K-Mod: Far Beyond the Sword

[SithUK]

Thanks for the response Joakim. I don't believe I was playing with the Aggressive AI option so I can't speak directly about its effects. I did witness Rome DoW me with a stack of maces and catapults when I had 4 riflemen in the target city. I also was able to move many more into position to easily raze the invasion stack, so the behaviour is likely to be present to some extent in non-Aggressive AI games. That said, I like that the AI invades by sea with stacks. It keeps me on my toes.

It would be more akin to human play if the AIs targeted the AI who is running away with the game more. A roleplay aspect of the game would be damaged if the DoW code followed the path of keeping a runaway AI in check. I guess it is down to whether we want a single player game to play like a human multiplayer game.

I think karadoc is looking at the code on DoW at the moment so perhaps our posts will be helpful.

 

[Angst]

Oh, uh, it was actually a general note, and not for you specifically. But yes, I merely don't think the AI should randomly punish the player as it currently seemingly does.

 

[noto2]

Any news on the next update??

 

[satrapper]

joakim

i rarely play with aggressive ai on and don't really have the issue you have. i reckon you should definitely try with it off. monte and the like are still loopers for war regardless though

that said, i think the ai seems more likely to wage a campaign over too long distances to make sense logistically at times. i think often razing campaigns on distant civs is an unsensible use of resources with little direct payout for the aggressor but it's usually the nutjobs who embark upon this course i think so it adds some flavour to games, keeps everyone else on their toes.

 

[Angst]

Well of course. But the people that do it to me are culture civs like Zara and imperialists like Huayna. They often don't act this... Well, insane. I like when Shaka does it though, please let him keep doing it...

 

[Lenowill]

As others have said, it sounds like that's coming from Aggressive AI mostly.

Occasionally you'll still see an AI make a spiteful huge invasion that cripples itself in order to hurt someone else, but that's not the norm. I do see lots of early land grab wars by the AI though, so watch out for that.

 

[noto2]

You guys...this is AI you're talking about. The AI never acts out of "spite", although it could act out of some kind of programmed spite. For example, let's say you beat up on a civ during your game, incurring "worst enemy" status. Later on that civ suicide rams you and manages to raze a few of your cities, even though it has no hope of winning the war. Why would it do that? If it were a human, you might say spite. In this case...it's actually quite similar. You incurred those diplo penalties by attacking it earlier (or having a different religion or refusing to give tribute, etc, etc) so now it chooses you as the target. You just have to pay more attention to diplomacy to avoid this sort of thing.

 

[Lenowill]

The AI never acts out of any emotion, because it doesn't have any, but programmed spitefulness is a reality and sometimes fairly egregious.

AI player: "You won't give me Education in tribute!? Okay then, here's my entire army knocking at your door 20 turns later from across the world when I have no intention of keeping your lands and even though financing this invasion is probably going to set me so decisively far back on tech that I'm never going to have any chance of winning the game anymore and will lead to me later being vassalized by my larger neighbor!"

I'm sorry, but you can't call that anything else but spite in how it plays out. This is part of why players hate seeing certain AIs show up (because they come with hidden negative attitude penalties toward the human player only and are more likely to war you over trifles than others while also having a high unitprob that results in their petty wars being very annoying to counter even if you're significantly ahead on tech, just because the sheer flood of units they send ends up causing you a lot of losses).

Also, AIs going for Conquest/Dom are willing to ignore diplomatic status (under certain circumstances) when deciding to make war in this mod, so taking someone to pleased/friendly isn't even guaranteed to save you here like it is in other play.

 

[Angst]

Playing without Aggressive AI pretty much solved my problems.

The spite mechanic is fine, but I was actually talking about nations that I had done nothing at all towards.

Aggr. AI isn't necessary with this mod - and thank you for that - what it did in BtS was to simply make the AI act naturally fierce rather than unnaturally peaceful and naïve, but playing without it with this mod actually has the AI utilize the aforemented fierceness, as to be expected from empires. So my conclusion from this whole experience: K-mod actually fixes the AI, but breaks Agg. AI. It's better with your mod, basically.

 

[Danwood]

I can't thanks Karadoc enough for the efforts he puts into this. Civ4 is the best turn-strategy game for me, and with K-Mod is even better, it's over the top

 

[Linkman226]

I suggest WinMerge for merging purposes.

Depending on the implementation of the Inquisitor unit, it could be more complicated too, because it should have some kind of AI so it knows where to go and when to be built. But I've seen this implemented in Python, too, so maybe you can save the effort of recompiling the DLL here.

