Unlike GalCiv II, the GalCiv III AI and overall system is extremely moddable. I'm glad they did that but I'm having a hard time making the AI play the game as well as I'd like.
Whether people like it or not, skill at a game is the result of knowing effective, specific, strategies. You can't procedurally generate a strategy. Some of it needs to be hard-coded and that's where we're struggling because GalCiv III is all about data mining and procedural design. It is much more like a Chess AI than what I've done in the past.
For instance, in Starcraft, I'm a mid-level diamond league player. I have very specific build orders, very specific map control strategies that rely on timing and a very tight control of resources. In GalCiv III, presently, I can't even make a ship focus on a particular type of defense. Heck, getting the AI to not decide to build endless constructors is a lot harder than you'd think.
Anyway, you're not here to read me complain about our own game. So let's roll up our sleeves, we've got years to do this. What I can say is that the AI system in GalCiv III is on a much better foundation than GalCiv II. There's much more we can do. But it's going to take time and frankly, a lot of community help.
What I need form you guys are saved games with an explanation of a strategic error you see the AI making. I don't need help in coding what the AI should do because I can assure you, all those functions are there. It's simply calculating that doing something else is a better idea.
GalCiv II way:
If (transportisnearmylanet)then (do specific bad things to that opponent)
GalCiv III way:
Go through and weight zillions of possible things you might do, sort those weights and execute various empire-wide build/movement decisions.
Much of the work on GalCiv III will be making decisions more locally.
Here's a save from a recent Soak test where my custom faction, the Veluszhi, have utterly smashed the Automatons' army and have 6 fleets surrounding a planet near their borders, but they have no transports, and none of their shipyards are even making an attempt to build any after dozens of turns, so its wars stagnate and pile up while the Altarians lol their way to victory.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/86kdr6sbjw5p24s/soak_-_AI_not_invading.GC3Sav
Actually, I know what's causing this, because it happens to players as well. The AI uses Rally Points for everything, so what's happening is that multiple ships are landing on the Rally Point at the same time, and if there was already a fleet of 2 ships there, the game just shrugs and says "there's a fleet here already, what do?" and leaves all the other ships as singles. The game needs to recognize that it needs to keep adding ships to any fleets that show up on the rally point until they are full, and that should fix the problem. It's probably happening because too many ships are landing on the space at once, and since the game can't add ALL of them to a single fleet, it doesn't add any of them, since it can't decide which ships to exclude.
See reply #6 We are ready for the Stardock AI Programming team.
I figured out what was happening. You know the Beam Support, Kinetic Support, Missile Support, and Tactical Support ships? Those have the <AIShipClass>Transport</AIShipClass> tag, which means the AI thinks those are transports, and it is trying to build those instead of transports, but usually can't because they have no resources, and since regular Transports have zero threat, they refuse to build those as soon as it gets large hulls. As soon as I fixed that, the AI started ramming out transports during wartime as it should.
Unfortunately, it still doesn't USE those transports on anything that's not already inside its borders...
UPDATE: I fixed it. In GalCiv3AIDefs, I increased <WartimeFocusSectorRadius> to 16. It now very aggressively pursues invasions when it has transports, especially on large maps. No longer does it sit on piles of transports when it's at 3 wars, it uses them any way it can, which is exactly what I was hoping for.
A side-effect of this is that the Drengin became MONSTERS!! Move over, pre-nerf Krynn, the Drengin are in town!
Is this effected by map size, I wonder?
