Love for the AI: AIL(ove)-Mod

[TheMapDownloade]

Civinator is right and it's yet another example of how they only programmed the bare minimum into the editor even though it would have been very feasible to let us do things beyond the base game (e.g. let buildings be prerequisites for units). Very frustrating especially compared to the freedom of cIV.

Civinator do you have any idea for how to put that Town Hall in every city in the game? How about making it very cheap and making it a prereq for every other building? But if so, you could still sell it away once you had built what you wanted or if unhappiness got to be a problem...

 

[AIL]

http://www.civforum.de/attachment.php?attachmentid=654748&d=1324601292

Fixed a bug with Leonardos Workshop and Copernicus Observatory to require 5 forges in total instead of 1 forge in the building city.

Duration of Knights Templar has been extended from Steam-Engine to Replaceable Parts.

Towns now can reach a size of 8.

Cities now can reach a size of 14.

Granaries now in addition to their previous effect give +1 Content-Face.

Temples now give 2 Content-Faces up from 1.

Theatres now give 3 Content-Faces up from 2.

Courthouses now give 2 Content-Faces up from 1.

Reason for these changes:
Making the settling-pattern the AI uses more attractive by making it easier to use the tiles in the city-radius more quickly.

@TheMapDownloade: Yes, it's pretty sad how limited the options in the editor are.

I have btw. also tried to make the Artilleries as in CCM, which, as Civinator already stated, resulted in the AI making no other offensive units anymore. Now I'm thinking to bring them back in a simlar way they were in Civ 1 and just make them normal units with good offense and very weak-defense so they would require protection.

 

[RickFGS]

Solutions #1, #2 and #4 seem to be on the money, removing corruption doesn´t seem to be a good choice though, why not add charm to courthouses as you did to factories, solution 1 could partly be implemented for Forbidden Palace, let´s say you need at least 5 couthouses to build a Forbidden Palace, that will force the AI into building courthouses, after 5 of them are up the AI will choose the same closest non corruption city, but if you make another forbidden palace (like a winter palace) that need 10 courthouses this time, the AI will have to make even more courthouses and the corruption ring will get further away from the capital. Making the courthouses cheaper can also help.

Of course you need to apply charm to all these builds, something i´m still working on myself...

In all, very interesting ideas and will copy some of them if you don´t mind

 

[AIL]

removing corruption doesn´t seem to be a good choice though

I think that's more of a personal preference than anything else.

It's a change that not only affects the AI but myself aswell. And after having played so many games without it, I'm happy it's gone. I never felt it added any fun.

 

[Quinzy]

From my understanding, removal of corruption in governments does not work in Civ 3, instead making it become rampant.

 

[AIL]

From my understanding, removal of corruption in governments does not work in Civ 3, instead making it become rampant.

How about trying it out and seeing that it works perferctly well?

 

[_ghost_]

um AIL i am currious:

what did u do? caus i just testet this. i set the coruption to non in the editor and made a map with many cities. thus i got a ral rampant corruption even in my capital. so just switching coruption to none in the governments tab will not work. ( i use the c3c editor)

 

[AIL]

Then probably it's the corruption you set in the difficulty-level.

There's a slider and I set this to 0 as well. Since I reduced corruption everywhere I could before doing the test I am not sure which of the measures actually was the one causing it to go away.

If it's not the one under Governments, it's gotta be the one under Difficulty Levels. Or probably even a combination of both.

 

[AIL]

In my current game I just reached modern age. The AI did so quite a while ago.

Now while the AI did pretty well over the course of the game there's some non-AI-related issues that are really bothering me:

These are Railroads and Stealth-Bombers.

Railroads are very powerfull in continental warfare and they completely shut down intercontinental-invasions. Theoretically being everywhere at once with all of your units just kills any tactical reflections.
Is it somehow possible to change that? It does not appear to be possible from what I can see in the editor.