Quite frankly, the Python pseudo-AI that some have implemented for the inquisitor is awful. I would recommend DLL if possible

 

[Leoreth]

Well, as far as I could tell SoI uses it so it can't be that bad

 

[Linkman226]

I thought SoI uses a DLL for that. Or maybe I'm thinking of RFCE. It's been a while, and some of these modmods just all mix together

 

[noto2]

Lenowill what are you talking about, diplomatic penalties vs the human player only? As for Joakim, yeah, I don't think aggressive AI is necessary with Kmod. I used to play with ag AI on as well, to make the game more interesting. I used it because with it turned off I could just sit and wonderspam with nothing but warriors protecting my empire, and use diplomacy to save myself. It was cheesy and boring. With agg AI on I had to actually defend myself. In Kmod, however, the AI actually plays to win, and will attack you if it is a step towards victory, therefore I don't think agg AI is necessary.

 

[Charles555nc]

I like the new changes Karadoc (only tested 1.3) so far.

You were saying that you wanted the Ai to be a bit more logical so I thought:

1. Higher positive diplomatic bonus for liberating/giving cities to the ai

2. Shorter negative penalty duration for refusing to cancel deals/declare war on distant enemies. You know, the spam demands.

3. I like this idea...
Even though an AI would never trade with a civ (or maybe just the human) that it has a strong negative diplomatic influence with, I think the Ai, if it losing a war (or at least a couple cities) should then be able to trade with another civ/human, even if it has negative relations, as long as the civ in question isnt adjacent to them (and likely direct threat)- with special trading rates for military tech/resources that may turn their war situation around. Why is this cool?

Often times you want to help an AI, in its war efforts, and trade them a vital military tech, but guess what? They asked you to declare war on all your neighbors and you said no, so they hate you and wont trade. With this change, in desperate times, the ai will "reach out" to people it might never trade with for a military tech/resource that maybe will save them. I think this would give the Ai more of a human feel....and slightly decrease the influence of religious blocks/spam demands on diplomacy.

4. A higher per city minimum defense. Seems like the ai mostly only leaves 3 units in, non border with the enemy, cities when it declares war. So it leaves its back cities (but border cities to other ais) wide open practically. I think a 5 unit minimum would be more appropriate.

 

[jtanner28]

Hey everyone! I'm working on a merge of K-Mod 1.31 and RoM 1.03 Extended. Here's the thread:http://http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=465442

Any feedback would be appreciated.

 

[Enkidu_Warrior]

i really appreciate k-mod, as I've largely been playing with the better BAT AI mod and this takes gameplay changes a little further, though doesn't seem to have all the same BUG interface improvements (eg field of view)

I'm finding, though, that it's crashing my favourite map script, full of resources. Mostly, I like that script for how it allows finer control of distribution of terrain (eg less jungle), aside from it's ability to boost resources overall.

full of resources works fine with better bat AI so I'm not sure what's different. Can you offer any advice on what might be causing the conflict or how it might be avoided?

I realise the map script isn't yours, so if nothing else, thanks for offering k-mod

 

[karadoc]

K-Mod does have the field of view option. The slider is turned off by default, but it can be turned on in the BUG options menu. Also, K-Mod has the option to keep the custom field of view settings even when the slider is hidden again; and it also uses a dynamic default field of view - ie. the default field of view is bigger for wider monitors.

As for the map script, and you give me a link to (or upload) the particular script that crashes a crash? Does it crash as soon as you start the game? Every time?


@Charles555nc
Diplomatic bonus for giving cities to the AI is a sensitive issue, because the AI is not skilled enough to tell when you are giving them a junk city that you simply don't want - perhaps even to cripple the recipient of the city; or when you're giving them a city which they have no chance of keeping, due to culture or war or whatever, and so on. If the diplomacy bonus was increased, it would require new AI to help determine prevent human player's from just exploiting the AI's stupidity...

Higher minimum defense is also a bit of a tricky issue. Keep in mind that the AI can't simply just have more defenders. Putting more defenders in the inner cities would mean putting fewer defenders in the more vulnerable cities... Sometimes that might work out well for them, but often it would not. When I play, I usually have almost no defenders in cities that I'm confident are safe. I put everything I've got in the border cities, and I make sure that if someone tries to charge at one of my undefended cities, I have some proper defences somewhere nearby that can get to the city first - or at least block the path. -- Unfortunately, the AI can't really play like that; but what the do try to do is to put most of their guys in the border cities, and then counter-attack any stacks that come into their territory. I think it works alright most of the time, but if they run out of counter-attacker, then they're a bit stuffed. It obviously isn't a great strategy, but I suspect that it wouldn't be any better to simply have more guys standing around doing nothing in fairly safe cities.

-- Perhaps there could be some more AI personality put into the game to make some of them do that, and others not.

