MODMOD: ERA and Better AI

the prob is not that they take me down. defending is always possible somehow still but i cant expand anymore after they spammed settlers everywhere even if i block them or do everything that is possible to expand quickly (might aswell be the erebus map setting)

What turn would you or anyone else consider fair for the AI to build their second city (on monarch difficulty)?
 
Trying out your mod using the Amurites. Map is Tectonics/Mediterranean, noble difficulty, tiny, with 6 AI's. So far its working out fairly well. The tectonics map gives everyone plenty of space - even a tiny map with 6 AI's, everyone has enough space for at least half a dozen cities, if not more, so I haven't seen any combat yet, except with the barbarians and Orthus. Which, btw, orthus took out Flauros, my neighbor to the north. I have only met 1 other civ so far, but I have been beaten to octopus overlords (Founded turn 97) and runes of kilmorph (founded turn 147) already, and the lurchip :)confused: what? lurchip ALIVE!?!? amazing...) also have a higher score than me (turn 213 normal speed). Atm, I am in the middle of the second era, trying to see if I can grab empyrian

The only bug I have encountered so far is haste doesn't seem to be wearing off. The description still states 100% chance of wearing off each turn, but all my units (where my adepts had casted haste) have both the tag for having haste and still have 1 extra movement from the spell 10 turns later. Not having used haste in FF though, I'm not sure if this is a problem from FF or from your mod.

As for your last post, I usually end up settling my second city between turn 40 and turn 60 depending upon if there are lots of barbarians and if I build a worker first. A good time for a second city for the AI on monarch I believe would be turn 40 for an excellent start, 50-60 for a poor or mediocre one.

-Colin
 
Thanks Valkrionn - guess you can just ignore my little "bug report" then :p

Further playing on noble with a friend as the kurotaes... it is annoying when the AI grabs ALL the religions. The mid-later techs also feel reaaal slow when playing on normal speed. Part of that though could be me just not really playing optimally, more messing around than anything else. I do love the changes to the settlements though. The only thing that really messed with me was my first city starting as a settlement - once I figured that out though that system did make much more sense than the FFH one (probably another FF feature).

As the kurotaes though... it is reaaaaly annoying that there isn't a civic that reduces the amount of time it takes for cottages/etc. to increase in size. Having to wait 130 turns to get enclaves is... painful, to say the least. I can definately understand not getting enclaves in 70 turns at the beginning of the game, especially with your new improvements to them, but for mid-late game, being able to grab a civic to grow my cottages faster would be incredibly helpful, as my major cities grow in size and manage to start working more tiles.

-Colin
 
Thanks for the feedback Colin
I have only met 1 other civ so far, but I have been beaten to octopus overlords (Founded turn 97) and runes of kilmorph (founded turn 147) already, and the lurchip :)confused: what? lurchip ALIVE!?!? amazing...) also have a higher score than me (turn 213 normal speed). Atm, I am in the middle of the second era, trying to see if I can grab empyrian
Did you fight the Luchuirp. As long as they have atleast two mana nodes in their land, they should turn one into fire mana. And I teached them to build fireball throwing golems once they reach sorcery :D.

As for your last post, I usually end up settling my second city between turn 40 and turn 60 depending upon if there are lots of barbarians and if I build a worker first. A good time for a second city for the AI on monarch I believe would be turn 40 for an excellent start, 50-60 for a poor or mediocre one.
that sounds good

Further playing on noble with a friend as the kurotaes... it is annoying when the AI grabs ALL the religions.
shouldn't happen that much in the next version.

The mid-later techs also feel reaaal slow when playing on normal speed. Part of that though could be me just not really playing optimally, more messing around than anything else.
What turn did you reach Conquest era or a tier3 unit? Did you use tech trading?

I do love the changes to the settlements though. The only thing that really messed with me was my first city starting as a settlement - once I figured that out though that system did make much more sense than the FFH one (probably another FF feature).
I didn't change the turn settlement into city mechanic. I guess when the no razing Gameoption is on new cities automatically start as settlements.
 
I made it so that the DLL forces any newly founded city which would overlap a real city's radius is force settled as a settlement. In FfH AI is forced to found only real cities until they reach the cap, which is a good approach, if you teach them to space the cities out a bit better. I didn't want to wait on teaching them that, so I just made it impossible for the AI to promote a settlement (via python) when too close to a city, and made cities start as settlements (via DLL) when founded in such a situation.

Apparently the AIWeight on Upgrading settlements needs jacked up a few notches though, people are reporting that the AI isn't casting it when appropriate.
 
I did not fight the lurchip - we were nice and peaciable, especially with all that space to my north opened up by the dead calibam. This is with agressive AI off. However, I definitely wasn't playing optimally... it was taking me waaay to long to crank out settlers because I kept being distracted by all the new features.

