Ever noticed how poorly the AI handles its wars? It builds transports and sits on them, loads fleets up with tiny ships that were obsolete ages ago, and rarely does anything but annoy you. Here's a neat little fix for that.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/edf9fdx86hxlz5q/VidWarAIv3.zip
With this, when the AI goes to war, it will almost exclusively build transports and capital ships, which means their fleets are much faster, and far more dangerous. Additionally, they are now invade much more aggressively, and will sometimes line up several invasions back to back. Ever wonder how scary the Drengin would be if they actually finished their wars? Oh man... brace yourselves.
This is compatible with the 1.10 opt-in.
Note that the AI doesn't seem to use anything for planetary defense except for Tiny ships, so as a side-effect, when they are at war for a long time, they will very often start to neglect their defenses to smash the front line. However, if you tell it to build tiny ships, it loads them up in fleets absent-mindedly, so it's best to just tell them not to, especially since they are very inefficient once you get Medium hulls. Tiny ships are ineffective defenders anyway, so until the AI learns how to defend with larger ships, this is the next best thing.
UPDATE: v2 is now up. It makes the AI even more aggressive on larger maps, and additionally helps it build more Constructors once it has secured a decent-sized empire.
UPDATE 2: v3 is now up. It makes the AI much better at defending its own planets. Due to necessity, while this is compatible with 1.11, I have refrained from using the new BestDefense modifier that the devs added, as I find it quite counter-productive, and it often makes the AI worse at defending.
can I add this mod to the insane abundant mod.
Not at present (both use the AIstrategydefs.xml file), but if Vid gives me permission then I'll add the changes to IAB for tonight's build.
Go right ahead.
In the meantime, I'm going to be fiddling with other values to see if I can't fix the AI's love affair with Tiny ships as Defenders.
since we are suggesting I've seen a mod where expansion is better than vanilla. Thanks naselus.
Included in 0.5 Thanks.
Naselus, I like your mod but really dislike playing on maps with that amount of hab planets. The work you did is amazing! Thanks. I'd like something similar at the opposite end of playing, Naselus' life is rare mod (for those who like few hab)...The changes to LEP are a nice and seem to make the game play how its supposed to....
Devs, we need a multi-xml hook where we can add multiple mods that affect the same line such as both yours and others.
I suspect that, in time, we'll probably have mods for each map size. It's basically impossible to find a balance that works at both ends of the scale AND do really cool things, which I suspect is one of the reasons the AI is so poor. Some bits (like the governors) are just silly (the AI actually does pick planets to specialize... but then proceeds to rotate building type on them anyway), but other problems appear mostly to be due to balancing around smaller map sizes.
I blame this largely on the late addition of the big maps. The devs were dutifully scripting and listening to feedback - but it was feedback from large-or-less sizes for the vast majority of the beta.
But let's not hijack this thread for that discussion
Expect an update later tonight, guys. I've been playing around with the XMLs some more, and so far, it doesn't look like there are any negative effects felt from increasing the War Focus radius. All it seems to do is increase the distance the AI is willing to send their transports, which makes the AI much more aggressive on larger maps. To give you an idea of the changes I've done, beforehand, the AI would only send Transports to invade if there was an enemy planet within 8 parsecs of their resting spot. The first version of this mod increases that to 16. My current version increased it to 256 and counting. Aggressive races get a major power boost from this, as they will actually WIN those 3 simultaneous wars they always have going, and thanks to their player-style Capital Ship spam, they don't even need defenders. They reach out and crush enemy fleets with speed alone.
I'm also getting to work on having the AI build more Constructors during wartime, and have more of those be Mining bases instead of random Military and Economic starbases, as those will help it claim more resources. Yes, Economic starbases are good, but not when you're in range of 3 resources! Obviously, early on, Constructors are not at all important, but once you secure territory, building constructors becomes a big deal, and currently, the AI will almost never build any if it's at war with anyone (which is always).
Has it been updated yet?
Soon. I'm just checking a few things to make sure my last round of changes didn't break anything. Actually, it looks very promising.
Updated.
I might have over-tweaked how much it loves constructors now. Let me know if there's any problems on that end.
Vid, this is excellent work. Could you post some of your various finding in the Strategic AI discussion thread (https://forums.galciv3.com/467582/page/1/#3567046) and I'll update the big list of AI hooks in the opening posts.
When I install this mod, should I replace the actual 'game' docs where steam keeps the game (on my ssd) or can I drop the entire folder 'Vids mod' in the 'mod' folder and it will work that way?