Regarding the AI trading when losing a war or whatever, I'll consider implementing a "desperate" state-of-mind / strategy for the AI for which it will trade with anyone; triggered when it think it's going to be wiped out or something.


--

There will be some more tweaks to the AI's war planning in the next version; but hopefully the changes in the current version are a step in the right direction. Again, it's kind of hard to tell if it's working well withing playing a stack of games, so we'll just have to see how it goes. But I'm expecting that the changes in the current version will just slightly reduce the overall probability of war at any given time, but greatly reduce the probability of really stupid wars... Particularly at the start of the game. In previous versions it wasn't uncommon to see some bitter little warmonger civs decide to march a stack of archers half way around the world to attack someone that they happened to have formed a grudge against... That should happen a lot less now. The AI now does a (very rough) cost-benefit analysis before deciding to plot war against someone. If the analysis says that the war would be a stupid idea, then they won't go for it. (But again, let me stress that the analysis is very rough...)

 

[Charles555nc]

@Charles555nc
Higher minimum defense is also a bit of a tricky issue. Keep in mind that the AI can't simply just have more defenders. Putting more defenders in the inner cities would mean putting fewer defenders in the more vulnerable cities... Sometimes that might work out well for them, but often it would not. When I play, I usually have almost no defenders in cities that I'm confident are safe. I put everything I've got in the border cities, and I make sure that if someone tries to charge at one of my undefended cities, I have some proper defences somewhere nearby that can get to the city first - or at least block the path. -- Unfortunately, the AI can't really play like that; but what the do try to do is to put most of their guys in the border cities, and then counter-attack any stacks that come into their territory. I think it works alright most of the time, but if they run out of counter-attacker, then they're a bit stuffed. It obviously isn't a great strategy, but I suspect that it wouldn't be any better to simply have more guys standing around doing nothing in fairly safe cities.

You are the programming genius, not me. But as a human player, I know that I have to have a certain number of defensive units (even units in cities by the ocean or in cities near "friendly" ais) just to cover myself for military police (hereditary rule) happiness,to thwart a potential naval invasion, or stop a potential back stab by the ai. Hell, really just not to look like a juicy target to the ai.

6 units per city (medieval period and after) wont stop a big invade, but it'll do a much better job of defending- perhaps requiring the invading army to bombard first, before straight attacking the city. Perhaps start at base 3 defenders for the bronze age, and add one for each age after...

Maybe we have different playstyles but I try never to have less than 6 defenders in a city, and if I dont, Im building up troops desperately and not even thinking about invading anyone else until I do. If anything your mod has taught us, that there are no safe cities.

My suggested solution would be to have the Ai have increased military production efforts/focus, through slaving, regular production, or drafting, until this minimum requirement is met. Maybe have the AI more heavily exploit their cheaper unit upgrades by producing cheap units when they can still upgrade (archers into longbows, pikemen into rifles, grenadiers into machine guns etc etc).

I divide my cities into 3 different types (tech, production, and hybrid-does well at tech and production). Does the ai do the same thing? Maybe have more production focused cities for the ai...

The ai usually has no problems teching and whoring wonders, so a little more focus on extra military production wouldnt hurt them imo- especially with your new war adjustments, and difficulty bonuses.

Im still finding success by launching a mega stack at the enemy capital or most powerful city, ignoring its other cities, and burning it to the ground, although its been getting harder to do and they generally hate me for the rest of the game. I do this because capitals are huge part of the ai (and player) economies, and I can generally snuff out holy cities, and alot of their great general specialists that are extremely powerful and almost impossible to replace. My experience with all this stuff is on emperor difficulty only tho.

Then there is the situation like you probably see, where one Ai declares war on the other, and then their two mega stacks pass each other and they both lose a city...but thats probably much farther away of an adjustment.

I want to be clear that I love your mod and this is not a huge issue. Im a big fan and I get a kick out of providing the mega modder with my best constructive feedback. I would love the ai out thinking/out playing me, strangely enough lol.

Thank you so much for keeping me playing this game for so long! I love reading about new updates!!

p.s. Btw can you post the donate link again? Youve saved me so much in gaming fees.


Edit: O, for the "Desperate state of mind" ai mindset. They probably shouldnt trade military tech/resources TO adjacent ais that dont like them. In my mind, they should trade FOR military tech/resources (possiblely at a larger price than they usually would pay, since they are desperate) but trading away military tech to angry neighbors might be a bad condition. But then theres the trading military tech FOR military tech situation...lol. But you know better than I do about what to do.

 

[kiwi_lifter]

Hello Karadoc,

I'm not sure what you've done to the ai, but it's wonderfully effective. Thank you for sharing your work, and I look forward to seeing more of it. It should be the base on which all other mods are built.