Sadly, no. Also, this isn't as cut and dry as I once thought, but I have made major fixes that I will publish as a mod on Saturday.
could you guys tell me what files need to be edited to mod the AI behaviour? i wanna play around with it.
here are my observatons so far:
1) ai not building propper fleets as already discribed
2) ai does not understand the value of strategic locations of planets and stations - it will happily trade away stations that can be used as bridge heads into their territory or one simply builds a station in their territory to trade it to them a turn later
3) ai doesnt understand trade. AT ALL. it does not understand that aquiring resources of which it aready has an abundance is worht less than a rare resource for example
4) ai wont build good improvements on planets: sometimes i even find planets full of farms that have far less population
5) ai always uses the same pathfinding to attack your territory so once you figure out the corridor in which their fleets move you just bock that or create a shooting alley
6) ai can be very easiy overpowered by buiding long range transports with large or huge hulls so they can carry enough firepower.. since the ai barely defends its planets you can, in a single turn, take over alot of planets rom them simply by having a bunch of long range transports to swoop in. then you simply trade them one of the plaets and maybbe some useless stations and resources for a peace treaty and repeat.
the abov is all true for challenging diffculty/gifted ai
See https://forums.galciv3.com/467582/page/1/#replies
Several of us went through and found most of the files and even defined what many of the modifiers do.
Aggressive (most of the the Krynn) AI declares war on me in each game well before it is ready to send combat ships against me. After declaring war I mostly have dozens of weeks to tech and build up a bit and when the attack arrives it is mostly underpowered and ships not organized into as single large force
AI also looses combat ships by chasing my scout ships around its border while my stronger and faster counter fleet picks them off one-by one
A solution for both might be to have the AI build a bit up first and at least partially create/position fleets before declaring to attack. The challenge is probably big to have the AI prepare for a war without actually declaring it but that is what a human player would do - else the surprise as lost putting it into a strong disadvantage.
I just saw this topic.
Ok, a few turns ago a custom faction of mine 'demanded tribute' from me, another custom faction. The thing is I have over twice it's power. I find it laughable how they demand tribute of a faction that's far stronger than they, and that I'm currently destroying the Altarians who were the second strongest in the game.
the AI shouldn't demand tribute unless it's stronger.
edit: now a minor faction demanded tribute. I have 10x it's power lol
2: I think that when I agree to go to war at someones request it should gove more than +1 to diplomacy. Also, shouldn't the faction that asked us to help them in the war actually be at war? Like, Iconians asked me to help them in a war against a custom faction and I only received a +1 in diplo with them while going to war against the cureent second strongest faction, and the Iconians aren't even at war with them.
Catching up.
This extremely interesting! Will look and see if I can enhance this effect.
It's not. It was fixed to 8. I just changed this to use medium as the base and increase it based on map size. So at medium, it';ll still be 8. But on huge it'll be 18.
I also fixed the typo with the transports.
Could you look into some AI tech choices? I've had a couple of games now where Yor never went above 20'ish logistics and just completely failed at war because of it. I think the basics such as this is more breaking than whatever stupid stuff the AI does with it's ships on the map. (I reckon you guys are aware of the bad blueprint designs already)
I think I can. I'll see waht I can do.
On insane, we're getting good results with it set to 256.
in advance sorry groggy. It doesn't matter how big the galaxy is if the planets are the same distance apart. What matters a whole lot more are appearance of planets, habital planets, stars, or habital stars. Type of galaxy loose clusters...
I meant groggy if someone prefers rare settings with tight clusters 18 is likely not enough.
froggy
really sorry I wasn't. Trying to shut down this post.
a couple Ai ideas I have. First if you have advanced algorithms then that would at least end some complaints people have about Ai being to hard.
about when a planet is colonized in some else influence you need to turn that into an influence planet with influence star wars.
if I hadn't mentioned it already you need preplanned numbers on specialized planets. Based on how many planets you have.
I think it would make the game better to have a separate Ai for bigger, and smaller maps.
This is intriguing but I think we would have simply hooks or triggers that tell the ai that "hey you are on an insane map...go rush planets for 100 turns THEN build ships" or "hey you are on a medium map, go rush military tech and/or influence tech and get those few planets by force!", it really is about getting more 'if this, than that' built into the ai.
As stated its all data driven, give the ai the data and give it the ability to weigh choices. I am not a coder so I have no idea if this is even possible.
I noticed on explore vessel on auto explore that it doesn't. Go to nearby star systems, or why can't. I tell it to go automatically to the nearest on the map.
on a separate note I can choose to go to stars on the map to explore why can't. The Ai do this. Use the mini map don't. Cheat.
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