Mod request: Boost AI Science

[wobuffet]

I've seen it posted over and over: science is the core of Civ V. It determines when units and buildings are available and is therefore critical to every win condition in the game.

Basically, I'd like to play on King (i.e., no ridiculous gold/units advantages for AI Civs) and still face a challenge. It seems the easiest way to "organically" make the game harder would be to either

- raise AI Civs' prioritization of Science (which presumably wouldn't be so effective) or, more likely,
- simply give AI Civs a straight-up science boost (say, 20% boost of all AI science production, or base 1.25 science/turn per population instead of 1).​

I have no idea how easy this would be to implement, but I think it'd go a long way towards giving the game more replayability (crushing Longswordsmen with Artillery gets old after a while).

 

[Putmalk]

It's easy to implement. Tedious as hell, iirc. I don't think there's a way to increase AI science in the difficulty settings - you'd have to half or 1/3 all the tech costs and make the player research them twice or three times as slow as the AI (this can be changed in the difficulty XML). I do not think this has changed in the past patches.

SQL might make this faster, but it may interfere with other mods.

 

[wobuffet]

It's easy to implement. Tedious as hell, iirc. I don't think there's a way to increase AI science in the difficulty settings - you'd have to half or 1/3 all the tech costs and make the player research them twice or three times as slow as the AI (this can be changed in the difficulty XML). I do not think this has changed in the past patches.

SQL might make this faster, but it may interfere with other mods.

Hm... this got me thinking, doesn't the AI play with Chieftain difficulty settings? So it seems that just changing the Cheftain (for the AIs) and King (for me) research settings in CIV5HandicapInfos.XML – i.e., two numbers in a single file– would do the trick.

I'll try it when I have time and report back here. Or if anyone else wants to check it out, please do so and post here how it goes!

 

[Spatzimaus]

I don't think there's a way to increase AI science in the difficulty settings - you'd have to half or 1/3 all the tech costs and make the player research them twice or three times as slow as the AI (this can be changed in the difficulty XML).

The game already has this. Remember, regardless of what difficulty YOU play on, the AIs are playing on Chieftain, which does have a <ResearchPercent> modifier. (In my mods, the AI plays on Prince.) That value is a percentage; if it says 80, then that means AIs' techs cost 80% of the normal values.

And wobuffet: Prince is the break-even difficulty, where the AI gets no bonuses, not King.

 

[Marshall Thomas]

The game already has this. Remember, regardless of what difficulty YOU play on, the AIs are playing on Chieftain, which does have a <ResearchPercent> modifier. (In my mods, the AI plays on Prince.) That value is a percentage; if it says 80, then that means AIs' techs cost 80% of the normal values.

And wobuffet: Prince is the break-even difficulty, where the AI gets no bonuses, not King.

So even if I play with immortal difficulty, changing the <ResearchPercent> modifier for chieftain will effect the AI's reasearch rate in my immortal campaign? Also, the <ResearchPercent> modifier (for all the different difficulty levels) doesn't say anything that makes it seem to apply only to the AI. Are you sure that changing this value would only effect the AI, and not the player as well?

What I'm trying to do is actually the opposite of what the original poster is trying to do. I'd like to decrease the AI's research speed a little. When playing on immortal, the AI builds building and units really quickly. I believe you need to give the AI a variety of bonuses to make it challenging to play against, but I don't like seeing the AI jump so far a head in tech in addition to having all of these production and monetary bonuses.

I agree with the OP in that the AI should either have very little production/monetary bonuses with a high bonus to research -or- have plenty of production and monetary bonuses with a penalty to research. When the AI has both it takes away a lot of the enjoyment for me, even if you can still win using some somewhat gamey tactics.

Thanks in advance.

 

[wobuffet]

The game already has this. Remember, regardless of what difficulty YOU play on, the AIs are playing on Chieftain, which does have a <ResearchPercent> modifier. (In my mods, the AI plays on Prince.) That value is a percentage; if it says 80, then that means AIs' techs cost 80% of the normal values.