The whole Air-Combat feels implemented poorly and is hardly fun to perform or defend against. Especially with Stealth-Bombers involved. It's not really possible to defend against them at all and you just gonna eat their attacks.
Is there a way to make Bombers and fighters work like in Civ 1 and Civ 2? I liked that much much more!

 

[Civinator]

Civinator do you have any idea for how to put that Town Hall in every city in the game?

This could be done, but you need a special Great Wonder for every civ in game that provides this building to that civ.

It´s much better to reduce coruption directly with the slider AIL told you and additionally the goverment settings (but as some civers posted here, please don´t forget, that the button "Corruption off" is not working and you get a rampant corruption everywhere).

 

[Civinator]

Railroads are very powerfull in continental warfare and they completely shut down intercontinental-invasions. Theoretically being everywhere at once with all of your units just kills any tactical reflections. Is it somehow possible to change that? It does not appear to be possible from what I can see in the editor.

A) For fixed maps I found some solutions for this problem:

a) Railroads could be interrupted with terrain that doesn´t allow roads and railroads (trade= 0) and a rail resource placed on that terrain, so the optic is somewhat that the rail is continued on top of that "Stop-terrain". I made railresources for the upcoming scenario SOE, that show a railroad signal "stop" beside the rail. In reality here the road- and railroadnet is interrupted. In the screenshot below, some of these resources are marked with red circles.

b) There are maps, where the airlift-option can be changed for some cities to symbolize railtransport. I used this methode in the upcoming scenario SOE, too. The airlift funktion is connected to the airtrade-flag, so the plane symbol you are normally used from airports, can be changed to a locomotive without problems. The buildings that give the airlift option, are very rare, can only been built at certain places (predetermined by resources and other buildings) and have culture. In the WW2 scenario SOE Germany and Russia can build these railyards. If Germany conquers a Russian city that holds a Russian railyard, this railyard is lost, due to the culture. But Germany at that place can build its own railyard. This feature also symbolizes the swapping from Russian gauge to standard gauge. If Russia conquers such a German city, the same happens, too.

It can be very handsome to railtransfer a division from the West front to the East front in one turn - but the number of these transfers is very limited due to the small number of cities, that have this possibility.

Spoiler :

B) For random maps I have the tendency to abolish railways as known in Civ 3 completely. The boost in production by railroading can be simulated with some other buildings without problems.

Modern landunits get more movement points that in connection with "roads" (that should gain another name now) are multiplied and give an acceptable (not infinite) unit movement for late gameplay.


------------------------------

The whole Air-Combat feels implemented poorly and is hardly fun to perform or defend against. Especially with Stealth-Bombers involved. It's not really possible to defend against them at all and you just gonna eat their attacks. Is there a way to make Bombers and fighters work like in Civ 1 and Civ 2? I liked that much much more!

Yes and no. Aircraft can be set in this way, but they can be killed by each landunit, that moves on such an airplane.
It´s much better to rise the chance of interception of Stealth planes to at least 20 -30 % in the general settings of the editor.

 

[AIL]

It´s much better to rise the chance of interception of Stealth planes to at least 20 -30 % in the general settings of the editor.

That's what I've done for it.

And for the railroads, I've more or less accepted as it is.

For the lategame the AI uses Nukes to prepare invasions and it appears to be pretty effective. So there's no actual need for Medieval-Style Sod-Play at different locations anymore. And Nukes help against railroads too as they destroy them.

Also I'm currently in testing how Naval warfare changes when the AI no longer is forced to protect their transports. (this is done by giving the ships the invisible flag and detect invisible as well so they aren't really invisible to eachother) I hope they bombard and attack enemy-ships a lot more.

I hope SOE will be played by many people. Personally I never liked to play Scenarios where you started with a fully developed country instead of having to build it from the ground.

