Religion and the AI

[MetalMilitia-]

So, i decided it was time to play some Lanun again. I used my usual settings aggresive ai, raging barbs, wildlands and living world. starting up i went after overlords pretty early, founded it as the first religion, someone else founded fotl and rok soon followed. some time later some ai founded the order. Nothing seemed to be more messy then usual but then...some things got mixed up pretty badly. have a look:

Spoiler :

as you can see, all evil civs was converted to either RoK or order, changing alignments to neutral or good. Furthermore RoK is everywhere. I saw the same thing in a previous game, it just spreads like wildfire.

Faeryl viconia actually founded Fotl, but then she converted to RoK and then after that to order. Go figure. ^^

A level of randomness is to be desired. A civ may sometimes convert to a religion that changes thier alignment, they may even change from evil to good, redeeming themselves. this is fine. It shouldnt happen to every civ of one specific alignment. There is a battle between good and evil in this mod and I really like this concept.

I find that there are many religions that just arent represented anymore, I sure havent seen the AI use AV for quite a while. Its a shame really.

Anyway i suppose this falls under the long list of things that the AI doesnt handle too well.

 

[Grey Fox]

Yeah I think the early religions spread way to easily. And Order even if late spread super easy.

I think Disciples should either be limited to only a few, like missionaries in Civ4, or they should remove their ability to spread religion. (and maybe create missionaries national units)

And the religions inherit spread factor needs to be toned down.

FoL: <iSpreadFactor>100</iSpreadFactor>
OO: <iSpreadFactor>75</iSpreadFactor>
RoK: <iSpreadFactor>100</iSpreadFactor>
Order: <iSpreadFactor>175</iSpreadFactor>
Veil: <iSpreadFactor>150</iSpreadFactor>
Empyrean: <iSpreadFactor>100</iSpreadFactor>
CoE: <iSpreadFactor>100</iSpreadFactor>

And it seems to be a trend that the "evil" religions have a slower spread-factor (and I dont just mean the above value one), than their good rivals. For example, OO has 25 lower than RoK, Veil has 25 lower than Order, and Order get free Acolytes every time the religion spreads (or Crusaders if advance).
CoE has to adopt the religion to spread it, etc.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

Anyway i suppose this falls under the long list of things that the AI doesnt handle too well

Nah, it's not that they are playing poorly; in that situation, you want to be similar alignment to your enemies. It's that they are role-playing poorly, which makes it less fun for the human players.

 

[Grey Fox]

Just to enforce my point, I will show some examples from my current game.
I'm the Svartalfar (Dreadnought) and I just this turn switched to Leaves from the Order. Its turn 247 and it's normal speed on a standard sized balanced (pangaea) map.

Here is the Religions:

As you can see, the Order is dominating heavily. CoE got 0% cause Cassiel of all people founded it. Leaves has basically only spread to the Balseraphs from Ljosalfar. It didn't even spread to me, but that might be expected since Amelanchier has never liked me, and we have been in multiple wars, including one right now. Same with Balseraphs.
Elohim has been in RoK since Ethne founded it, and she has fought multiple wars against order civs.

Once Order was founded Varn basically barfed out Acolytes, and every time it spread to one of my cities a new one was created of my ownership. Dozens of acolytes passed through my territory for quite some time.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

You went order? I'm curious to see how that came about

In my last game every civ but me & Auric went AV, pretty quick too. With extra civs on a pangea, any early religion will dominate, not sure why it was AV this time, though.
(In the end, I was down to just Gilden vs. an endless stream of diseased corpses. What a world, what world...)

 

[Grey Fox]

You went order? I'm curious to see how that came about

I did it cause it was the only religion that had spread to me. I'm playing on immortal, and because of late markets, Elder Councils and cottages my research was slow early in the game. And I needed the happiness and the diplomatic bonuses to survive.

EDIT: I was going for CoE but Cassiel got it just as I was about to start research on deception.

In my last game every civ but me & Auric went AV, pretty quick too. With extra civs on a pangea, and early religion will dominate, not sure why it was AV this time, though.
(In the end, I was down to just Gilden vs. an endless stream of diseased corpses. What a world, what world...)

True that can happen too. But if the majority of the world is good/neutral, I find that Veil is a dangerous religion to adopt nowadays. Especially since Sac the Weak was moved to Infernal Pact. And if you wanna go Sac the Weak, you have to bring in Hyborem, and then you got war on your ass.

 

[felwar]

I really think this has less to do with the spread rate and more to do with the weight each civ puts on certain religions. I can't recall the numbers off the top of my head, but I recall the negative ones being quite low.... something like a +5 weight (+10 or 20 for the elves and dwarves) for a favored religion and a -2 to -5 for an unfavored religion. The problem is that generally still means that even if a single city gets the religion, the AI converts.

The negative numbers are much too small. Any city will reach a population of 3-5, most will go higher. The negative weight needs to be closer to 10 so that we get less of Tebryn Arbandi converting to runes of kilmorph because his size 5 border city got the religion.

Even at 10 it might not be enough, and feels like it should be more percentage based. The Calabim in my last game had 8 cities, 4 of them over size ten with no religions in them. The order spread to one size 10 city and sure enough, from evil to good instantly. Yet it was a small percentage of his population.

Mechanically it may make sense for the AI to do it, but it makes no sense for the character of the leaders.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

you can check it out at the bottom of the leaders page in the editor. They've been increased to 10's and 20's.

 

[MetalMilitia-]

you can check it out at teh bottom of the leaders page in the editor. They've been increased to 10's and 20's.

I just dug through the civ4leaderheadinfo.xml, i guessed that was the one you guys were reffering to. Some of these values are wierd. for example Flauros has +10 towards OO and nothing else, likewise Alexis has +10 towards veil. No negative weight towards any other religions. you would think they would have a problem with empyrean atleast.

Im gonna poke around and change some values and add some ReligionWeightModifiers. Its been bothering me the last couple if games, its just not much fun having only 2-3 religions in play on a map with 10 civs.

 

[Warts]

I've tweaked mine as well. The game may be more 'predictable' but evil leaders and civs should go for evil religions AND avoid the good ones. Having the Calabim go from evil to good and following order just ruins it for me.

 

[MetalMilitia-]

I've tweaked mine as well. The game may be more 'predictable' but evil leaders and civs should go for evil religions AND avoid the good ones. Having the Calabim go from evil to good and following order just ruins it for me.

Definately saw some improvement. The AIs dont seem to go for religion techs much though.