Fixing the passive AI.

[ACOLKitty]

I have been testing out some of the mods that have been suggested for making the AI more aggressive. I implemented Matte979 and other suggestions and was quite surprised at the increase of aggression in the early game.

However it seems there is another problem. If you are the most powerful civ you will not be attacked. In the test game there are 8 civs, 2 peace treaties, 2 civs that hate me with cease fires that are very old and then the rest dislike me. I am laying on HARD for this test.

I am ranked #1 because af an immense economy despite being behind in tech and military.

To see if I would be attacked I disbanded ALL of my units and just ran 50 turns.

Not one attack. A few offers to exchange maps and a couple of spy attampts.

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So in other words, the mod only works if you are weaker than the computer, which doesn't last long in my games.

I am going to start hunting for the code to change this if anyone knows whare it is and how to change it....

[BlueO]

The samething happened to me, when I was playing on very hard, 25 ai. None of the ai ever attacked me, except at the beginning. I eventually got the lead, but one of the ai was closing in on me, very very close. After I got nukes, I launched my assault on this ai and noticed that it did nothing at all. I eventually turned on fog of war and noticed that it had 10 10+ stacks fortified around a city along the rail network.

I got suspicious, so I put some additional rails around them. Next turn, a couple of those units budged. Put some more rails, no effect. So I deleted a couple stacks here and there, and behold, a lot of those stacks began to move! Several turns later, all the cities I captured, the ai took back. It even launched assaults on my border cities with stack 10 armies! I lost my capitol too (it wasn't very foritifed).

In summary, if the ai has too many units, it'll all eventually get stuck around one of its city due to its poor road network. (ie, a big stack moving along the road, can't pass through a city with huge stacks in it. If too many big stacks converge on this city, they'll all get stuck and fortify themselves. This traffic jam will increase, until all of the ai's mobile units get stuck) I got disheartened by this new discovery in the ai, I never completed my game...though I might continue later to see if the ai can defeat me, after I unclutter all of its fortified units...

[ACOLKitty]

I thought of that since I read it somewhere. Didn't help.

I went back to where I had started the test and reset the turns to 0, changed all my production to infrastructure, and deleted all my units except 2 diplomats and a spy. I linked all the AI cities to ine by railways and changed all my cities to have all scientists so they would stop growing.


After cycling through 45 turns one of my two peace treaties was violated when a cannon attacked my diplomat who was standing next to an empty size 25 city. The cannon then fortified next to my open city and remained there for a long time. The next turn my other diplomat was killed by another civ.

I then kept cycling turns. troops would come up to my empty cities and fortify outside of them.

-turn 91 I declared war on all the other civs and broke cease fires.
-turns 101-121: 7 of my cities were taken. All but 1 were below size 10.
-turns 122-162: was sent 5 cease fire requests from different civs.
-turn 163: placed enemy units outside of half my cities.
-turn 180: Turned it off and went online.

This left me with 15 large cities that were undefended surrounded, and not producing anything. The computer did pirate and raze a few times over the 180 turns but was incapable of taking my cities.

Great huh?

[Cyrius]

Two questions:

1. What difficulty level?

2. Did you try provoking the AI's in any way? I think this may be necessary. Try threatening, demanding gold and techs and stuff, spying continuously (and trying revolts) park a few units on AI's territory and just leave em there, ect. ect.

Of course, you probably shouldn't have to provoke the AI to get it to attack you. Aggressive personalities should attack you on their own, I suppose. Hmm.

(edit)
I'll tell you what just happened to me. I started a game on Hard, and found myself near the German (aggresive imperialist). He was encroaching on land I wanted, so I parked a warrior near his size one city and threatened him to give it to me or else I would destroy it. Of course, he refused, and I promptly destoyed it. Then, I fortified the warrior, and he later destroyed the warrior. Then, much to my suprise, he marched an army of 2 archers and a hoplite down and attacked my capital and took it by force. I later recaptured the captial and went on an all-out offensive, using his captured cities to produce more units to fight him with. Currently, he's tied up in defense and doesn't send anything to attack my home cities besides slavers (sent two after me already). Curious thing is, that while he had my capital he built a mine and a city wall instead of more troops. Bizzare, huh? Well. At least he attacked my capital! Currently I'm trying to attack his 12-stack capital with my 12-stack army and loosing again and again. I need catapults.
[This message has been edited by Cyrius (edited January 01, 2001).]