 

[AIL]

Version 7.4:

http://www.civforum.de/attachment.php?attachmentid=659402&d=1325718871

General:
Intercept Chance for Air Missions increased to 66% (from 50%)
Intercept Chance for Stealth Missions increased to 33% (from 5%)

New Unit:
Modern Marine 24(12)-16-1 Requires Smart Weapons, Cost 160

Removed Units:
Paratrooper
Flak
Mobile SAM

Unit Changes:
Galleon now has 5 Defense up from 2
Transport now has 12 Defense up from 2
Carrier now has 12 Defense up from 8
Ironclad now has 5 Movement up from 3
Submarine now has 15 Attack 10 Defense up from 8-4
Nuclear Submarine now has 15 Attack 10 Defense up from 8-4
TOW-Inftantry now has 12(6)-18-1 and costs 140
Mech-Infantry now has 1 Air-Defense

Misc Units:
Cavalries and Calvalry-Like-UUs can now be upgradet into Tanks
All Units now have upgrade-Paths, that do not end before the Modern-Age-Units

AI-Behaviour:
The AI no longer guards their Transport-Units with their Naval-Power-Units. Instead they use those to dominate the sea and bombard coastal-cities and units. This was achieved by a workaround: All Naval-Power-Units now have the "invisible"-flag. And all units have the detect invisible flag.
While it might sound like a disadvantage for the AI to not guard their transports, it actually isn't as they will actually kill your transports and ships now!

The AI no longer uses Stealth-Fighters as offensive Units and builds more Stealth-Bombers for that purpose.

Governments:

Monarchy now supports 4 Town 6 City 8 Metropolis free Units up from 2-4-8

Republic no longer has War-Weariness, it supports 1-2-3 free Units, units above that now cost 1 gold (down from 2) and has fast workers

Democracy no longer has War-Weariness, it supports 1-2-3 free Units, has no fast workers anymore but up to 3 military-police

Communism now has free support for all buildings, no free support for units and no military-police (think of it as marxist communism instead of stalinist)

Terrain:

You now can build cities in Swamp-Land.

Buildings:
No building causes any pollution anymore.
Hospital and Shakespheares now prevent pollution from population, so no pollution anymore at all.
Coal-Plants and Nuclear-Plants cause 2 unhappiness.
Recycling-Centres and Mass-Transit now provide 3 happy-faces and +50% Luxury-Trade.

 

[scratchthepitch]

AIL

Great ideas. Some very appreciated new ideas in your mod that I have not seen before. I've done some of the same things and I've done some things different trying to reach the same goal of coaxing the AI to be more competitive and remove exploits the human player can use against the AI. The results I've gotten are similar, although by a means that's quite a bit different in some ways. I wont list all what I've done right now, it would take too much time and space, but limit my post to things you were recently discussing here. The changes I've made are more along the line of experiments than an actual mod. I use Conquests, so my ideas may not apply to Civ3 Vanilla or PTW.

Happiness:

I first changed the starting happiness in the difficulty levels so up to regent it is 4, 3 up to emperor, 2 for the next two levels and 1 for sid. I find micromanaging the happiness of cities one of the more tedious and least enjoyable aspects of the game. Since I usually play at emperor, I made that the last level before it gets too ridiculous. I added happiness to markets and raised temples to 2. I also added happiness to wonders for the city it was built in that originally didn't have it. There were changes to the happiness of later buildings and happiness producing wonders.

Corruption:

I didn't remove this, since I think it has a useful purpose in the game of representing reduced efficiency in territory that is on the "frontier". What I did was increase the optimal city number (in world sizes). It can be set high enough that the number of cities needed to pass it wont be reached. Or just increased so there are more cities before that vast corruption increase is triggered. I left the corruption to the default 100% in the difficulty level settings. This makes corruption a factor, but not a crippling factor. On a huge map with 30 cities in the early part of the Middle Ages and still well below the optimum city number, I had -75 of 541 for republic using the rampant corruption level and -31 from 346 for monarchy using the problematic level. Without courthouses, outlying cities were starting to feel it with some seeing 33-50% corruption, courthouses were able to reduce the loss considerably. This was in a young empire that was still fairly small. Some of the AI were already larger, with many max sized cities, so I know the AI was coping with the corruption as well as I was. The idea about making courthouses (or equivalent buildings) less expensive and earlier on the research tree would definitely work well to improve AI abilities still further.

