tile river issue seems to be because the fresh water calculation looks at the fresh water availability of tiles on the first ring, instead of the actual spot. Not entirely sure on that one yet, but it would best explain what I've seen so far.

Yeah, I changed friendly city multiplier from -10 to 5 but it has only marginal impact when settling second city, after it AI again prefers 3 tiles distance, probably due to competition for the land. Changing it to higher values (+15) leads to crazy results when AI settles second city 15-20 tiles away from the capital =)

Yeah that point is rather awkward. The reason is pretty simple and hard to avoid though. On lower difficulty levels, the defending player will have significantly less troops. This makes relative differences in strengths bigger, so that they hit the condition of 'minimum odds of success' much quicker, and thus launch more attacks. I haven't found a good way yet to make this better on the higher difficulty levels.

On this point, I was wondering whether strategies "if strong" have too big numbers - I see that the last strategy "STRATEGY_AM_VERY_STRONG" needs 1,000 points (I assume that's the military score difference bw attacking and defending civs) and as I see this is the only strategy which values Zerg_rush operations. I have a feeling that I never saw these operations in the late game.

Agreed. Those information age cities are nearly impossible to conquer, and that doesn't seem very historical. If anything it became much easier during renaissance to take cities, rather than harder. I'm considering just removing the strength scaling based on population to make it a little more bearable, but it'll mean most cities have exactly the same strength.

Yeah, I changed parameter city_strength_per_pop to 1 but it doesn't create that much difference. Do you know how is the technology scaling factor named in the game? I scanned through global_parameters.xml but can't see any exact parameter named after city defence scaling.

Working on this one. Have you by any chance seen them actually build them in vanilla? I'm not sure yet if they even can. Same deal with nuclear weapons.

No, AI doesn't use them at all in vanilla game - makes me so frustrating when I think that basically 25%-30% of units is just not used by AI. AI only uses battering rams, even siege tower I never saw being used by AIs.
Also, AI doesn't build Forts/Airstrips/Missile silos.


Also got a bit more feedback on other things:
1. Shipbuilding
I noticed that AI normally doesn't build ships apart from navy civs (England/Norway) and some strange situations (not sure what they are, but mainly when AI is locked on small piece of land). I increased general desire to build ships by 200 and decreased desire for it for navycivs by 250 and after this change AI started building ships in relatively normal numbers. Sadly, there are currently no operations for "Naval assault".... is it possible to create this type of operations for ships (e.g. including 2-3 melee ships and 3 ranged ships and mb 1-2 melee land unit)?

2. Inquisitors
I am not sure whether the issue is in the mod or is it after winter patch but I started seeing AI building tons of inquisitors - I saw stack of 10-11(!) Sumerian inquisitors.... I have a suspicion that AI incorrectly defines this type of unit or has some weird preferences towards building it. Mb this is something to do with newly added code for religion picking.

3. Strange moves
Sometimes I see that AI grabs all its forces and move them to weird places, e.g. snow deserts in map ends. I have a suspicion that AI probably tries to create either massive escort for its settlers/workers or it tries to attack enemy city but the target is unreachable. The problem is that it takes ages for AI to dismiss this move and start behaving back normally. Even if it is DoWed by other civs, AI won't relocate its units quickly.
By the way, I noticed that defence operations are switched off in the code.... can we change to give AI a bit more ability to defend it? Because sometimes AI is about to lose its capital but it is careless about this fact because it is fighting another civ on the opposite end of his empire.