[WesW]

Great thread here, guys. This is the kind of info I need to figure out how the AI works and how to improve it.
I think most of the problems you have described can be fixed, it's just a matter of studying the right text files.

[ACOLKitty]

quote: Originally posted by Cyrius on 01-01-2001 09:10 PM Two questions: 1. What difficulty level? 2. Did you try provoking the AI's in any way? I think this may be necessary. Try threatening, demanding gold and techs and stuff, spying continuously (and trying revolts) park a few units on AI's territory and just leave em there, ect. ect. Of course, you probably shouldn't have to provoke the AI to get it to attack you. Aggressive personalities should attack you on their own, I suppose. Hmm. (edit) I'll tell you what just happened to me. I started a game on Hard, and found myself near the German (aggresive imperialist). He was encroaching on land I wanted, so I parked a warrior near his size one city and threatened him to give it to me or else I would destroy it. Of course, he refused, and I promptly destoyed it. Then, I fortified the warrior, and he later destroyed the warrior. Then, much to my suprise, he marched an army of 2 archers and a hoplite down and attacked my capital and took it by force. I later recaptured the captial and went on an all-out offensive, using his captured cities to produce more units to fight him with. Currently, he's tied up in defense and doesn't send anything to attack my home cities besides slavers (sent two after me already). Curious thing is, that while he had my capital he built a mine and a city wall instead of more troops. Bizzare, huh? Well. At least he attacked my capital! Currently I'm trying to attack his 12-stack capital with my 12-stack army and loosing again and again. I need catapults. [This message has been edited by Cyrius (edited January 01, 2001).]

I started the game on Hard since this was only the second time I played it (going to get my money worth
)

In the beginning game I usually run into a similar situation that you describe. The computer attacks, fights yadda yadda yadda. After a while it just stops trying.

Before just cycling turns I had been picking on the computer in all kinds of ways, threats, requests for gold, etc.

It never did anything but the diplomacy was pretty bad against me.

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For the next test.

I did one more test for aggression.

Someone made a smartass comment about noone ever dying and if you only built one city you would be around till the end of the game as long as you didn't do anything stupid (like disbanding your city and fighting a babarian with your settler).

I started a small map on HARD with 8 civs, built my 2 cities Sorry, not 1), placed them both on default city manager and started cycling turns.

The only things I did was make PW the highest and destroy some troops every so often because of the messages about not being able to build more troops.

Here is everything that happened.


I met all the civs.
2 declared war on me because they were angery about my embargo against them (this has happened to me before, anyone else?), on turn 308 I recieved 2!!! threats for money, both of which I declined, on turn 479 I was bombarded by a cannon and then it rolled away.

That is it. I stopped at turn 636. All the civs were still alive.

I cannot see how the computer can ever win.

They cannot form alliancs with each other-no diplo
This also prevents them from ever covering 60% with obeliscs-no science
They never kill each other off- no war victory.


This game would be awesome if the computer had diplomatic relations with each other and accually attacked.

[Alpha Wolf]

I'm playing on impossible with 5 other civs on a world with 3 large islands. The zulus were the only other civ on my island. i manged to find the chokepoint first and stacked troops there til I had enough PW for a fort. The zulus tried to send a few same stacks against the chokepoint but they are on pretty bad land and cant produce much altho they did build ramayana. BTW, Attila also managed to BUILD, not capture Hagia Sophia.

I crossed over to another island and ran into the chinese. We traded maps and to my horror they were everywhere. They had sliced thru the Welch heartland leaving nothing but a few small outpost cities. I'm only at 300ad but it looks like the chinese are running thru the remaining 2 civs also. I've been watching cities change hands altho the largest stack in the field I've seen is 8, but the Zulus have one city fortified with 11 and without catapults yet, it'll be to costly to take that city..for now!!! Surprisingly, even tho I'm playing the hardest barbarians, I havent seen much of them, and when i do, the civs seem to be attacking them immediately.

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History is written by the victor.

[BlueO]

Well, I continued my last game where I found the cpu had units cluttered up. I wrote a simple slic code to unclutter them. To make the long story short, the cpu continued to be pretty passive, it did attack and conquered 2 of my cities, but I took them back pretty easily. After that, the cpu didn't bother me one bit, even after I took over half of its cities.