Player small town spam and the town "farming" exploit:

The ideas about changing the happiness settings and adding more happiness to building I think are excellent. Same with making town limits larger so larger cities can be built earlier in the game. Additionally, I like the idea of limiting unit support for towns. I had not thought about that way to reduce the small town appeal to players. I think I might go 1 step further and remove all unit support from towns or maybe just keep it at 1 unit for all governments. That removes one of the major incentives for having lots of small towns and things like "science farms".

Another major incentive is corruption, which was already "fixed", see above.

Something I've also done which changed the game's settling dynamics was to change the food requirement for citizens and the specs of all the terrain and resources. This was a much larger change. I did this because I didn't like the way the game represented terrain and resources. Instead of 2 food per citizen, I changed this to 3 food. I tried 4 food per citizen, but that didn't work with the existing game mechanisms very well, like the food storage box. To use 3 food/PC, I had to discontinue use of the tile penalty setting in the governments since it was limiting tiles to 2 food and making it impossible to grow any cities (might keep it for anarchy, to represent the chaos of a revolution on a country). I also moved granaries to the late industrial age to represent modern, mechanized farming gains. The AI proved to be able to use this system very well and expands like crazy. Faster than before.

The way this limits the usefulness of small towns is that more citizens are needed to produce the food a city needs. With the original settings, many tiles produced 50% more or double what a citizen ate. In my set-up, the tiles produce less of an excess. For example: grassland produces 3 food basic and 4 with irrigation. As opposed to 2 and 3 food. This is a 33% excess instead of a 50% excess. Before, 2 irrigated grasslands produced enough food for 3 citizens, with the mod, it takes 3 irrigated grasslands to feed 4 citizens. So you need to keep at least one more citizen at work than before. The food and shield production of all the terrain was changed so all the tiles produce at least 1 food and when irrigated will produce enough for 1 citizen. All can be irrigated and mined.

The resources now only produce a max of 1 food. This prevents any one tile producing to much. Sugar on irrigated flood plains produces 6 food, double that needed for 1 citizen, and this is the highest producer. Irrigated grass with a bonus resource produces 5 and irrigated plains with a bonus resource produces 4. So these still give a nice benefit, but not so much as before for food. You need to research advances to get both mining and irrigation. Mining is an early AA advance, while irrigation comes around the middle of the AA.

The affect on the AI is undecided. The improvements I've seen could be from the other changes made, or more likely from all the changes helping out together. I'm not sure if they utilize the terrain better than before, but they do expand and grow better and I did see them foresting tundra, which is the best thing to do to a tundra tile. They also produce units and buildings faster. The AI got the wonders before I could most of the time.

Roads, rail and movement:

I wasn't able to do anything to RR, but I left them in like you did. Roads and movement I changed drastically. Roads give 1 move instead of 3 in the mod. This goes with the movement costs of the terrain better and the increased movement I gave the units. The changes match the terrain crossing of the units up with the terrain better than in the original. While the various terrain types subtract from the unit's movement, roads allow it to move its full amount. Example: horsemen move 6. They also have ignore move cost for plain, grass and flood. This gives them 6 move on thise terrain types and on roads. Through other terrain, they move less according to the move cost of the terrain. For deserts, it's 4, hills 5, mountains 7, and so on. This means they only move 2 across deserts and hills, and 1 over mountains and similarly restrictive types. It's kind of the opposite of how move works in the original.

The effect on the AI has been very positive and they use the units properly and with better tactics than they did before. The increased unit movement also greatly speeds up the AA, and the game in general. On a huge map with 31 countries, I find the land is mostly filled up by the middle of the AA. If you don't move fast and early, the AI will leave you with very little to settle.

