AIs and the Art of War

Soulmate wrote:

> Okay seriously this session expired stuff makes me want to kill people. I jsut made wall of text with screenshots and it just cockblocked me. FU forum.

Before posting, click on your text, press CTRL-A (select all) press CTRL-C (copy). A copy of your post is now stored in your computer. Then post your post. If the post fails, just reply again, click in the reply area and press CTRL-V (paste). The text now re-appears. If you do something wrong, like press CTRL-A then accidently press SPACE, and the text disappears, just do CTRL-Z (undo). It is worth practicing this in notepad, very useful trick whenever you work on a computer.

Also there is a forum option somewhere "never log me out". Don't know where.
 
There's a button marked "keep me logged in" when you're at the login screen. I don't know if that's the same thing or not.
 
Session expired is not affected by being logged in or not.
It's about how long it's been since the page was last refreshed.

There is no way to stop it from happening, but it can be avoided by copying all text to clipboard before posting or refreshing the page before you start writing (unless you spend a long time writing; my guess would be 1-6 hours or something)
 
Yeah , thanks for the replies guyz . But i guessed the *copy the text* solution myself =) It's just that I don't usualy experience this type of restriction so it's easy to forget(and it's not about login). :Danyways

Tweaking AI stacks to balance the rams would be great !

Also, after RI and PAE I can't play with unlimited stacks anymore, so I put the 50 stack limit. Does anyone have any experience with limitations ? Does it affect AI strategies ? I hope it does not hinder him.
 
Also, after RI and PAE I can't play with unlimited stacks anymore, so I put the 50 stack limit. Does anyone have any experience with limitations ? Does it affect AI strategies ? I hope it does not hinder him.

It can cause infinite loops as the AI tries to move. Also called "Waiting for Civs.." error, ie the turn never ends. The only solution for that error is to load a save before it happens and up the limit for a couple of turns before setting it back. -1 or infinite is the best choice.

No the AI does not know about the limit or take it into consideration while playing.
 
It occurred to me what may be 'wrong' with the rams issue. This seems to only be a problem before a certain era and I'm thinking it may be that rams are the only appropriately set unit AI for city attack at that stage. I'll take a look at that within a few days here.
 
It can cause infinite loops as the AI tries to move. Also called "Waiting for Civs.." error, ie the turn never ends. The only solution for that error is to load a save before it happens and up the limit for a couple of turns before setting it back. -1 or infinite is the best choice.

No the AI does not know about the limit or take it into consideration while playing.

"0" (zero) is the Unlimited setting. And I had No CTDs or WfoC problems with using 50 as the limit.

Koshling warned about going below 10 as that was known to him to cause WfoC as the game progresses.

Ex. size 20 city with a BUG Stack Limit of 10 would shove all defenders above 10 outside the city. This would cause stacks to form around the city. And if late enough in the game were Multiple Units can be built per turn this could get nasty quick.

This would also cause problems when you Had to have multiple Healers or TW to combat Crime and Disease Before I started making changes right before v36 Freeze period.

JosEPh
 
I can concur with the Ram Spam. While it is the only way to Siege Cities until Ancient Ballistics, the amount the AI builds is ridiculous. You usually need 5-10 to knock down walls or maybe even less. The ram itself can't kill but can damage garrisoned.
 
Forget rams! The problem is when the AI discovers metallurgy and compass and then builds hundreds of sloops, fluyts and sloop of wars.

My current game went from a turn time of ~110 seconds to about 4 times that, over the course of a few dozen turns (eternity game speed) after a single AI discovered those techs. I went onto the defense adviser to see what they had and it was almost a thousand ships, and I couldn't even see all their cities. Trying to figure out where to move each ship each turn when they all have high movement and a whole map to wander around in seems to add up to a long turn time.

Any way to...huh, well I suppose I could manually put in a national limit on the offending units (100 or so) in my own game files then WB away most of them. But it seems to be a similar problem to the rams: for whatever reason the AI wants to build a stupid amount of something.

(To get back to the rams, once the AI has the relevant tech they love building siege towers too.)
 
Yeah, I thought last I saw they were overbuilding hunting/exploring type ships. Naval will get a full restructure at some point fairly soon as well.
 
I can concur with the Ram Spam. While it is the only way to Siege Cities until Ancient Ballistics, the amount the AI builds is ridiculous. You usually need 5-10 to knock down walls or maybe even less. The ram itself can't kill but can damage garrisoned.

I have reduced a Define for City bombard resistance that was set to 100 down to 80. That should help this situation somewhat. If you have current SVN that change is in there. Not sure if it will affect older games or just new games though. I think it should on the older.