I'm beginning to think, how aggressive the ai behaves is tied in with the overall ranking. The best game I had was on impossible setting, 8 ai, giant map. I was kept to the 4th overall ranking, and the ai was extremely agressive. It was always retaking cities after I captured them and I was barely expanding. I eventually lost when nuclear fallout covered the land with dead tiles (after I launched a nuke at a cpu for invading one of my cities, and it countered with 4 MAD nukes!!!), and I hadn't researced conversation. The ai had, and they were rebuilding the dead tiles...while my whole empire is pretty much covered in black.

I'm not saying modifing the strategy and goal files isn't important, they are to make the cpu more aggressive and attack each other, but if the human player's overall ranking becomes too high, then none of those setting matters. I'm going to start a new game on very hard setting, and make sure to stay behind the cpu's overall ranking, to see if they'll remain aggressive. If they do, then it would seem, the best solution is to redo the ranking systems...or force the ai to use military ranking instead of overall ranking as an aid to determine who they attack.

[Bluevoss]

I've got a hard game going with the changes Alpha Wolf suggested (I think he came up with the timeslice changes). I'm also playing with 10 attack pt Coracles. Now, there is a mediteranian in my game. I've managed to bottle it up with some units. For a while, I would sink anything that came in. But its MORE EFFECTIVE to take those same fleets and just park them all over the place, making a barrior to entry. The Persians just mill around out there and give up and go away.

Talk about passive-agreesive.

Then I sent three Coracles out to explore the world. While I saw lots of enemy units (some stacked to '2') (all mine are singles), nobody bothered me. Could it be that the AI dosn't know how to use Coracles in attacks (even though they have 10 points now). Is there something else I need to set?

I have an email in to activision, asking what their plans are, AI-wise. Sheesh. I hope we don't have to build this game ourselves....



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Bluevoss-

[ACOLKitty]

That is why I ran the game without ever doing anything. I was so far behind in everything that the rank should not have mattered. When there are tanks rumbling by your city and you have 6 hopolites fortified, the enemy should kick your ass.

[Bluevoss]

So who is working on the AI? Activision? Individuals? Teams?

I'm just trying to get a handle on where this is going. Can the AI be fixed? I'd sure hate to let this thing slide back into the dead CD drawer.

Just a thought - I never got a chance to really play CTP1 (I played a little, but my life was sorta busy back then). My questions are...

1) Was the game more aggressive? And...
2) Was the code different? Or are they using the same background code to run things.

My thought (my long-shot through) is that we might be able to look at the CTP1 code to get the CTP2 AI jumpstarted.

[colorme]

I haven' t done much modding for CTP1, but my understanding is that while the Slic used is similar to CTP2, the various AI database files are different. In particular, there were these .fli files in CTP1, which were similar to the `Strategic states' of CTP2. I would suspect most of the game engine is similar though. The problem of aircraft running out of fuel, and aircraft-less aircraft carriers existed in CTP1 also. AI was not particularly aggressive there either, but I remember it making some decent attacks.

[ACOLKitty]

CTP1 was an abortion that in my opinion was unplayable. It did attack though.


CTP2 is playable, but there is no point. There is no challenge. It is just a Sim game without the fun or graphics.

[Alpha Wolf]

Take a look on my webpage for some changes that I made. Most are marked by JAW but not all of them. i have very active barbarians and AI. In fact, in my last game the barbarians grouped in a stack of 12 to take my 2nd best city. It bypassed a city that had better defenses to hit this one and I had 3 archers and 4 hoplites in it. Guess I needed to build a city wall. I've seen barbarians from a hut step back, group then attack, because one on one they would have lost.

I throw files up there so I can look at them at lunch but its not really setup as a mod. i had hoped to get more things like natural disasters figured out and I wanted to make sure that the AI was more aggressive on a regular basis and that my first few tests games werent flukes.

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History is written by the victor.

[joe77]

I am one of those folks who went it and changed the Powerbonus and the alloted time per turn for the ai...and I beleive it those changes made a significant differnce in the aggressiveness of the ai...the computer still only survives my wrath on impossible level because it cheats like Sean Connery on Celeb Jeopardy but its way more interested in looting my cities and pilaging my women and children than ever before...the next step IMHO is to teach it to make grand sweeping offensive as right now all it does is peck away at the edges of my empire.

-Joe