Workers:

I couldn't make the AI use workers better, but I was able to get them using more of them. I gave all military units the ability to enslave. The unit becomes a worker for enslaved land units. The AI still doesn't have as many workers as a player usually does, but they do have more of them since every 3rd or 4th combat they win, they get a free worker and they love attacking barbs, so that gives them a few extra workers early in the game when they need them. With ships, the enslaved unit is a curraugh, the AA transport in the game and the first ship you get. I never got as far as making a building that produced workers automatically. That's something to think about.

Wonders:

I changed the wonders around a lot, but didn't try and do anything specifically to get the AI to use more sense in building them. As mentioned already, the AI nabbed wonders before I could because they were growing at a faster rate than I was. Most AI seemed to try for the wonders, so likely many tried building them too soon, the more advance getting them. I probably could have gotten a few had I really tried to. In the original game it was easier to get a wonder and I usually got the ones I wanted. The ideas you have about making the AI build wonders later I think are brilliant.

Some other things that may have improved the AI were I set all the civs to the most aggressive settings in the civilizations rules. I also took away the attributes and other things like build preferences. No free techs, no government preferences. They were all the same. In the game, they would act different from each other, but the result was more random. You couldn't expect the civ to act a certain way like before because they had no set "personality", it got generated randomly, either at set-up, or during the progress of the game. Not having things like build and government preferences gave the AI more freedom to act.

I didn't go into much detail, but the results I've gotten were positive. In emperor, the AI expanded as fast or faster than I did. Many out researched me. I was about in the middle. In the original game I was usually able to get that philosophy slingshot. In trials with the mod I rarely got to philosophy before the AI did.

 

[AIL]

Hey, I'm going to give some thoughts to your thoughts.

First I'd like to get off a waring:

The current version of my Mod suffers greatly from the Submarine-Bug and thus is hardly enjoyable, once Naval warfare comes into play.

Corruption:
The main reason with it really was how the AI chose the location of the Forbidden Palace and was not able to do palace-jumps.
If you leave it in, I'd suggest to remove the Forbidden Palace and prevent Palace-Jumps by making the Palace require a resource that doesn't exist.

Food:
Very good thoughts to counter the town-farming-exploit.
Going as far as to not give them free-support at all sounds like a really effective way to prevent it. Also I've always thougth that 2 food per citizen is pretty bad to make adjustments to fields because a difference of 1 food was already so huge.

Unit-Movement:
I've always noticed that the AI is pretty good with fast units and okay with Hybrid-Units (Units that have High attack and decent defense). It cannot really work with Units that have a high attack but low defense. (Longbowmen-style) I've tried to bring artillery units into the game like that but the results were terrible. They just would move them in to die.
So by limiting the arsenal of land-units to units that either have higher than 1 movement and/or roundabout 2/3 of it's attack as defense the AI performs much better.

Workers:
Another Idea I just had was speeding up the workers in general so that the amount the AI uses to make is sufficient to keep up with city-growth. The biggest impact here is stuff like cleaning jungle. Reducing the time here could vastly shift the amount of workers needed to be okay as in what the AI does. Enslaving sounds helpful too but is pretty situational.

Wonders:
Really, the "make-wonders-require-a-production-building"-change was one of the changes with the biggest impact on AI-early-warfare-performance. I would suggest something like that to any modder interested in making the game more challenging. It speeds up AI-expansion and unit-production just so much that the early-game feels completly different. The disadvantage might be that if the Human player really wants a specific early wonder he will most likely get it guaranteed. But that's more an issue of balancing out the wonders, not the mechanism itself.

AI-Preferences:
I've set them to all the same instead of removing them. Yes, it pretty much eliminates personalities if all AIs build offensive units and production preferably but that's just the best you can do.
I also did not change the agressiveness-slider. I even think that the neutral setting here works best, given that the AI still builds a lot of units.
On most agressive they will declare wars even if they are at a disadvantage.
On least agressive they will let pass opportunities by they could have used.
On medium it seems very reasonable how they act and it's close to how my own decision-making works in that case.

