VEM Variants

[Aristos]

This is why I have made it so that barbarians tend to leave civilians alone preferring pillaging, unless two or three of them have cornered a civilian.

hmmm.... this will lead to huge exploits, and that is a big no-no isn't it? If the choice is between enabling a huge exploit for humans and helping the AI or leaving as is, wouldn't you go for the second? Maybe there is a way to influence escroting that we did not find yet...?

 

[glider1]

Now you are thinking! It would be nice if there were some options to enhance escorting. The escort code is bugged as well, but not as bad. The problem is that some AI's want to quickly expand and thus the settlers cannot be escorted because there aren't enough escorts in the early game. Yes exploits are all possible but this mod concept is not about creating a fool proof game but examining and having fun with IC5. The exploits are not that bad because AI's can send settlers out to good locations and actually make it, while their workers are more productive. If there is a war, the settlers and workers are just as vunerable as always.
Cheers

 

[Aristos]

well, I found this lines inside Civ5TacticalMoves.xml:

<Row>
<Type>TACTICAL_MOVE_NONCOMBATANTS_TO_SAFETY</Type>
<OperationsCanRecruit>true</OperationsCanRecruit>
<Priority>0</Priority>
</Row>

That priority "ZERO" does not look good at all... it's the only zero-priority in the entire file. Worth testing. 100?

 

[glider1]

Yeah good spotting Aristos. I saw it too but rejected it because I thought it was something to do with maneuvering civilians during war but you could be onto something. We could solve the issue in minutes if we could read the code in the core. Autoplay would be the way to go. Set the priority to 100 and see if the AI will never move the settler unless escorted. There probably will be unanticipated side effects.

Actually when I think about it, I think this is to do with workers in the midst of war. Have you noticed that the workers rarely move away from danger? It's possible that there is some issue in the code that the developers decided to negate with zero priority. Most likely the code is not good enough to distinguish between actual danger and not. Therefore with priorities above zero, workers probably get interrupted too often which would be a major irritation.

Only guessing. It's worth trying under autoplay conditions.

EDIT: SORRY FORGOT TO EXPLAIN AUTOPLAY:
1) Enable this line in config:
[Debugging]
; Set to 1 to enable the fire tuner to connect to the game.
EnableTuner = 1
; Set to 1 to activate the debug panel
DebugPanel = 1

2) Start FireTuner2 application in the SDK

3) Start the game and load up

4) Hit ` button on keyboard and select "reveal all"

4) Switch back to the FireTuner2

5) Select the autoplay options

6) Switch back to the game and watch

7) Switch back to FireTuner2 to turn off

Leaving the config options turned on does not appear to slow the game down under non-debug situation which is good. Also auto-play works ok in full screen.

Cheers

 

[Aristos]

OK, I did some runs with AI auto, and many small changes to AI xml files, to no avail. The AI really gambles with the Settlers in the first rounds. I use the word "gamble" because as soon as the AI has military units at its disposal, the escorting is perfect, from source to destination using the best terrain possible (and related promotions).

That means the code for escorting is there, and works well. There is something else though that makes it take those huge risks in the start. For some AI's it means huge benefits if lucky, for others it means loosing two or three settlers to the barbs.

What if we increase the units available from the start for the AI's? I didn't yet, but maybe somebody did already. If my observations are correct, the AI's should use at least one of those for escorting in the first rounds. Did you try that?

 

[glider1]

Thanks for trying. Problem is that AI will get distracted and use the extra units for something else than escorting unless a flavour is assigned to ensure that the unit only escorts. Code could be written to give them a warrior for every settler, and assign the warrior an escort flavour, but it's just not worth the trouble unless we find that Firaxis are not going to release the core. Until then, just make it so that barbarians are unlikely to pinch civilians, and play the game to steer the AI into some competition (no point exploiting it).

That's all I can think.

Boy the issue of space is an interesting one. Perfect world is a great map but the terrain is complicated around cities, and as such we are battling not just more space for units, but also cramping for the AI because of the terrain. Perhaps Continents+ is better.

Aristos, I have China just into the industrial era and they are doing great but they are not upgrading their trebuchets even with the available cash!

Cheers

 

[Aristos]

I use always fractal and it works pretty well with IC5.

 

[Aristos]

Good news!

First run with the fresh idea: 3 defensive units for the AI in Emperor. The AI used only the normally initial available unit for scouting, and kept the defensive units (although the same type of the initial one, warrior) close to the capital. Once the first settlers were produced/SPgenerated, ALL of them were correctly escorted to their destinations. NONE of them was lost.

Strengthens my impression that the code is there, but the AI lacks escorting units so it takes the gamble.

Now I will try with less initial defensive units to see what happens.

If this gets confirmed, I consider it a far better solution to the unescorted settler than crippling the barbarians. It also adds challenge to the higher levels without overy imbalancing them.



I have pictures, but need to process them, and am more interested in further trials right now. Pictures later.

 

[Aristos]

OK, after many trials with 1, 2 and 3 initial defensive units, a pattern emerged:

Basically, the AI leaves all but the "hardcoded" initial unit on duty guard around the borders of the capital. The "hardcoded" initial unit goes on scouting duty all over the map, but the extra defensive units stay put, on the immediate vicinity of the capital's border. As soon as the first settler is ready, it is highly likely that one of the extra def units, or the only one in the case of giving it only 1 def unit, escorts the settler to destination.

Sometimes with ony 1 or 2 units extra, you see an AI gamble with sending a settler unescorted, but it is rare. With 3 extra initial units, it becomes very, very unlikely, and you see the AI escorting ALL its settlers. With only 1 extra unit, escorting the key first settler is very likely, although in some cases some AI's still gamble.

The effect of adding initial units on other aspects of the gameplay remains to be seen, but even with 3 extra units, I have only seen the normal "early rushes" that you would see, and only from some AI's (the ones that rolled warmongering). At the same time, the extra units help the AIs fight the onslaught of barbs that are an obvious consequence of IC5.

I would strongly recommend that Thal re-instates at least the initial extra unit that is part of the higher difficulties in vanilla. In fact, Emperor+ in vanilla has 2 extra defensive units for the AI, plus workers and explorers. That may be too much, but the extra def units should come back. For this variant, I would use 3 extra units in the higher levels, perhaps starting with King + 1, Emperor +2 and the higher two + 3.

There is still the occurrence of the settlers being lost either by a stupid move by the AI, or by the escort genuinely loosing a battle against surrounding barbs, but the first became rare, and the second is something that would happen to the human too.

These are my findings. More testing is encouraged, but I find the first results very compelling.

 

[glider1]

Thanks for doing that Aristos. Can you post your recommended changes some time?
Cheers

 

[Zaldron]

Good news!

First run with the fresh idea: 3 defensive units for the AI in Emperor. The AI used only the normally initial available unit for scouting, and kept the defensive units (although the same type of the initial one, warrior) close to the capital. Once the first settlers were produced/SPgenerated, ALL of them were correctly escorted to their destinations. NONE of them was lost.

Do remember we've also seen AIs use excess initial units to rush with. Against another AI it's about a wash since they both have the units, but if you give Monty or Alex for example excess initial units purportedly to help escort settlers he'll feel free to rush the human with them, and there may be no way to defend it at that stage of the game. This may not be a problem if the defensive tag explicitly prohibits using them in a rush.

 

[Aristos]

Change is easy: in the dif levels xml, look for a line that says something AIStartingDefensiveUnits and change it to something different than zero (as is in VEM). In vanilla those values are already >0.