It'll work just being put into the mods folder, so long as you don't have any others that change AIstrategydefs and Galciv3AIdefs.
Uh, does it work with your mod Naselus?
No. My mod does basically contain Vid's previous release, though.
The version of IAB I released last night has rather more strategic wartime AI scripting than this mod (I've included 5 different possible AI war strategies for different personalities, and I've used more things like setting minimum numbers of certain ship classes etc - and Vid, do feel free to steal them and add them here, they should be fine for normal play, they're in the 'warstratdefs.xml' file in my mod), and I included a similar fix for transports to Vid - the 0.5 AI will send transports upto 48 squares, so I'm seeing a lot more action in soaks. I suspect you're still playing on 0.4.
In the 0.6 build I'm now working on, this has been increased to 256. I might put 0.6 out tonight, given that this is a pretty important change for very large maps.
Solution (duh): play other humans!
I'm impressed with all the AI tweaking, game setting maniputlation, etc....
But, in the end, why waste so much time tweaking AI to act humanish? Who cares if the AI are better than their default setttings? As a data miner who is anxious to get his hands on real-time game data, I naturally assume... they will NEVER be better than the best human opponents!
Um.... because trying to co-ordinate a game with 60+ human players would be a bit futile?
I found out the side-effects of setting <WartimeFocusSectorRadius> to extreme values. It seems to confuse the AI, and they won't invade anything once again. This means for Gigantic+ maps, the AI might not be as effective as it should be, and there's nothing I can do about that. I need the devs to fix transport behavior to be more like Colony Ships and Freighters, where they attempt to go after the first thing in range, no matter how far it might be from their current position.
The thing is, once the AI has decided to go on the warpath with one of its transports, it will not stop until that transport has been used for an invasion, even if it has to re-route it multiple times to the other side of the map. So it almost seems like a bug in its code is causing current transport behavior - it should work, it just isn't for some reason.
GalCiv has never had multiplayer until now. AI is probably the one thing it's always done right, and honestly, it's an important part of the experience. There's just something about Multiplayer that is missing the charm of single-player AI.
Plus, you can have 100 opponents in this game, and that's real hard to do with humans.
how high did you manage to get it before it went fubar?
256 was fine. It went fubar when I tried setting it to 512. The exact value is somewhere between those two numbers.
I figured out why the AI only uses Tiny ships to defend. It's programmed to only station ships that are classified as "Defenders", and the only ships with that distinction, currently, are Tiny ships. Unfortunately, if you classify a ship as a Defender, the AI will never use it for anything but that, so you have to make new ship classes (AIDefenseCorvette, for example). Getting the AI to use better defenders is going to take a bigger mod. I can do it, but it'll have to change the default ShipStyleSetDefs.xml to add the designs to each faction. Most of the rest can be done with standard Append mods, though. I'll keep working on it.
I'm out of town until Saturday, so no update for a while, but before leaving, I discovered this: the AI is diligent about never using Defenders as anything but stationed asset defense, so you can safely make their blueprint crazy strong because it lacks life support and engines. The AI will barely use them at all unless you offer a class of each weapon type, even if it would only use one type anyway. However, even giving it Medium defenders makes it astronomically better at defense.
No faction outright dominates anymore once they can all defend. The AIs instead have truly epic wars that often end up ruining both parties from the loss of life alone, which leads to an opportunist swooping in and crushing someone while they are weak. Each faction seems to follow a pattern - the Altarians are always the first to get defenders, but the Iridium Corp always gets the most -- they can afford a huge defensive army, so they often get up to six corvettes per planet! This causes the other factions to leave them alone, which ends up playing right into their hands, with them dominating the mid-game. However, they don't value military upgrades the way the Drengin do, so if the Drengin survive long enough, they often smash through their formidable defenses and start eating the Iridiums right up.
Don't sleep on the Terrans, though! One game, they were being picked apart by the Thalans, then the Krynn joined in, then the Yor. All three wanted the Terran worlds, so they ended up declaring war on each other! This distraction was exactly what the Terrans needed to mount a decisive comeback, crushing all three opponents and becoming top dog!
Know how the Yor always seem to run away with the game after a while? Doesn't happen because of all the war. The Krynn, too, never stay on top for long. Power changes hands very quickly. All I did was give the AI adequate defenders, it took care of the rest on its own. Holy shit. It was capable of organic behavior all along, it just didn't have the tools to express it.
Also I found the value that makes the AI declare war on people they could never possibly reach. Reducing that causes them to only fight with people in range. You guys are going to love V3.
This is promising.
Terran AI doing well?? Quite Impressive!!
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