Brainstorming: Weaknesses of the AI

[Sarisin]

I've been playing a 3 vs. 3 team game of neutral/goods in automatic constant war with evils, and I've been noticing that the AI's on my team don't know how to deal with the raging barbs or the enemy teams (the enemies were doing pretty well since one had the barb trait and it was on deity which i think handicapps human players teams).

=snipped=

Some excellent points here Sureshot.

I have never tried playing with teams - sounds, like fun. But, I play with raging barbs on (lower setting Prince or Noble) most of the time.

I think you are correct that raging barbs in FFh is more difficult than in the vanilla CIV. This makes it difficult for the human player, BUT also manageable if you persevere.

I mentioned my current game where I was getting smoked. Down to two other AI civs and I and both (Jonas and Charadon) have the BAR trait. They also both declared war on me so I had raging barbs and two civs attacking me. I was able to fend them off and acquire some obscene XP in my units 200+ from battling Jonas and Charadon.

You mentioned one sure fire way to change the balance of the game - the Baron and his werewolves. This has become my goal in every game. I watch as the AI builds up their techs and I go for Animal Mastery and Feral Bond. It takes forever (especially with only 1-2 cities), but it is a gamebreaker IMO.

Now, I have a army of powerful Greater werewolves able to handle anything the barbs or AI civs throw at me. I just wiped out Jonas and Charadon is next.

But, I think the main point to make is that still raging barbs is tough in FFh and this toughness takes its toll on the AI civs more than yours. You can deal with it and overcome, however, for now, I think if you play with FFh with raging barbs, most of the time the AI (without the BAR trait) will get wiped out.

One final point on the raging barbs that I mentioned before:

I think the creation of orcs and lizardmen for barbs in the early game was brilliant. However, later game really needs work. I mean the mounted units like chariots (I still think they come too early yr 250 for me), Royal Guard and Mercenaries are bizarre. I mean you might as well throw in a couple of F-16s and Abrams tanks as well. The worg riders are good too. Also, the orc macemen don't make much sense, but lizard assassins and rangers are a fine challenge and make sense.

I know all of this is being worked on, but that doesn't stop my annoyance when Royal Guards take out my improvements. Barbarians Royal???

 

[Sureshot]

I've never seen the Royal guards, but the chariots always seemed out of place.

A neat thing to do once you have werewolves is to let barbarians take all your cities so you don't have to pay upkeep and can let them increase in numbers without bankrupting yourself (need Complete Kills option checked).
Edit: That actually doesn't work I just found out, though without cities and units defending them I seem to be making way more from pillaging and razing than I lose from upkeep.

 

[ChaoticWanderer]

not sure if this has been mentioned. Im a builder type and i know that many have mentioned the endings before sio ill not go into that. The thing ive noticed the most is that many time if i dont attack people or i stay away from others and stick to myself the rest of the world wont go to war with each other. i think is odd that others should go to war even if im not attacking them they should fight amoung themselfs.

 

[Kael]

not sure if this has been mentioned. Im a builder type and i know that many have mentioned the endings before sio ill not go into that. The thing ive noticed the most is that many time if i dont attack people or i stay away from others and stick to myself the rest of the world wont go to war with each other. i think is odd that others should go to war even if im not attacking them they should fight amoung themselfs.

Yeah, we will be looking at scripting some wars in specific circumstances.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

Seems to me that the animosity between good and evil doesn't come to anything more than trade embargos. Yes, yes, I know you guys must be working on it, and are most certainly aware of it, but I guess I'm just dissatisfied about there being all these awesome units doing nothing at all! I always turn on Agressive AI and Raging Barbs, by the way, but I think that these should be the default settings and there should be an option to make them even more extreme.

Perhaps the good and neutral, neutral and evil, and maybe even the good and evil Civs should be more likely to trade even with bad diplomacy, but also be much more likely to go to war? It's not so fun when you only have one or two trading partners...

 

[Frozen-Vomit]

I besieged a city with a queen of the line filled with 3 eaters of dreams and 3 archmages all with fire III and twincast.

There were so many defenders that it took many turns to take it down (+120% city defense). Inside the city were about 5 queen of the lines.

The problem is that the ai didn't recognise that it could easiely destroy my best units with just sacrifing one of his ships.

Maybe the queens just need to be marked as offensive units because they are the most powerful ships in the game.

 

[Chalid]

Thats a bit of a problem. The higher level AI does not change the UNIT_AI aftre it has been built. So it built those QoLs as transporters and won't change them to attack when needed. Unfortunateley its not easy to decide when to change a AI, but the general problem is known and listed in the first post.

 

[Zurai]

Unfortunately that was one AI problem present in Civ3 that didn't get fixed. Exact same thing happened there and was complained about there.

 

[Sureshot]

Then maybe go with the flow, and make two ships, one a transport with less strength and maybe higher defense, and the other with more strength and no transport ability?

 

[Chandrasekhar]

A pure attacker ship might be a nice idea.

 

[Chalid]

I aim for the AI change some time in the future. It will be needed for Mages (so that they build nodes, terraform and enchant in peace and go offensive/defensive in war), so it can be implemented for ships as well. Just a matter of hard thinking when to change the AI of the ships and to which degree.
(possibly it gets easier when i slip in another layer into the war AI - as i plan - that coordinates the now independendly operating selection groups)

 

[vorshlumpf]

I had mentioned this in the Bugs thread and then noticed this thread: the AI does not recognise water-born threats for protecting its workers. I plopped a water-walking land unit next to a barb worker, and it kept working the next turn.

Another problem I noticed with the AI that I don't see in this thread: logical choices for unit promotions. I've seen some fairly silly choices made by the AI, and it would be nice if, for example, the AI started choosing Elf Slaying if it was at war with an elven civ.

