Refuses to Talk?

[TheMeInTeam]

Hey, just a quick report/question:

There is no "refuses to talk" for AI to AI warfare. Was this intended?

The reason I ask is actually backward from what you'd expect - I WANT the AI to refuse to talk with the other AI, instead of accepting capitulation.

I encountered this issue while building a "runaway" AI. I set the RTT base turns at a ridiculously high number - like 150 or so. The runaway part worked - the runaway AI slapped the daylights out of gilgamesh, then hannibal, then alexander one after the other. The issue is that each time the target would capitulate pretty quickly after the war. It's obvious they'd be willing to - I set runaway so that it would only declare once it had enough to steamroll its target.

So was the AI to AI RTT intended or not? It might not actually be a bug, but I don't know where to put this issue threadwise - it's not really creation/customization because my problem is on the base mechanic itself, but it's possible that fireaxis either just ignored this value intentionally or just didn't think anyone would try to set a crazy number there.

 

[r_rolo1]

I read the code yesterday about the refuse to talk while searching for other stuff and ( as far as I can understand it )there is no reference to being diferent for the AI that it is from the human. And I'm sure you already noticed that sometimes the AI is willing to talk to you in turn 0 of the war too......

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I read the code yesterday about the refuse to talk while searching for other stuff and ( as far as I can understand it )there is no reference to being diferent for the AI that it is from the human. And I'm sure you already noticed that sometimes the AI is willing to talk to you in turn 0 of the war too......

I know they'll talk with massive war success - I think DanF mentioned something like it going as far as 20% what it would be originally.

However, I set RTT to 150!!!!!! Since the AI doubles this for DoW, that means that it should, in theory, have refused to talk a base 300 turns. Obviously it was winning the war, so possibly longer. It's pretty dubious in such an instance that its war target would vassal within 20-30 turns if the RTT threshold was supposedly 10X that, which is why I'm asking. What you're saying is encouraging, but it doesn't seem to fit what I saw, which was a vassal-crazy AI that was SUPPOSED to just keep taking cities until it obliterated someone.

 

[DanF5771]

The thread isn't really fresh, but here are my 0.02 €.

IIUC "refuse to talk" for AI-AI *does* work, only the other way around than what you expect. The runaway civ's RTT = 150 is never asked for, since it is the losing player who initiates the surrender trade after checking his willingness to talk to the runaway player. So the targets use their unchanged RTTs which most likely get reduced further due to Mr. Runaway's huge war success (btw an increase due to war success is not possible).

I'm afraid in order to achieve your intended goal of total obliteration, you'd either need to set the RTT or the VassalPowerModifier of everybody to very high numbers or disable vassals altogether in the first place.
Or you find a way to set the contact timers (CONTACT_PEACE_TREATY) of all targets towards Mr. Runaway to sth. like 1000 in a given game. IMHO that's not even possible with the Python console, but you might get somewhere with some really hard xml + WB work...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I see, so it's not possible within the scope of what I was trying to create.

From my understanding of the few people that tried that XML "tweak" of a nightmare I made though, it was still an incredibly effective AI. With such a large power lead before declaring the player is often the only viable (or should I say FIRST viable) target for its (very frequent) war check passes (I think I set it to 10 at all levels of disposition ) if on the same land mass. If not, it was a serious threat to win UN off sheer vassal vote magic, meaning the player might be forced to stage intercontinental war against an AI that prioritizes siege . Funtime.

Thanks for answering my question though Dan. It's unfortunate that I'd have to modify the target AI's RTT or vassalpower modifiers. I mean I COULD do it, and easily, just via find/replace with one of those values and have it replace it with a ridiculous value for all leaders in the XML...but that would give the other AIs some of my runaway's trade secret .