Spartan117 said:
dom pedro but when you are playing you cant have a state religion, unless im wrong i just sort of noticed but i did see otehr ai with state religion though!
however it does show the religions in the city but as human player i could not bmake state religion...but i did see some AI make state religion... i might be wrong or maybe i didi something...
Maybe the religion was not popular enough to switch to it? I really don't know as I've not tried to set the state religions for any of the players yet. Right now I'm working on getting the AI to do what I want.
TO ALL:
I've been working on the AI attack strategy I discussed
earlier.
So far, I've only worked on it for the Germans. Basically, every game year between the first ten weeks and twenty-six weeks, the Germans will launch a "campaign".
Five or six turns before the campaign begins, all newly-created units are sent to what I have dubbed "the corral" which is a staging area for the troops to gather before the campaign begins. It's a 4X4 box of plots positioned on the border between France and Germany. All units are sent to this front except for units either A) fighting Russia, or B) in a city where it is the last unit (so the city is not left undefended).
The units are then held in the Corral fortified (which simulates the trench warfare I think). Once the fix or six turns have passed, the campaign begins. All units within the Corral are ordered towards a randomly chosen city near the border. So the player (whether it's human or AI) will find a dozen or more units suddenly barreling down on one of their cities.
Just so the player doesn't get the rhythm of it, the turn in which the units start mobilizing for the campaign is randomized within certain parameters, and the length of time between mobilization and attack is randomized within certain parameters as well.
Basically, what I also want to try to do is give the AI an overall strategy. Think of it like the Schlieffen Plan. Each one of these overall strategies will have a set of criteria so that the AI will be forced to follow the plan.
For example, let's say that Britain has several plans for winning the war.
- Cut off German supply of Oil and invade Ottoman possessions in Middle East.
- Decimate German forces on the coast of Germany and attempt an amphibious invasion.
- Come up through Italy and attack Austria-Hungary and cut into the German underbelly.
- Attack via Greece
- Attack via France
I just threw this together just now... so let's not get into the practicality of these options. We can hash all that out later.
Ok, so first things first, some of these are dependent upon certain Allies. Are either Greece or Italy in the war? No? Move on. If yes, keep them as an option. Is Middle East still Ottoman? No? Move on. Do the British still control Egypt? No? Move on. Is France still in the war? No? Move on. You get the idea...
So then the game randomly chooses one of the remaining available options. Let's say the Ottomans still control the Middle East and that's the option picked. So now the Corral is set for Egypt near the Suez Canal. At the same time, we force the AI to start loading transports and then sending them to Egypt. That's probably going to take a lot longer than German troops moving to the Western front, so we might start the preparations in winter for a spring offensive sometime after the twelfth week of the next year. Then we also force the AI to gather ships near Egypt.
When the campaign begins, the AI will be forced to march its units up through the Sinai and make an attack on Jerusalem. Then there would be a second component to this plan wherein the AI would send the fleet farther north to bombard Turkish coastal cities... maybe land some troops as a diversion from the real attack. The AI is dumb... so the more viable strategies made available to it, the better. Essentially, we have to force the AI to do what we would do if we were that civilization. This would obviously never work in a regular game, but in a scenario where the geography is set, it would be considerably easier.
The selections the AI makes are randomized with certain criteria, which makes it harder for the player to anticipate the next move. Now while the player will realize the patterns if he/she plays long enough and enough times, there are some ways here to keep the player on his/her toes. As I said before disinformation should be a factor.
I want to have briefings as well as "newspapers" that are available for the player to read. Sometimes they'll have accurate information and sometimes they won't. Only scouting Corral area will determine what strategy the AI is using, and even then, sometimes they launch different campaigns from the same staging area. So your intelligence people and the news media might say Rheims! But really the enemy is going for Ypres. And if the enemy is going for Ypres, that means the next stop is Calais in an attempt to cut off the British from the mainland.
Of course, logistics will factor into this as well. I would like to make it so that England has access to all resources from Coal to Bananas, but that most of said resources are being shipped in from across the Empire. So we create a merchant fleet... ships that are automated to head for London or some port city. If they make it to the port city, then Britain gets that resource for that turn. If they don't (i.e. if they're sunk by U-boats) Britain doesn't have that resource for that turn... or the next turn rather I suppose.
The AI won't understand logistics, but it doesn't have to. All of that has been taken care of by the designer. It just needs to follow the commands it's been given.