- Niilo

 

[Chalid]

Another problem I noticed with the AI that I don't see in this thread: logical choices for unit promotions. I've seen some fairly silly choices made by the AI, and it would be nice if, for example, the AI started choosing Elf Slaying if it was at war with an elven civ.

- Niilo

Actually we have code that does exactly do this, elf slaying when at war against elves, shock when you have a lot of melee units and so on. But we did not check it in yet as we try to check in one big Change in the SDK at a time. That makes it easier to track bugs. Probably the code will go into 0.15 were some AI changed are sheduled.

 

[vorshlumpf]

Sweetness!

 

[vorshlumpf]

Two other things:

The AI doesn't seem to understand the usefulness of units with the Medic promotions. Perhaps this is simply part of the AI's reluctance to mass troops together, but it seems like I've had a lot of lone prophets and such thrown at my borders.

Playing as the Ljosolfar, I used to think that the ancient forests / treant thing was pretty cool. Now that I'm invading a Fellowship empire with many ancient forests, I realise it isn't that big of a deal to weave your way around them. I'm pretty sure the AI doesn't realise it can do the same thing to avoid the possibility of creating treant adversaries.

- Niilo

 

[Chalid]

The second point is actually a real Problem and as things stand i would even remove the Ancient forest treant spwaning for the AI. Why? The AI always chooses that path that provides the best defensive Positions for the final plot (where it comes to rest each turn). The problem with that is that the pathfinding algorithm is within the .exe and so not accessible for us.

Ok there could be one way that emulates the behaviour you are doing. Give a negative Defensive Bonus to the ancient forest and include a new SDK routine that removes that one and adds a positive defensive bonus. This way one could trick the pathfinding routine (hopefully) into avoiding ancient forests, but as you can see for yourself its a very dirty workaround. Furthermore that workaround would negatively influence the AI when fighting a defensive war as it would avoid its own Ancient forests, too. So no real solution here.

ABout the medics. Yes vanilla AI does not understand how to use them - it accidentially moves them with the troops as its medics are mostly UNITAI_ATTACK units. But there is a new UnitAI (UNITAI_MAGE_BUFF in Worldbuilder) that is designed for Medics and Buff Mages, but it is not yet performing optimal and therefor i dealt it out very rarely.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

Chalid, could you make it so that the ancient forests only give defense bonuses to the people that own them, and then use the SDK to give the same bonus to everyone else? Seems like that might make the AI use their own ancient forests more properly, but I'm not sure if it's possible.

 

[Xuenay]

Or, how about taking an easier route - Ancient Forests give no defensive bonus (or even a negative defensive bonus, if that's possible) by default, and Elven/Fellowship units get a promotion that boosts their defense in them? The trees are old... and sentient... and wary of visitors. It might be easier to defend yourself from other humanoids in the forest, but that won't help you when you'll spend most of your time fighting off the forest itself.

That still wouldn't solve the problem of an Elven AI taking its units to Ancient Forests, but maybe those units could be set not to trigger Treant spawning? The trees will fight to oppose those who would hurt them, but will not touch those who they know to be their friends - no matter the internal squabbles their friends might have.

Thoughts? That would both be flavorful and solve the problem neatly, without resorting to dirty (and maybe resource-intensive) SDK-tampering.

 

[vorshlumpf]

That still wouldn't solve the problem of an Elven AI taking its units to Ancient Forests, but maybe those units could be set not to trigger Treant spawning? The trees will fight to oppose those who would hurt them, but will not touch those who they know to be their friends - no matter the internal squabbles their friends might have.

I like that idea.

- Niilo

 

[SchpailsMan]

In my current game, I noticed the following :

The Balseraph had built Loki (good), but kept him in their capitol all the time (bad), probably for the Gipsy Wagon-like culture effect or maybe to have a permanent Inspiration spell in their capitol. Anyway, it doesn't seem correct to lock their civ-only hero for tasks a couple of low cost units can do as well, and deprive themselves for Loki's unique skills.


The Malakim have trouble expanding, but they hardly make any effort. As of year 300, they still only have their capitol and are packing LARGE amounts of units (90% archers, with a couple of warriors and workers) inside without ever thinking of building a single settler. Their starting pos is near toundra, so I guess they had trouble in the beginning and lost land to their neighbours (they are currently surrounded by the Dovellio and another civ although I don't remember which one exactly), but still they have a perfectly good location for settling inside their own boundaries (a Gold resource, along with another one I can't remember, possibly rice or reagents).

My guess is that they still didn't get Mining so they can't exploit the gold resource yet and just dont go for it because they don't yet have a city that could use anything the Mining tech grants Another possibility is that they don't want to settle right there because it's right against the Dovellio borders, which they have been at war with for the last ~100 turns (the war is not even likely to end soon : it will take centuries for the Dovellio to kill the ~12-15 archers in the Malakim capitol, and the Malakim don't look to have the tech and prod required to force their way through the land). I should also mention that I have supplied the Malakim with free sheep and horses almost since the war began since they were small and extremely far away from me while the Dovellio were already large and spreading like crazy. Anyhow, the Malakim STILL don't have a single mounted unit and won't get out of their city to grab whatever land/resources are still available to them.

Anyway, after 300 turns they really should have got the tech (if not alrdeay) and the gold resource : it's only 4 squares away from their palace, and there are 2 perfectly settable tiles that would grant them both the gold and the other resource. I think the AI just didn't choose its priorities well enough and ended up locking itself into a full-defense strategy it has no chance of escaping from. I guess "Something" (yeah, that's not very precise) could be done to force the AI out of this behaviour... making it avoid the situation might be really hard, but doing something as simple as forcing it to produce offensive units from time to time seems necessary.