Version 0.45 Discussion Thread

Cybah -

So the circumstance is that the AI's enemy doesn't have any planes to attack with but the AI is still using its planes for air defense, correct?

A human player would recognize their advantage and pound away from the air with zero air defenses ... the AI doesn't yet consider whether its opponent actually has planes yet when making these decisions. It's not too difficult to have them consider their opponents capabilities broadly ... they could for example know whether their enemies can build attack air craft or even whether they have 0, a couple, or many.

I'll think about the best way to make this change ... don't want the AI to be unprepared should it be sneak attacked by a more advanced player.
 
I found a good solution for the unnecessary air defenses problem. The AI chooses how many units it needs based on how close the city is to other teams and whether those other teams are enemies. In version 0.5, if the enemy teams don't have any bombers then they're not considered as enemies ... just as another team. The AI will thus keep up some defenses on border cities but will use its technological advantage more.

In other news, in my current test game with 0.5, Julius Caesar just won a conquest victory on a Terra map at 1930 AD by vassalizing the whole world. He got a Firaxis score of just under 50000 and a rating of (humorously) Augustus Caesar! :eek:

That's a record for the AI as far as I've watched (never seen a conquest victory before). It was completely autonomous. Had to share that. :dance:
 
jdog5000 said:
That's a record for the AI as far as I've watched (never seen a conquest victory before). It was completely autonomous. Had to share that. :dance:
Click to expand...

Oooh it must have been a beautiful sight!!

I've never seen it either. Very cool and let's hope the AI can achieve even more conquest wins in 2009 so long as it is not at the expense of our own human dignity!

Cheers
 
The new version is really good it's a real pleasure to plya now terra map like.
But I'm wondering something on the attitude of the vassal, when the master of a vassal decides for example, to prep a total war against someone, does the vassal do the same?
Beause I find finally that vassal, in war help rarely their master. Sometime it is more profitable for them to don't vassalise I think.

Armand.
 
Excellent point. The whole issue of vassal attitude and the way that they cooperate with their master is still a major area of research and improvement. More generally, the way that civs cooperate with each other has still a lot of potential.
Cheers.
 
Yes it can really help to optimise our war, and can greatly help the master AI in their futur war to tell to their vassal to adopt the same strategy (total_war, assault ...)

Armand.
 
Alright, what I'm thinking is that when a vassal's city is choosing production, if they are not in any current wars there would be an additional check for whether their master had any war plans. This way, the vassal could tool up for war and play a bigger role.

The vassal would never explicitly know who they were gearing up for war with, just whether they should prepare for a land or sea war. For land wars, I can't think of any reason the vassal would not want to do this ... their territory is at risk if they can't fight back and they have the chance to make territory gains. Sure, they could be freed from capitulation if they lost enough territory, but at that point they'd be nearly dead. For naval invasions though I could see an argument that a vassal shouldn't try too hard. The vassal's ability to launch a meaningful invasion is potentially limited, they could just be throwing a lot of hammers at a lost cause. Perhaps their enthusiasm for naval invasions could be tempered based on how tiny they are ...

Thoughts?

Aside from producing military units for the right kind of war, are there any other things the vassal could/should do?
 
I completely agree with you with there behaviour in case of land invasions, but in case of naval invasion I think it depends of the power of the vassal.
Indeed some leaders can easily accept vassalage than the others it depends of their XML personality so in certain case they can support with no problem naval invasion I think. It can depends to on how you modify the behaviour for someone to accept a vassal or to continue his conquest too I think.
Because right now most of the time leaders at war with each others accept to vassalise their ennemy even if these ennemies are nearly dead and I think its a great part why most of the time vassals are useless. :crazyeye:

Hope it will help you a little ;).

Armand.
 
In the interests of player-AI parity, how would the AI vassal know if the player master was gearing up for war?
 
The simplest way would be some sort of button or diplo option that says to the vassal "gear up for war." That could probably be abused, and it might be beyond the scope of better AI, but that's probably the easiest way.