I will probably make a whole new mod, that is even further away from the default settings.
As core features I'm thinking about:

1. Mathematically determined unit-prices. Right now thats just values that increase without any recognizeable logic. Making a forumla that can calculate the right prize based on a units stats could do well here. It might also reduce the overall unit-amount which can be pretty annoying in the lategame.

2. Resources only give a better version of units you can build but not cause you to be 2 ages behind if you don't have them. I feel lacking resources is too much of a disadvantage. I'm thinking about differences that are like the difference between Regular unit of one type and UU of one type.

 

[scratchthepitch]

Corruption correction:

I had forgotten that the forbidden palace uses half the optimal city number to determine how many cities you need to have before you can build the FP. The more you increase that number, the more cities you will need to be able to build the FP. So my idea of increasing the optimal number to a figure higher than the likely number of cities a player would get pushes the FP to late in the game for the player, and probably would prevent the AI using it at all. If going that route, might as well leave out FP (and SPHQ) altogether and lower the corruption settings in the difficulty rules to set corruption to a level you want.

An alternative idea would be to lower the optimal city number to 1 for all sizes. This should also get rid of that sudden jump in corruption once the optimal number is passed since you would start with that in force from the beginning. My understanding is that once the optimal city limit is reached, additional cities suffer twice the corruption of those built before that number was reached, and that the corruption formula still operates in the same manner, only with double the corruption amount the formula would specify for the over the limit cities. If that is how it works, then you should be able to adjust corruption in the difficulty rules to get a workable corruption model. probably start by setting it to 50%, to compensate for the optimal number doubling, and it should then look like the corruption in a regular game. This way you could still use corruption reducing small wonders like FP and SPHQ, as in a regular game. The idea of requiring a set number of courthouses or police stations or similar before the FP/SPHQ building could be built would prevent wasted building of these by the AI before the empire got large enough to warrant building them. I don't know if this has been tried before, I'll ask on a Q&A thread I started last year.

One other thing about corruption is that the formula was changed with the Conquests expansion. From what I've read about it, in Conquests, the FP doesn't give that 2nd core like it did before. You can place the FP in your core or near it and it will lower corruption almost as well as if you used it to set up a 2nd core far away. This means the AI failure to use good placement doesn't hurt it nearly so much now in Conquests. The change was probably one of those few made in the game to correct for an AI failure. This explains corruption in Conquests:

Everything About Corruption: C3C Edition
http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3/strategy/corruption_c3c.php

 

[jimkirk]

where can i d/l the main files for the mod?

 

[AIL]

There's only a biq-file. No graphics or civiliopedia changes.

Unfortunately 7.5 suffers from the submarine-bug which causes AIs to declare war on other parties where it makes no sense.

I had started making a completely new mod and thus made no further uptdates to it. If someone wants I can revert the changes that cause the submarine-bug.

 

[AIL]

Put out a new version:

Releases · Xilmi/Civ3AILove

Holds my Civ 3 Mod. Contribute to Xilmi/Civ3AILove development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Changes:
Settlers and workers no longer cost population to build.
Fixed Destroyer not having the invisible-flag needed to workaround AI wasting ships potential for protecting transports issue.

Rationale for the change:
I often saw the AI trying to produce Settlers or Workers without the sufficient population, leading to them wasting production in the process. So in old tradition I just removed the thing that troubled them.

 

[AIL]

Settlers and workers costing no pop actually just feels bad on Emperor and above difficulty due to the need to quell unhappiness with military early on. It also accelerates the game just too much. Also the AI doesn't seem to be aware just how many workers it could churn out that way.
It also completely removes any tall- vs. wide considerations.

So I'll revert it.

I also swapped Horseback riding with The wheel, called the wheel "Chariotry" and gave the chariots 3-2-2 for 40 production and UUs accordingly. The base-cost of the tech went from 4 to 10.

The 1-1-2-unit was just a waste of a unit-model that noone ever really used and the jump from Horsemen to Knights felt too big.