And wobuffet: Prince is the break-even difficulty, where the AI gets no bonuses, not King.

Cool, thanks for the info. I know that Prince is "break-even" (although really Cheiftain is because that's what the AI plays at). The King-level AI bonuses seem modest enough through a couple plays and don't bother me, but the higher ones seem way too large, and I'd rather try boosting the AI's science than having to deal with the higher levels' ridiculous gold boosts, etc.

 

[Spatzimaus]

So even if I play with immortal difficulty, changing the <ResearchPercent> modifier for chieftain will effect the AI's reasearch rate in my immortal campaign? Also, the <ResearchPercent> modifier (for all the different difficulty levels) doesn't say anything that makes it seem to apply only to the AI. Are you sure that changing this value would only effect the AI, and not the player as well?

You need to read the earlier post more carefully.

You play on Immortal, because that's what you chose on the setup screen.
The AI plays on Chieftain, because that's what the game defaults to. (This CAN be changed.)
Each difficulty has its own <ResearchPercent> value.
If you change the Immortal ResearchPercent, then it'll only affect you, because you're the only one playing on that level.
If you change the Chieftain ResearchPercent, then it'll only affect the AI, because they're the only ones playing on that level (usually).
If you ever decided to play on Chieftain, then it'd apply to you as well, but you won't, because you're not an idiot. Any even remotely competent player can easily win on Prince or even King, so there's not any danger of this happening.

 

[Marshall Thomas]

You need to read the earlier post more carefully.

You play on Immortal, because that's what you chose on the setup screen.
The AI plays on Chieftain, because that's what the game defaults to. (This CAN be changed.)
Each difficulty has its own <ResearchPercent> value.
If you change the Immortal ResearchPercent, then it'll only affect you, because you're the only one playing on that level.
If you change the Chieftain ResearchPercent, then it'll only affect the AI, because they're the only ones playing on that level (usually).
If you ever decided to play on Chieftain, then it'd apply to you as well, but you won't, because you're not an idiot. Any even remotely competent player can easily win on Prince or even King, so there's not any danger of this happening.

Thanks. I'm really glad that I clicked on this thread because I've been playing for a while and I had no idea that the AI was effected by anything other than the level the player chose to play on.

It's surprising that Chieftain level effects other difficulties because, for example, Immortal (like every other level) has several AI catagories in the Handicapps XML file. Though now I understand that these AI catagories for harder difficulties are modifiers for the Chieftain level base numbers.

You mentioned that you changed the AI base ratings from Chieftain to Prince. How does this change gameplay? How do you do it? Do you simply paste Prince's numbers over Cheiftain's. I'm interested in anything which can make CiV challenging without just giving the AI Diety-like bonuses for everything. I'd rather have less AI bonuses, but maybe add penalties for the player. Any suggestions you have would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[wobuffet]

You mentioned that you changed the AI base ratings from Chieftain to Prince. How does this change gameplay? How do you do it? Do you simply paste Prince's numbers over Cheiftain's. I'm interested in anything which can make CiV challenging without just giving the AI Diety-like bonuses for everything. I'd rather have less AI bonuses, but maybe add penalties for the player. Any suggestions you have would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I don't want to answer for Spatzimaus, but I reckon he just changed the handicap settings in \XML\GlobalDefines.xml, which by default has STANDARD_HANDICAP set to HANDICAP_CHIEFTAIN .

I agree that it gets annoying seeing AI Civs getting 300+ gold per turn and 30+ happiness magically while you're struggling to stay solvent and in the single-digit happiness levels.

 

[Marshall Thomas]

How can higher difficulty AIs be modded to have all the bonuses of either emporer, immortal or diety -except for the income bonuses? I can live with the production bonuses (without them, the AI isn't a challenge -unfortunately), but I hate to see the AI civs with 3000 gold and 400 gpt.

Thanks in advance.