I think it would be pretty cool (again, beyond the scope of better AI? and probably not possible anyway with hardcoded diplo options) for an AI player or a player to contact a civ (not necessarily a vassal) and say "we're preparing for a war against X in 20 turns, care to join us then?"

Anyway, a few observations from my latest game (in WolfRevolution, which uses better AI .45): The AI was using outdated or useless units in their stacks. A Chinese invasion fleet in the industrial era had explorers in it (I think they can attack in that mod, but still pretty useless). Perhaps the AI could do a sweep of units that would be relevant to the invasion before stacking units? With regular stacks, I guess it's not as much of a problem if useless units tag along, but the Chinese were sending them in invasion fleets, so they were taking up precious cargo space.

Also, the Chinese transports had more movement space than their escorts, so they were unprotected the entire way to their target because they wanted to use their full movement.

Also, I saw some interesting behavior. They landed a stack near one city, bombarded it down to no defense bonus, then walked the stack over to where a few of my units were camping out near another city, and attacked that one after bombarding it. I thought it was cool that they changed targets, but it could have been by accident rather than design.
 
BobTheTerrible said:
...Also, the Chinese transports had more movement space than their escorts, so they were unprotected the entire way to their target because they wanted to use their full movement.
Click to expand...
Yeah, been seeing this too, the cargo ships just leave their escorts behind and get taken down.
 
Yakk said:
In the interests of player-AI parity, how would the AI vassal know if the player master was gearing up for war?
Click to expand...

I came up with a couple of things for this. The first was just to make a vassal of a human player have a 20% expectation of war ... ie, when their city is picking a new build decision it has a 20% chance of using the impending war logic (if there are enough targets in the area).

Second, in 0.6 if you hold down SHIFT and ALT and click on someone in the scoreboard you can declare war on it sets your warplan to WARPLAN_PREPARING_TOTAL ... your vassals will see this and begin war preparations as if you were an AI Master. Also useful for testing, effectively forcing the AIs to begin preparations for war with a particular opponent in the normal AI way (they can, however, opt out of actually going to war). This is not multiplayer compatible however ...
 
phungus420 said:
Yeah, been seeing this too, the cargo ships just leave their escorts behind and get taken down.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm working on it ... once the issue where transports would sit in place attempting to load the units they already had on board was fixed, transports started flying around all over the map and much of the existing escort AI behavior couldn't keep up. I reigned in the crazy transports mostly for 0.5, but there's another round of improvements coming in 0.6 which will really help. Loaded transports will now explicitly wait for escorts that are on their way before launching, instead of happening to usually launch with escorts because the invasion code was so inefficient.

It's a sign of improvement that the transports are ready to go before their escorts reach them (and a sign of need for further improvement ...) :p
 
jdog5000 said:
It's a sign of improvement that the transports are ready to go before their escorts reach them (and a sign of need for further improvement ...) :p
Click to expand...

Will we get to the point where the AI will plan things so that the transport will be full and the escort is ready to go on the same turn?

EDIT: Or so they can plan the landing so that al transports will land on the same turn?
 
BobTheTerrible said:
Will we get to the point where the AI will plan things so that the transport will be full and the escort is ready to go on the same turn?

EDIT: Or so they can plan the landing so that al transports will land on the same turn?
Click to expand...

We'll see ... but the AI in 0.6 can land multiple transport groups on the same tile on the same turn or can reinforce troops on the ground with troops from a transport the turn before they attack. Definitely did a fist pump the first time that actually worked while I was watching over the weekend ;)
 
You are a fortunate person, to be the first to see the BTS organism evolve like that. It must have been a rush indeed, even if you were the instigator! Great stuff.
Cheers.
 
I have seen the AI frequently take out other AI civs with naval invasions in 0.5 and its even better in 0.6 ... successful intercontinental wars were not a common occurrence before. It's still a lot harder than continental warfare, so there has to be either a gap in power, military tech, or one civ has to be dog piled (or, more precisely, these gaps have to be a little bigger than for land war). As for whether it will take out your civ, well that's partly up to you but I am working on it ;)
 
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