Rifling / Military Science / Assembly Line - how to set high priority techs?

[Cybah]

I can often observe a KI researching physics, electricity, ... without having researched rifling / military science / assembly line before.

How can we set high priority technologies? Should BBAI add new priority values to CIV4TechInfos.xml? I've added ALL flavors to rifling with a value of 10, but I cannot see a better AI behavior.

 

[Lone Wolf]

They research AL and MT fine, in my experience, it's Rifling they often miss. I've seen cases of AL before Rifling.

 

[Cybah]

you mean tradition, I mean science since the human player is often using riflemen.

 

[phungus420]

In LoR I was able to fix this behavior simply by giving the core techs like rifling super high AI values and weights in the XML and bumping up the military flavor value. Crude, but effective, and i get the desired behavior from it.

 

[Cybah]

weight 10? 100? 200? 1000? 1000000?

 

[phungus420]

Here's LoR's TechInfos file. Compare Rifling I guess, that's the main one I tweaked because in default BtS the AI does ignore it too much.

 

[Cybah]

strange. you did not change iAIWeight at all. you inscreased flavor_military 10 (if it wasnt 10 before, dunno). this is was I did already but it seems not to be enough. therefore I will now also change iAIWeight.

 

[Fimbulvetr]

Is iAIWeight ever not 0 in the whole file?
phungus buffed Steam Power's military flavor from 4 to 5

Rifling cost is reduced from 2400 to 2000, Military Science from 2000 to 1800, Assembly line is the same. No flavor buffs here.

I see no weighting, just cost and prereq changes.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I see more aggressive AIs gun military science before paper already (and rifles before education).

Peacemongers do like to avoid rifling but will often trade for it if they can. This has the interesting effect of sometimes screwing them but sometimes hiking the global tech pace as the AI researches different things then trades. I'm not sure training the AIs to all go for a canned military power tech is best ----> the player will (quickly) adapt to research something else (such as econ or physics to snipe the great person for getting there first) and then using that to trade for rifles and more while the AI all slops over itself going for the same thing.

 

[phungus420]

Hmm, I could have sworn I increased the military flavor, might have been cost as well. Anyway I know I got desired behavior, but I guess that's not helpfull then as BBAI can't change tech costs. Sorry, guess I was wrong, been a while since I did this, but I did sit down and do some testing and tweaking to get the AI to stop skipping Rifling specifically I know.

 

[phungus420]

Peacemongers do like to avoid rifling but will often trade for it if they can. This has the interesting effect of sometimes screwing them but sometimes hiking the global tech pace as the AI researches different things then trades. I'm not sure training the AIs to all go for a canned military power tech is best ----> the player will (quickly) adapt to research something else (such as econ or physics to snipe the great person for getting there first) and then using that to trade for rifles and more while the AI all slops over itself going for the same thing.

I partially agree with this, but there is a point where it gets rediculous. The AI should not be researching Flight, and still not have rifling. When it does this it is just making itself a target; there is no reason at all for it to still be defending cities with Longbowmen and Muskets in the modern era.

 

[Cybah]

I'm always playing without tech trading. And the game option is no excuse.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Well, and personalities who discover Rifling early usually aren't much of tech traders and tend to dislike peacemongers due to peaceweights.

 

[Yakk]

So, your problem is that in a game without tech trading, AIs who have a bias against military technologies tend not to have military technologies for too long, and you want to fix that (make AIs have less personality, or be more practical, in their tech choice).

Hmm.

 

[Fimbulvetr]

Arriving at Replacable Parts (or a tech before in that line) early without tech trading is probably a good indicator that the AI in question is pretty peaceful. And such an AI should know that completely neglecting military won't always work so it should take the opportunity to grab a tech that greatly enhances its defensive effectiveness.
In a similar fashion I can see warmongers go rocketery before assembly line, not that great a decision either imo, probably better than ignoring Rifling.
Military Science seems like an easy fix, as that one is only interesting for warmongers anyway: simply increase military flavor.

One solution might be to actually let peacemongers weight military higher, and even more so when tech trading is limited or off. Should be doable, or so I thought. Looks like CvPlayerAI::AI_chooseResearch() calls a python function "AI_chooseTech"... that's outside my territory.

 

[Afforess]

The AI_ChoseTech python call should do nothing unless you have a mod that uses it. Standard BTS just returns NO_TECH... In fact, that might be a good spot to add a new callback and disable for speed improvements.