Exciting AI improvements.

[Blake]

However, one thing I noticed: for hills the AI does not seem to be able to make up its mind: mine or windmill. It happened a lot that I saw 5 workers mine all the hills around a city and 10 turns after that they were building windmills. Once these were build, they switched back to mines, etc

This is a known problem and it's very tangly. In short the AI doesn't know it's already adjusting the terraforming of a city - so it sees a starved city and gets a worker to change a mine to a windmill... but it repeats this x5. Then once that's done, it sees an excessive food surplus so starts converting windmills to mines...
There are possible solutions I'm looking into.

Maybe you haven't touched that code, but I don't remember the blue circles being this misdirected in the past. Here's one where I went worker first on a highlands map. I started with hunting and researched animal husbandry, but I guess it wants me to irrigate the turndra?

I have absoutely no idea why it would suggest the tundra.
Look into it immediately I shall.

edit: uhhh... okay that was easily reproduced. I don't really understand WHY but ... actually I think I do understand why...
This shouldn't be hard to fix. It's a return of the "farm bug" where the AI wouldn't build farms, because it saw them as having no yield (a farm has no yield until biology, it has a special effect of +1f with irrigation - I had to manually check or that special effect. it's the same deal with camps/pastures - they produce no yield, it's special yield with a bonus only, i need to check for that manually.)
Thanks for finding the bug. It wont effect the AI badly ebcause they always hook up resources with high priority, but it will be fixed.

[johnmcd]

I've just won my first full game since the new AI, down a level and it certainly was a different experience.

The reason I won it though was primarily due to some straightforward old fashioned AI incompetence.

I wanted a space race win, as I thought that was the best way to go toe to toe with the AIs new productivity and commerce know-how. While I led (I came from behind) the game was far from sewn up.

Until my two major rivals were prepared to enter a devestating war with each other in exchange for Democracy.

Really, those guys should have locked down their win method a millenia earlier and started weighting options to match it.

I guess that is a massive recoding of prioritisation and the like but might be something to bare in mind.

Much better game than usual though!

[Fosse]

Does this change Barbarian city placement as well?

[dacole]

Originally posted by Blake



Goverment Civics:

HRULE: Total_Population * 0.2
REP: 12 * City_Count (up to max # cities effected) + Total_Population * 0.5
POLICE: Wartime: 5 * City_Count (Units) + 2.5 * City_Count (WW).
POLICE: Peacetime: 1.25 * City_Count (Units) + .5 * City_Count (WW).
US: 3.3 per Town + 8.3 per City_Count (16.7 if avoiding science).

HRule is valued very, very lowly (really I should add one of those long very very very chains to indicate just how lowly it is valued) - it has the dubious honor of being valued lower than police state in peacetime if cities are smaller than size 9.
Rep is twice as valuable than HRule just from the specialist effect, the happy effect is smaller - but the value from the happy effect alone means you need a population of 360 for HRule to be more valuable. Rep value is not based on specialists themselves.
Police State is always worth less than US and usually worth less than Rep. In wartime it's worth more than HRule.
US is worth more than Rep under most cases and is always worth more than the other two civics.


The goverment column essentially uses this logic:

US > Rep > Police State > HRule.
There are two glaring flaws:
HRule is less valuable for empires with small cities - in reality it's most useful for small empires (ie should be based on city count rather than population), HRule is so worthless the AI might not see it as worth the Anarchy.
Police State is always less valuable than US regardless of *anything*.

You know I'm not sure I agree with the above and would like to know what you are basing it on. Maybe I war to much but I always run into problems with war wariness causing my people to become unhappy above and beyond what I can spend on happiness additions. Usually the loss of money going from a medium to high value civic is more than made up from the people who now work squares. As well, especially early in the game you don't have many towns (at least I don't maybe 1 or 2 per city since they take so long to build up) so though I freely admit the extra hammer from them is wonderful and requiered in the late game if at all possible especially in the early game I would see police state as being a better choice..

[Blake]

That's what the existing 1.61 / 2.00 code does.

[MortVader]

I've been playing a few games with this new AI .dll now, and I must say that it plays really well. The AI gives much better resistance against my world-domination now! I am really looking forward to both an improved combat/invasion AI, and also a port of this excellent "mod" for the Warlords expansion.

Well done, Blake!
Excellent work!

[binTravkin]

I just yesterday attempted a CS slingshot just to found out someone had researched CS before me through conventional means

[MortVader]

CS slingshot? Caste System slingshot?

We havent heard about this from under my rock. What is that?

[Thedrin]

Civil service slingshot. Research code of laws and then use the oracle or a great prophet to get civil service. This allows the civic beuracracy which is, in general, more powerful the earlier in the game you access it.

[MortVader]

oh.. thanks

[Arrian]

Originally posted by binTravkin
I just yesterday attempted a CS slingshot just to found out someone had researched CS before me through conventional means

is right. Wow.

-Arrian

[kiky]

Originally posted by binTravkin
I just yesterday attempted a CS slingshot just to found out someone had researched CS before me through conventional means

What year was it? and what difficulty?

[binTravkin]

It was emperor, dont remember the year tho.
It might've been a bit of my fault being slow to take off, but still impressive.
Im guessing the AI could've been using a GP, though Im not sure it does at all.

[Senethro]

Playing against Warlords AI with more of blakes additions implemented and Monarch is suddenly quite challenging.

Played as Julius, Praet-rushed the 2nd and 3rd place civs to gain a total of 9 cities on a small map in 1200AD. I'm not on top of the scoreboard, but 5th out of 7 in tech.

I'm now clueless as to whether I should bully the smaller civs, attack Mansa Musa (who is in danger of running away with the game) or sit tight and build up.

[binTravkin]

Blake, your modifications in worker-building priorities seem to have striked back.
In my last game I had a civ (Bismarck) who never grew past 3 settlers, while having room for at least 3 more. I suspect it being caused by building a lot of workers while the AI 'settler time' is, thus denying the valuable resources to expansion, and then just giving up.
Also the AI razing algorythm is simply nuts (though it's not your fault) - once it gets rampant, it razes just about every city.