As for the game with the Kurotaes, I was Cardith Lorda and was teamed with my girlfriend who was playing Falamar (got tired of the elves finally). My start... wasn't all that great. Mostly lots of plains, though I did get my capital by the coast. When we got out of the survival age we were fairly low on the scoreboard. And then it was taking me 33 turns (pulling in round 100 research per turn) to grab trade on my own, and with the whole era system we weren't exactly ahead of the AI in one way or another by specialization, so we couldn't really go pick em off. One thing I did notice though was that the AI kept demanding sailing... We ended up quitting Long before going on to the era of conquest. Tech trading was on, but we usually don't trade techs with the AI (as it always demands stupid things like give sorcery for fishing....).

Also, for this the no razing setting was off - we like burning down the ill-placed, annoying AI cities when they are in our way. The good ones we'll keep of course though :D

I'll try a few more games later on, and post how they go.

-Colin
 
Valkrionn, you mean it depends on civ, right?

In the next version the AI will build in its first city a defender group first, then a patrol group (they will only guard workers and attack hostile barbs/animals/demons in their territory). Then they build up a settler group (scouts aren't allowed anymore to guard settler). I guess even for the clan it is better to build up a patrol group first, as demons or other players could still threaten them in the beginning.
 
i played an alliance game with some cpus

having 3 cities in turn 50-60 was the result. with an expansive leader u can hardly keep up with them and u cant even guard your newly founded cities.

i would suggest to tone the building in non-capitols down to just 1 food 2 hammers and no research.

5 bonusscience is already 50% of your normal total output.

this foodbonus is the reason the ai produces settlers so damn fast. if it proves to be too weak then one can slowly add science again to other cities.

it IS possible to have 3 cities in turn 60 with expansive leaders but u should aim for turn 75 or even 80 for the 3rd city and 40-50 for the 2nd.
 
Here is an attached Calibam save - auto turn 1, and 158 turns in. I specifically went to find the most OP start for them that I could, and ended up with my capital next to the mirror of heaven on floodplains, another city on floodplains, and a third city near Yggdrasil. Opponents are 7 AI's, map is small tectonics. By the turn 158, I had Aristocracy and a few other techs, researched runes of kilmorph (was beaten to it), FoL and OO have also both already been founded. I haven't met anyone else yet (blame it on griffons ;) ).

Settings are:
speed - normal
difficulty - noble
New random seed on reload
no Acheron
blessings of amathon
living world
all unique features
flavor start

So far I can say for things that need to be toned down:
AI snatching all religions
AI building so many cities so fast

I'll post more as I play and tell you what I think. Feel free to download and try this yourself though.

-Colin

Edit: Further playing ends up showing me with the highest score of everyone I have met (the bannor, the lurchip (my neighbors to the east) and the sheim (my neighbors to the west). A few important dates:
Turn 226 - researched Era of Survival. Would have probably gotten it earlier, but I researched sanitation first.
Turn 258 - I finally founded empyrean. Only Esus not founded now. I had originally been trying for order, but the bannor snatched that so I decided to grab empyrean instead.
Turn 265 - went to war with the sheim

After taking one of the sheim's cities, I realized that I couldn't hold it against the hordes of pyre zombies, so I retreated back to my border town. This was their response
Sheim Response stack.jpg

I must say... thats the first time the AI has thrown a REAL stack at me... I may even have to build some archer defenders now instead of just spamming Morai.

Edit 2:
First - it is really annoying when you make a lengthy post only to get told that you don't have permission to edit this post and get it all thrown away.... -.-

On to the real reason for the edit. I continued with the game, and was much less impressed after that first stack. The AI proceeded to send a constant trickle of units in at me, allowing me to rather easily beat them off. Eventually, I managed to get overwhelming force and smash through the sheim's defenses and wipe them out. That put me in a position that no other AI could really touch me, so I ended the game, figuring that victory was inevitable, but I don't feel like finding out how.

I then went and started a game as the amurites, same settings with the only changes being a tiny map with 4 AI's, and setting aggressive AI on. This ended up with me getting wardecced by the dovollio, my neighbors to the south before turn 100. Their stack however was unable to take my second city from me, and then they proceeded to occasionally trickle in and otherwise wait for me to get around to smashing them for their stupidity. However, I was unable to do this for a time due to insufficient forces. Then I got battle sorcerers. My offensive stack started out consisting of about half a dozen drown, 4 archers, and 3 battle sorcerers. The first sorcerer only had channeling 2, so I gave him fire 2 and combat 5 (eventually). The other two both got channeling three right from the getgo, and both had fire 3. With this, I was able to easily overwhelm him and eventually smash the dovollio to pieces. Before the dovollio died, I had 4 battle sorcerers on the field, 3 with fire 3, earth 2, and some combat, and that first one (who still hadn't gotten channeling 3) with combat 5, fire 2, earth 2.

