An Encyclopedia Of & Recommendations For Modding

[Predator145]

Having watched a huge Sid AI debug game with the C3X mod, a problem with these stacks is that they often end up with a bunch of defensive units and artillery type units and that's it. Once they find a city, they will bombard and bombard the city as much as possible. They will bombard to the city down to size 1 and destroy all improvements after redlining all units. That might sound ok, or might not sound ok. It's a tough call. But worse, is that no attacker ends up with such a stack apparently, unless it just so happens to come nearby. It's not like one medieval infantry or knight or longbow travels with such a stack. They will also park near a city and bombard it with no attack support for quite a few turns if the war continues.

I haven't seen how Korea handles their UU. I picked random civs, and they weren't in it. But, I would guess that Korea ends up with a military edge when warring against other AIs.

Edit: If an AI has infantry proper next to a heavily bombarded city, then they will attack.

I suspect the infantry proper doing the attacking you saw was not a unit assigned to guard the artillery but an offensively flagged one that happened to join.

 

[Predator145]

Has anyone done tests with the "Cities store food" flag? From what I've tested I don't see a difference in turns needed to grow after having 2 of improvements with that flag.

 

[Fergei]

Glad I stumbled on this. I'd been floundering getting the AI to select Curragh and here is a possible solution.

I've also been shaking up use of Ancient Cav, Crusaders, Guerrillas, Paras and modern paras. If my efforts fail I've got fall back options due to this thread. Excellent stuff.

 

[Fergei]

Apologies if everyone knows this already but the Curragh fix in this thread is perfect and I consider it pretty essential for Archipelago map play. In those maps an AI with sole possession of an island can typically get in an early game tech slump that it will never emerge from (due to lack of contact with other Civs, so no tech trading and no tech acceleration due to having contact with other Civs who already know the tech you want).

After playing about I settled on giving it only to Seafaring Civs (to give them a much needed boost) and not giving it any carry capacity (the AI couldn't carry 1 unit properly and carrying 2 units was overpowering).

 

[Ozymandias]

There's a lot of information packed in there and I do think you're correct, across the board, about the Curragh.

 

[Theov]

There's a lot of information packed in there and I do think you're correct, across the board, about the Curragh.

But if you make the Curragh wheeled and ocean impassable for wheels, theres no reason to make the ocean 2mp.

I added a scout ship to the game that transports 2. AI makes them a lot.

 

[Fergei]

I think if you don't do the following a default Curragh will not be used by the AI.

• Curraghs get the 'unload' flag and are given the AI Naval Transport flag instead of the AI Naval Power flag.

 

[SayHayKid]

Governments

• Republic: Increased flat free unit support to 18 units.
• Democracy: Increased flat free unit support to 18 units

@Ozymandias that is a lot of free unit support. Was there any rationale posted with the suggestions? Or how other settings were changed to compensate? I have been thinking about increasing flat unit support for all governments to minimize needing to build more and more cities to pay for additional military units.

 

[Ozymandias]

My apologies for missing this!

alexman (who's full documentation can still be found HERE) stated the following:

1. Republic: The Republic has always been the most flexible government, and now that free unit support has been added in C3C, it's even better than before.
   • Reduced the free unit support to 0/1/1 per town/city/metro
   • Added 18 flat free unit support.
   • All AI civilizations favor this government
2. Democracy: Democracy does not provide a significant enough advantage over Republic to justify a non-Religious switch.
   1. Increased the free unit support to 0/1/1 per town/city/metro.
   2. Added 18 flat free unit support.

My assumption has simply been that his "disdain" for Democracy prompted this, although, as I just posted elsewhere, even though the AI will always choose a Gov Type with the least degree of Corruption (Minimal > Nuisance > Communal > Problematic > Rampant > Catastrophic, with Communal remaining something of a mystery) further factors influencing the AI's Gov Type choice was discovered, long ago.

