Two AI Question and possible Request

[stmartin]

1. It seems the AI won't build workboat on lake even if there are unimproved bonus plot in the lake. The plot number prerequisite for building workboat has been set to -1 in xml files. I've check the code but haven't found any reason why AI won't do that.

2. Will the AI understand how to use the river plot in war time? I mean the river plot like Yellow River and Yangtze River in Chinese Unification Scenario. If we could teach the AI to assault along river bank or block the enemy harbor city on the opposite side of the river, it would be fantastic!

That's it, 2 questions. Just hope it could be of some help if you are looking for ideas(although these 2 ideas are probably not so great)

 

[jdog5000]

Good questions!

1. I just checked this out, and there's definitely something that should be tweaked. The BTS AI only considers building workboats if it thinks the lake/ocean the city is on is militarily relevant ... there's no point building warships on a small lake with no military opponents, but the same doesn't hold for workboats! Will be fixed in version 0.5.

2. I haven't played the Chinese Unification Scenario, but I'm guessing the river bank rules you're talking about are different than the standard 25% penalty for attacking across a river. Can you describe how it works or what makes it different?

I don't have time to do much scenario/mod specific customization, but if it's easy and fairly general purpose I'll see what can be done.

 

[stmartin]

Thanks!

Here is a picture describing the situation mentioned in the 2nd question:

As you can see, if a player on one side of the 'river' wants to attack another player on the other side of the 'river', he has to build transport ships and load units onto it; if he wants to stop an invasion from other side of the river, he better build war ships and block enemy transport from coming out of the harbor; if he wants to improve the land owned by one of his city, but is on the other side of the river, he need to load workers onto transport and move them across, and the same goes for exploring, and so on.

I could imagine doing this AI is real hard work. So it's not a request, just a suggestion.

By the way, thanks for this mod jdog5000. It is incorporated with our mod---The History of Three Kingdoms. It really made a big difference!

 

[jdog5000]

Do the rivers go all the way from the ocean to the edge of the map, creating effectively a bunch of islands?

If there exists a land path, even if it's through enemy territory, unexplored territory, or through impassable terrain, the vanilla BTS AI will not use AREAAI_ASSAULT which it needs to run naval invasions and boost its navy. The AI will also have difficulty moving settlers on to the other side of the river. While it might not be correct or look good, if you do have the rivers cut all the way through then I think you'd see better results.

The first issue though, running naval invasions if the land path is not actually achievable, is something that has been partly addressed in recent versions of this mod. I'm working on the settler part now. Still, these tests are only for whether a land path is feasible (not through blocked enemy territory, not through impassable terrain), not for whether it is reasonable ... this map has kind of an extreme setup where there may be a 70-tile land path but a 3-tile water path. With the next version of the mod, if you have a combination of water and mountain tiles dividing the map into sections you'll get pretty good behavior I think.

 

[Ljdjr]

I think the 'rivers' he's talking about are the one tile wide strips of coastal water that look like a sideways Y, separating the islands. Which could be effective blocking points.

But I've never played that mod either.

EDIT: And rereading what you wrote I think you understood that. Cheers.

 

[stmartin]

Thanks, jdog. I think you fully understand the situation and considered it thoroughly. When the current phase of development of The History of Three Kingdoms mod is near the end, I will update to the newest Better BTS AI version. Then I will run it and see how it works out. May be there's some specific AI work I could do and share. I'll report back later.