So, what this all means:
First, the AI is much better than it had been. I was really impressed to see it terraforming as well as sending scary stacks. However, it needs to work on its scary stacks some more. If the first scary stack fails, it needs to say "Hey, this didn't work - lets get a bigger one and try that". As it is, it says "Hey, that didn't work - more units to the front" which essentially just means free xp for the human. If possible, the AI needs to be taught to hold its units till it has a big enough stack to take the nearest enemy ciy, which it can determine through recon or something else, or it needs to be taught to throw stacks of ever increasing size at the enemy.

Second, battle sorcerers were exactly what the Amurites needed in the early game to give them a good reason to focus on the magic line. It also makes Dain a viable alternative to Valledia for which leader to use. Battle sorcerers possibly need to get toned down just a touch though. Fireballs are scary enough in the early game, but allowing fire elementals (or channeling three of anything else) before you can even get wizards is... a bit sick. On the other hand, you have to give up using other specialists (and workable tiles) to get battle sorcerers, and each one takes longer than the one before. Though... it will be a long while before you can get wizards anyways. You might want to tone down the 16000 research needed to get sorcery (double that needed for arcane lore?!?) - its already more difficult to get sorcery due to needing all four magic paths first, no real reason to make the tech itself cost the sun and the moon too. And even with Era's, it should be possible to snatch a tech from a more advanced era to give you that edge, as long as you realize that the advantage now, if not used properly, will probably cost you an advantage later.

On the note of Era's - the era of growth is really very meh. There are not any techs in it that grant better units, which means that for a warmonger that whole era (100-200 turns) he gets absolutely no edge at all, while the builders just get ever stronger. It would probably be better to bring the teir 3 units (champions, longbows, wizards, priests) down into the second era. The other thing that you can do is have the era of conquest add the national units, and then era of domination add them again - but without the national unit limit. Really the limit was put in in the first place to prevent someone from getting phalanxes or something else early and steamrolling people with unlimited numbers. But with Era's, you'll know that someone will already have a way to counter that by already having national units as no one can beeline straight for the endgame. If you go with this sort of approach though, you really need some way to allow wizards to become archmages without getting into combat (or allow the archmages in era of domination to be buildable from the start).

I hope that my input helped, and I will happily await further releases of this mod.

-Colin
 

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Alright, after doing some testing with Fall Further 051, I have determined that this is the best Fall From Heaven will ever get. Even the little things, like the Sorcerers, are of great use and are balanced well. Anyone wanna help me cobble together an appropriate link for FF 050, Patch N, and FFH2 0.40z?
 
When is this going to update to 51? I'd love to try it. (Or did it and I'm just stupid and missing where it says it did?)
 
Sephi's working on Wild Mana, which is a mod for Fall From Heaven 2. He may come back to Fall Further modding if we prod him enough once he feels his work there is complete. Here's hoping he will return to his rightful place with us in making our choice game a better one. :)
 
sorry for never updating this mod or looking at readercolins savegames, but I did lost a few files that had no backup (wasn't a big deal) and at the same time two very promising AI mods showed up for FFH so that it seemed to be a good idea to move to FFH. Also I mainly play network games which didn't run stable in 050.
 
sorry for never updating this mod or looking at readercolins savegames, but I did lost a few files that had no backup (wasn't a big deal) and at the same time two very promising AI mods showed up for FFH so that it seemed to be a good idea to move to FFH. Also I mainly play network games which didn't run stable in 050.

Aha. Well, I don't know about OOS errors, but 051 is stable as all hell for me, personally, and I can't wait to see if you grace us with your presence here! You have no idea just how much better you made the game with some of your ideas and all of your AI work! If you were to port the work you did with Wild Mana to Fall Further and combine it with your ERA and Better AI mod here, it'd be all I'd even need to play ever again for the game ever again! :)
 
The AI actually using magic has been the Holy Grail of Fall From Heaven AI coding for as long as I can remember, and from what I can see this mod more or less accomplishes that. I'm not at all keen on most of the gameplay changes, but the AI changes are simply amazing. How difficult would it be to extract those? I have a decent grasp of XML and python (or at least, I'm great at copying other people's code and tweaking it to my purposes), but no idea at all how to edit the DLL.

Is there anyone similarly interested with a better grasp of DLL work who'd be able to point me in the right direction on this?

EDIT: And that bit about the Luchuirp AI knowing how to produce fireball golems absolutely terrifies me. XD
 
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