Gwoxenox
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2018
- Messages
- 1
So I recently downloaded Gedemon's autoplay mod as well as using FireTuner's autoplay function, and I've been experimenting with various AI battle royales. At first I started selecting Prince difficulty as the wiki states that this is the difficulty where the human and AI players have no bonuses compared to each other, and I didn't want to advantage/disadvantage the 'Human' player that the autoplay AI takes control of.
However, I quickly noticed after a few games the 'Human' AI was consistently performing poorly, and while it was sometimes competitive on one victory condition (usually whatever that civ is naturally biased towards) it would always be one of the worst civs in all the other conditions and in overall score would almost always be in last place by a long way, and all the AI battle royale videos I've found of other people seem to have the same result. I even tested this on unbiased maps with all civs the same and the same result applies.
So I decided to change the game difficulty, and it seems that the 'Human' AI is competitive and playing at the same level as the other AI in the game only when the difficulty is at Settler, and the higher the difficulty obviously the further it falls behind. The thing is the only way to look at what's going on in detail is by stopping the autoplay and taking control of one of the civs, and when I do this the combat bonus always applies (or at least it says it does in the HUD, it's hard to accurately test this) to whichever civ started the game as the human, so this would imply that all the other bonus yields apply and that this Civ should have an advantage at difficulties below Prince, but for some reason it doesn't.
My guess is that in the coding of the game, the default human bonuses and yields are actually set to Settler, and that when playing on higher difficulties these bonuses are taken away from the player as a penalty. But when the autoplay AI takes over it reverts to the default AI bonuses (equal to a human on Prince difficulty), and then still applies the difficulty penalties of the player's level, making it inherently weaker than the other AI which are also using the AI defaults but also the AI difficulty bonuses/penalties rather than the player's. I've had a brief look in the game files to try to work out how difficulty is applied and see if I can confirm this but I couldn't really find anything useful and there's so many places to look I didn't really know where to start.
Does anyone have any thoughts to add to this or ideas as to what is going on here, or how to make a fully balanced and entertaining AI only game? (Running them in Settler seems to be balanced but the AI is painfully slow at doing just about anything). Sorry this post has been so long I just wanted to detail everything and my ideas on it.
However, I quickly noticed after a few games the 'Human' AI was consistently performing poorly, and while it was sometimes competitive on one victory condition (usually whatever that civ is naturally biased towards) it would always be one of the worst civs in all the other conditions and in overall score would almost always be in last place by a long way, and all the AI battle royale videos I've found of other people seem to have the same result. I even tested this on unbiased maps with all civs the same and the same result applies.
So I decided to change the game difficulty, and it seems that the 'Human' AI is competitive and playing at the same level as the other AI in the game only when the difficulty is at Settler, and the higher the difficulty obviously the further it falls behind. The thing is the only way to look at what's going on in detail is by stopping the autoplay and taking control of one of the civs, and when I do this the combat bonus always applies (or at least it says it does in the HUD, it's hard to accurately test this) to whichever civ started the game as the human, so this would imply that all the other bonus yields apply and that this Civ should have an advantage at difficulties below Prince, but for some reason it doesn't.
My guess is that in the coding of the game, the default human bonuses and yields are actually set to Settler, and that when playing on higher difficulties these bonuses are taken away from the player as a penalty. But when the autoplay AI takes over it reverts to the default AI bonuses (equal to a human on Prince difficulty), and then still applies the difficulty penalties of the player's level, making it inherently weaker than the other AI which are also using the AI defaults but also the AI difficulty bonuses/penalties rather than the player's. I've had a brief look in the game files to try to work out how difficulty is applied and see if I can confirm this but I couldn't really find anything useful and there's so many places to look I didn't really know where to start.
Does anyone have any thoughts to add to this or ideas as to what is going on here, or how to make a fully balanced and entertaining AI only game? (Running them in Settler seems to be balanced but the AI is painfully slow at doing just about anything). Sorry this post has been so long I just wanted to detail everything and my ideas on it.
