So full disclosure, I'm playing along with a mod that adds MANY new districts to the game. Like, over a dozen more. When I run AI-only simulations, here's what I see:
-Didn't see a single Commercial Hub, Campus, or Theater anywhere in one eight player FFA. In another, saw a single Campus and a few Theaters, but no Hubs.
I think the extra districts probably do impact Commercial Hub desire, because they usually get a least a few in my test games. Based on the feedback from you and some of the others, I think I'll probably make commercial districts the most desired. Not entirely sure whether I want to force it, or just make it more likely to be picked though, I'll do some testing.
I am confused by your comment - the point behind advocating commercial hubs is that the AI tends to run out of money often, even on highest difficulty levels. They should prioritize and use it for high gold routes if they are on negative or low income. If they have high income, growth/production/science/etc is fair game. Regardless, my understanding is Siesta Guru is able to tweak district priorities but not the trade route type selection. Which is fine because at least it increases the likelihood of them getting more gold.
So I'm honestly not 100% sure if I can't change trade routes choices at all, or whether it's just impractical. The only candidate for trade route desire changes is that they may be affected by the desires for yields that I can tweak. Problem is, changing yields also appears to affect many other decisions, such as picking improvements, evaluation buildings, choosing districts, etc. So I'm stuck to having just one set of values here that works decently for everything. Over districts I have a bit more fine control because I can also tweak the desire for great person yields and can force district choices.
I guess it depends on what the AI does after it has built the Commercial district. Does it rush buy traders? Does it rush buy Market, Bank, Stock Exchange etc? These rush costs add up and could cripple the AI financially even if using the policy card which doubles commercial building income.
I've not seen it rush buy buildings a single time yet in the logs, but I haven't looked much for that. I don't think it should be a problem at least. It doesn't really pick that policy though, even when appropriate. It greatly prefers the purchasing cost reduction policy when it's running out of money for some reason.
Wanted to respond to the question about aircraft attacking units. I didn't notice it happening in particular, but I also didn't move much near them so it could be possible they weren't in range. They definitely had two bombers in an aerodrone in their nearest city and razed some of my bordering tiles. Also I was using TCS' improved aerodrone mod which makes them more beneficial and not take a district slot, so that could be why the AI was more inclined to build them.
I'm betting they probably didn't. Haven't found a good way to fix these yet, especially since it's hard to get them to play nice with city attack operations (which for example at points require all units to be within a certain range).
It was on prince again. The Autoplay mod has an auto-war feature so they can't get in a rut, although it is kinda rare anyway. I have an entire series coming up feature AI battles. super fun stuff
Awesome! Looking forwards to it, hope you get to witness a 4 player domination victory game, which may be possible now.
Hello,
I tested this v9 with most excitment since I was feeling I couldnt enjoy civ6 anymore before a real AI patch that might take ages to come.
And the result is... drumroll... very good! This is indeed the best breakthrough in AI for battle so far!!!!
Glad you you enjoyed it and thanks for the detailed feedback!
Strangely, even though I put difficulty values ultra high, game still went quite easier as it went.
Yeah it doesn't scale well at all until the lategame yet. There's quite a few issues that cause this (policy choices, production costs and maintenance going up fast lategame), but I'm honestly rather surprised you actually managed to win your game with those settings. Smoother difficulty should already help with the AI keeping up, especially since you boosted it like that.
- District not enough built, my spies had nearly nothing to do lol. I really think it hurts AI a lot as game progresses and you need gold/etc from district to be competitive.
This point surprised me a little. Were their cities also small, or did they have the population but just didn't build the districts? If it was the latter, there may be some compatibility issue going on here. At those high difficulty boost levels they really shouldn't even be able to build too few of these.
Upgrading : mostly good when they had the strategic resource. BUT one of them didnt build improvements on them even though it was in the middle of his territory, so... couldnt improve.
This also sounds a little fishy. How were their tile improvements looking overall? A typical test game of mine on emperor has most tiles in their main cities improved, with some gaps in the cities on the edges.
- Play pangea or whatever with nearly no water because AI on water is cakewalk
Yeah... I'm working on this a little, but am not expecting to be able to get much done here. Both its military and its empire building abilities get completely ruined when you have to play with ships and the land is supbar.
They also don't realize that land units can't attack on sea for some reason, often making them swarm your boats.
- To add even more gold to AI (but not prod, 160% seems ok) because late game he doesnt have that much units (equal to less than early game lol). It seems they build very few to none commercial district and so get poor easily even with +160%
The issue with low lategame unit counts is also often a production issue. If for some reason it ends up losing many of them at some point (war or disbanding), it just can't produce units fast enough anymore either. The AI isn't as good at strategically building production cities, so you often have a bunch of cities, that despite their production bonus, don't actually produce faster than human cities. Humans also tend to be able to maintain and build upon a force throughout the entire game, but the AI often loses a bunch, so they need to completely rebuild everything for decent army sizes, which actually have to be significantly larger than human armies too, to even have a chance of competing.