Beyond that, all I can say is that alexman was a coder at Firaxis, and my suspicion remains that several aspects of AI behavior are governed by a secret formula involving {The Phase Of The Moon} / {pi.}

 

[Quintillus]

Moderator Action: Moved to Tutorials, References, & Guides as requested

 

[Fergei]

My apologies for missing this!

alexman (who's full documentation can still be found HERE) stated the following:

1. Republic: The Republic has always been the most flexible government, and now that free unit support has been added in C3C, it's even better than before.
   • Reduced the free unit support to 0/1/1 per town/city/metro
   • Added 18 flat free unit support.
   • All AI civilizations favor this government
2. Democracy: Democracy does not provide a significant enough advantage over Republic to justify a non-Religious switch.
   1. Increased the free unit support to 0/1/1 per town/city/metro.
   2. Added 18 flat free unit support.

My assumption has simply been that his "disdain" for Democracy prompted this, although, as I just posted elsewhere, even though the AI will always choose a Gov Type with the least degree of Corruption (Minimal > Nuisance > Communal > Problematic > Rampant > Catastrophic, with Communal remaining something of a mystery) further factors influencing the AI's Gov Type choice was discovered, long ago.

Beyond that, all I can say is that alexman was a coder at Firaxis, and my suspicion remains that several aspects of AI behavior are governed by a secret formula involving {The Phase Of The Moon} / {pi.}

There is a lot of good (and familiar) stuff in Alexman's proposed mod. I shall steal some more of that.

In terms of free unit support I don't like it. Either for a govt or a difficulty level. Free unit support per city scales in line with what mapsize you play, a flat free unit support over all map sizes messes with difficulty settings and AI government choices depending on the map size.

 

[Ozymandias]

There is a lot of good (and familiar) stuff in Alexman's proposed mod. I shall steal some more of that.

In terms of free unit support I don't like it. Either for a govt or a difficulty level. Free unit support per city scales in line with what mapsize you play, a flat free unit support over all map sizes messes with difficulty settings and AI government choices depending on the map size.

Agreed.

 

[C0rTeZ48]

This is pretty great. I've just come across this thread and will use it as input for my grand project. However, I can confidently say I've put in far more thought into every change I've made compared to alexman, no matter how much of an expert he may be on Civ 3. I've been working on a huge Civ 3 rebalancing project for many, many years now. It's a complete revision, where I focus upon customizing the ruleset found in the Civ 3 Editor. After knowing this game for about 20 years, and trying out many different mods, I always found balancing by authors to be a large problem. As of now I have a 80.000 Word document, about 170 pages long which I hope to release later this year, where I focused on the rules as they are in Conquest v1.22. I will release it in 7 parts, simply because it will be too large otherwise. It's this long since I had to provide a lot of evidence for every single change I made (since I not only wanted to make it balanced, but also historically accurate). I easily have many, many hundreds of hours working on it, if not many thousands.

Since Civ 3 offers some bad game balancing aspects (worst offenders being bombers, mounted warriors, gallic swordsmans, artillery, musketman (and also some units barely ever being picked), marketplaces, the Great Library, Republic and Feudalism, the agricultural trait, historically inaccurate tech trees, bad time scaling, initiate propaganda being useless, unrealistic resistors percentages, useless islands (no coast/sea shield production until Offshore Platforms), unbalanced & unrealistic terrain/resource/worker action numbers, and entertainer specialists being useless), at a certain point I found Civ 3 to be unplayable. I even revised some fundamental general settings after lots of considerations, as well as reading hundreds of CivFanatics pages. However, I will add a few new units and wonders in my project, but that's about all I'll add.

 

[Ozymandias]

After playing about I settled on giving it only to Seafaring Civs (to give them a much needed boost) and not giving it any carry capacity (the AI couldn't carry 1 unit properly and carrying 2 units was overpowering).

Yup, the AI doesn't seem to like 1-Unit-carry Ship Units.