Also go into BUG Otions and reduce the setting for City Defence down from 75 (iirc) to 65 or lower. I currently have mine set at 50 but have not re-adjusted for the SVN Define change yet.

JosEPh
 
I don't think that adjusting the city defense levels or the max bombard defense would adjust the AI's perception of Ram value.

However, even if it takes 5-10 rams to knock down the city defenses, if an invading nation wanted to bring enough rams to take more than a few cities, why not bring many? So long as you're backing it up with the other stuff you'd need. The first rams used are sure to die so you might need a bigger force to take multiple cities.

The last game I saw with a massive attack force (this week) had a fairly appropriate ratio of rams to other attacking units. Sure there were a few hundred rams. There were also a few hundred Javelineers and other units to assist.
 
I don't think that adjusting the city defense levels or the max bombard defense would adjust the AI's perception of Ram value.

Why not? It's all part of the calculations and decision making process. Or else there is no Need for the define or BUG Options adjustment drop downs.

JosEPh
 
Because for the most part the AI is evaluating the units themselves but not every single game parameter. It follows a thinking process something like this:

* At this point, now that I have the basics down in the city buildings, do I need an attack force?
* Yes? Ok, what would I need most for my attack force right now?

And if the building attack force has a ratio of units that can tear down defenses equal to the desired amount it will start valuing such units less but if not, it will value units (like rams) quite high until the ratio is about what it wants it to be for that attack force.

It does gauge the overall need for force strength based on the perception of defense levels the likely enemy(ies) appear to currently have, and there is certainly a lot it's evaluating throughout the process but I'm pretty sure the max bombard defense has nothing to do with it. This is just a game rule adjustment that the player can make so as to set it around the player's level of preference for game balance. The second setting you mentioned there I've not seen so I'm not sure what it does but I don't THINK it has much to do with ram building but more to do with defense building by the AI. That may have an effect somewhere in the mix... don't know.
 
Something else i've seen is that they'll use Law Enforcement Units like Regular units. Not for attacking, but for fortifying the countryside- not cities.
 
Something else i've seen is that they'll use Law Enforcement Units like Regular units. Not for attacking, but for fortifying the countryside- not cities.

Yes they will use TWs and such as defensive units but there is also a secondary purpose and it has to do with Crime.

Crime diffuses from the main city tile to the 8 surrounding tiles. Those tiles store the crime and then diffuse a portion Back to the City. If a tile surrounding a city has a lot of crime the AI is supposed to send a TW (LEs) to those tiles with the highest Crime levels and reduce the Crime on them. That is why when you look at a LE they have 2 Crime reducing lines, City and Tile.

JosEPh
 
Yes they will use TWs and such as defensive units but there is also a secondary purpose and it has to do with Crime.

Crime diffuses from the main city tile to the 8 surrounding tiles. Those tiles store the crime and then diffuse a portion Back to the City. If a tile surrounding a city has a lot of crime the AI is supposed to send a TW (LEs) to those tiles with the highest Crime levels and reduce the Crime on them. That is why when you look at a LE they have 2 Crime reducing lines, City and Tile.

JosEPh

I don't think that's what Buildkirbyus meant by country side. I've seen them march out to forts.

I also not even sure I've seen them use crimefighting build up promotions. I've know they use the normal crimefight promotions. Maybe defensive buildup promotions should be removed and the crimefighting promtion should be the only option.

The AI is just very broken. I've seen the autoplayer spend most of its production on ships that are disband the same turn(presumable for their gold). Normally, we don't see many functional with AIs issues until someone's marching into someone else's lands. In a v35 game, the autoplayer would not build the experimental fusion reaction.

AI's are essentially the game itself and it seems features are just added without considering them. This is a big problem. It may be better to remove a feature if their is no solution for the AI.

Point 1) The AI does suck at fully working with its gold and will sacrifice without giving alternative considerations. Slaving does need some attention soon. The AI also doesn't have any concept of the trick of having some cities build gold to keep the empire afloat if running in the negative at 0%. How to prioritize this for them will be an art of science. (difficult)

Let's say the AI can not work with it's gold reserve(which was implied to some degree. It's a bit vague) and can't rush buy useing it. That means the player has a huge advantage rush buying things while the AI's gold reverses uselessly go into the millions. This creates a huge imbalance in the game at a certain point. This game may as well be called Caveman2Castle if all it takes to win is to survive until the AI to be handicapped. This could happen at any era depending on the oversight.
 
Due to the amount of planning needed to improve AI, and the complexity involved in doing so, means it is regretfully seldom done. However, I believe we are getting close to the point where effort will be invested towards the AI.
 
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