- What sometimes feel like erratic behavior in defense. They sometimes keep 6+ units near a city unattacked while you take 2-3 cities not that far away. And then suddenly throw them at you (which is cool, but a bit late^^). It felt a bit like "random defense strategy". I understand it might be difficult to prioritize operations and all.
The defend city operations the devs put into place don't really seem to activate properly all the time and it's been hard to figure out the reason for this. I think it may have something to do with the target selecting algorithm, which at least feels as if it has some random factor in it (I Can't see it without code access). My hunch is that these don't get triggered like you might expect, but keep selecting random cities regardless of whether they actually need defending. Whatever is causing them to not launch these city defend operations properly all the time, may be connected to the way their city attacks and war declarations seem random too.
But I say it again : it's still a huge step forward! I look forward to DLL access, I didnt even know they plan to give it, do they?
Not sure. they promised some modding tools, but not the dll directly as far as I know. It may take years before they do, if ever.
About city strength and hp values, I tried to tweak them a bit, in gamechanges.xml.
I dunno if it's because I reloaded a save game to make my tests (with same unit ready to attack and same unit ready to get hit by city), but some values have effects and some dont:
COMBAT_POPULATION_PER_STRENGTH doesnt seem to do anything even on a 12 pop city, tried to make it 40 instead of 4, no change in UI, same damage to city, same %hp/wall left on city and same damage taken both on attack and defense.
It may be loading related, but note that a value of 40 here would mean that the city gets one strength every 40 population, not 40 strength every population.
COMBAT_GARRISON_MILITIA_MODIFIER works, used 16 instead of 6, both on UI, attack and defense results (the higher the less strength unless there is a garrison which override it ofc).
DISTRICT_CITY_CENTER doesnt seem to do anything, tried to make it -14 instead of -4, no change in UI, same damage to city and same damage taken both on attack and defense. Can it come from the fact that there is another update before? Maybe there are not done in the order of the xml? My biggest disappointment.
EDIT: I validate that CityStrengthModifier on DISTRICT_CITY_CENTER in gamechanges.xml as no impact whatsoever IF NEGATIVE even with a new game. I guess it's a bug? setting it to -40 does nothing compared to -4 (just play on latest era), but setting it to 40 does indeed raise it up by 40 (and not 44= 40 - (-4)). That is sooo ducked up by firaxis, maybe many values cant be negative.
Hmm, strange, I swear the city center one worked for me. I've seen cities sit at -80 combat strength. I'll have to go retest this to see if you're right.
Conclusion 2 : the only significant way to change a thing about city combat strength atm is COMBAT_GARRISON_MILITIA_MODIFIER, which is dumb because not only it doesnt scale with anything (can we do it scalable by era somehow?) but also it means that city with a garrison might become really strong compared to those without.
Yeah it'd be pretty terrible if this is the only thing we really have. Even with the city center district option there isn't much, but at least it's something.
Conclusion 3 : It might not be the place for a mod focusing only on AI but would it be possible to add a "default promotion" to all units that add +x combat value vs city both in attack and defense? I know ranged unit already have one but only for defense (tier 3 out of 4).
Hmm, I think this is probably possible with unit abilities and traits. Haven't looked thoroughly at it, but you may want to have a look at how they attach special traits to units, such as the moving after combat for cossacks, then apply that technique to add some city damage trait (if that exists) to all units.
Other things that are possible: reducing the amount that damage scales with combat differences, increasing bombard strenghts on siege weapons, increasing the damage that melee/ranged do against city walls (I think COMBAT_DEFENSE_DAMAGE_PERCENT_MELEE in globalparameters may do this)
Rome did struggle to get its army out of the water and on my land. I settled a city close to him but still went to attack my Capital with 2-3 knights and a catapult. They nearly took it until my walls were up, then nothing.
There's indeed still some annoying thing going on where they will neglect to attack walls, even if they have siege weapons. On my end there's no discernible reason for this. I'm curious if the devs will end up fixing this one.
The usual subject to me is about settling. They still do a weird job in picking there settling spot : no fresh water most of the time while it should be a priority, especially when you end up 2 tiles away from river/mountain when a far better spot was to move 1 or 2 tiles. They only look for strategic/luxury resources it seems.
They actually value fresh water highly, but there appears to be some bug in the settle logic where they consider a spot 1 tile away from a river as having fresh water. Nothing I can touch again unfortunately, I can only shift the relative preferences for yields/freshwater/coast around, but even if they only care about frsh water, they still settle 1 tile away sometimes.
Does the mod change chopping yields?
Nope. Are you seeing some weird values?
I'm not saying it's nice, it just works well. Once you're done 1 opponent (sometimes but rarely 2), even if everyone hate you they don't DOW because your stronger. In short : play aggressive. I'm not saying it's the most fun for everyone, just saying it works really well. In fact I dropped last game before end because once again I known it's won long before end (2 more civs left to crush but with 50% my score so...)
I don't think reducing combat scaling is a good solution, it works well like this (dont want archers to kill tanks^^).
